Diablo 4 Open Beta! ~ First Impressions.

The Diablo 4 open beta started today! Well, for those who pre-ordered the game. There's another beta weekend next week for those who haven't pre-ordered, but for us who did — we have two beta weekends to get shit done! xD

You get a whole lot of goodies for participating in the beta and reaching level 20. Those goodies can be redeemed once the game launches in June, and I'm looking forward to it! Especially the adorable little wolfie my person can carry on her back.

First of all, the beta download was a whopping 85gb. Which I was very surprised about. I had just enough room but it makes me wonder how large the full game is going to be and what I'm going to have to uninstall to fit it on my main drive. 😅

Guess I'm going to have to finish my Dragon Age Inquisition playthrough, stat, and get it off my drive to make room for new things.

Next, I was a little concerned when the game literally took five minutes to load on my PC. The first time I opened it and nothing happened, I tried to check task manager to see what was going on and it wouldn't open. Internet pages wouldn't open. Nothing would open. So I thought maybe I'd better restart the computer... I couldn't even restart. So I forced a shutdown and tried again.

It happened again. This time I decided to wait to see if it would just eventually load. And it did, five whole minutes later. Hopefully that's fixed before the June launch, HAHA.

I got popped into a queue, a very large queue, and waited for my time to shine.

During this first open beta weekend, we have access to the Sorcerer, Barbarian and Rogue, and next weekend we'll also have the Druid and the Necromancer. I decided on the Sorcerer... and maybe I'll dabble in the Necromancer next weekend. We'll see!

My main intent in this is to reach the max beta level of 25 and finish Act 1. I don't want to throw myself into this. It's just a beta. I'm only here for the free goodies for when the game actually releases, and to see how the game plays and prepare myself for the future.

I was pleased to discover that I could create my own character! The options are a bit lacking, but it's better than anything else on offer for an ARPG as far as I'm aware... well, except Lost Ark, but that's completely different.

To be ideal, for someone like me, there'd need to be more face options and more hair options. Also more hair colours. Why can I have teal hair but not purple? What kind of sorceress has ragged barbarian mohawks? I do like the skin colours, makeup, tattoos and jewellery though. Heaps of choice there.

At first glance, the talent tree looks just like that — a talent tree!

However, once looking at it a little more deeply, you can see that in the end you still only have a few abilities and how you spec into them is basically how things would've turned out in Diablo 3 anyway.

I'm still selecting an ability, and putting a glyph on it. Basically. Just done in a fancier manner.

That doesn't bother me! I personally didn't mind Diablo 3 but I know others hated the lack of talent choice. I'm just saying that it seems to be much same but with an illusion of choice. There are a few tiny tweaks and whatnot to further improve upon your choice, but that's about it.

I've decided to go a fire build, naturally. What kind of wizard doesn't want to throw fire around the place, right?

So far it seems just as I thought it would be. You have your 4 abilities bound to 1-4 and you have right and left click. Mana generator and main mana user. Simple and standard. I don't need change and I like this approach.

I'm playing on the hardest difficulty it will allow me to — minus the hardcore — and I'm finding it quite easy. The first boss you come across is a big arse guy who summons little guys and will occasionally leap around and clobber you.

Easy to dodge, easy to kill the little guys and get back to killing the main guy, and not much damage is taken at all. It's supposed to be a more challenging mode for people familiar with Diablo and ARPGs... and it doesn't feel challenging at all. I'd hate to see what easy mode is like. One shot everything without merit?

Once I reached the town of Act 1, I immediately felt similar vibes to Lost Ark. I feel as though the Diablo devs have drawn quite a bit of inspiration from it.

The renown per region in particular is what jumped out at me as a direct Lost Ark influence, and just in the manner it's presented.

And then, of course, the Collections tab where you unlock further things to change up your gameplay. It reminded me a lot of the cards you collect in Lost Ark.

I'm not complaining at all! I really enjoyed Lost Ark and all the little things you could do. It would be amazing if this ends up as in-depth as that, truly.

Before doing any main quests, I decided to check out the map and discovered that where I first started from were a few dungeons. Each one seemed to offer a reward for different classes, so I headed for the one that would give me a reward for my Sorcerer, though it seems like when you unlock things it just maaaay be available for all characters you create.

On my way to that dungeon, I came across two events which were far more challenging than the first boss I fought. Perhaps that was just "Prologue Difficulty" which makes me a little more confident in the new challenge I'll be able to face.

Once I arrived in the dungeon, I indeed faced enemies that were as challenging as I hoped, thankfully! I even died once!

I had to go through the dungeon and kill two special elites that would unlock the way forward, then inside the sanctum I discovered a coffin bound by pillars I needed to activate.

To activate those I needed to explore the area and kill many, many things until I came across some mechanical lockboxes on the ground, which needed to be placed in the pillars which unleashed the boss of the dungeon.

Once I killed the boss, I was rewarded with an aspect I can use for my sorcerer.

I was thinking that these things might be passive, but I was wrong. In order to use the aspect you've collected, you need to visit an Occultist in the town and imbue an item with the aspect which costs gold and crafting materials.

That's pretty spiffy. I approve.

As seems to be typical for my Diablo experience, the very first legendary item that I found is, of course, a helm! Only it's not King Leoric's this time xD.

I've picked up two legendaries as of writing this and both have abilities on them that seem useful. One's to walk unhindered through enemies when I have my flame shield active, and this one screenshotted above allows me a barrier during elite encounters.

Some items allow you to have an ability too, without needing to spec into it. I thought that was pretty snazzy.

What's also pretty snazzy is the ability to dash! It's not a "movement skill" you have to spec into, it's just space bar. That's so very helpful.

There's a vendor in a couple of the towns who basically serves as Kadala, except you don't have to run rifts or kill bloodshard goblins to get the currency. The currency required seems to drop from the events you come across in the open world, and then you spend them at her to buy a random roll of an item you might like.

I got this cool ring that my partner would've liked since he's on a lightning sorcerer at the moment. Still good for me though, even without using the ability that it would buff.

The larger fights I've come across have been fairly interesting. They all seem to have their own mechanics for you to take note of with visual cues for keeping watch on things that could explode and you need to avoid the damage of those things.

Some dude was complaining in chat about the difficulty of one of the fights at the end of one of the dungeons, where you kill a werewolf den mother. He, clearly, wasn't paying attention to the visual cues.

The servers are being absolutely throttled today, which is silly because surely they knew how many pre-orders were in the system and how much space to allocate for the mass of people testing the game this weekend.

It makes me cringe in advance for next weekend when the gates open and the servers are flooded with everyone else, also.

Hopefully they've embiggened the servers by that point, but it's doubtful. I'm expecting queues upon queues and plenty of disconnects. I've only been disconnected once today, thankfully, but my partner has suffered through four of the things. You get disconnected back to the character selection screen, but you can't get back into the game. You have to close it, reopen it, then re-sit through the queue again before you can continue where you left off.

The story seems interesting enough so far, but in saying that: I've only played Diablo 3, don't know much of the lore and backstory, and I play these games because I find the gameplay loop fun. Yes, I care about story in a lot of games... not so much this type of game. Is it fun to play? Is it fun to grind? Can I play this with my partner? Those are my tickboxes for this type of game.

Overall, so far I'm really enjoying it and am looking forward to diving into it properly come release day. Once I reached level 20 I focused on the Campaign instead of all the other little things around, just so I could finish Act 1. I'm more interested in finding all the smaller details once the game is actually out and I can enjoy it properly.

I'm rather liking the open-world slight-mmo feeling it has to it. It's not so burdensome that there are people everywhere, just a handful. It's pretty cool doing an event and then having some randos pop up to help you complete it in time and then disappear as they go do their own thing. There seems to be many events, dungeons, special high-level areas, and things to work on for a completionist.

I'd be interested to see what they've got planned for end game activities. Diablo 3 had the bounties and greater rifts... but I guess we won't really find out about that until release.

But yeah, overall, from first impressions of Act 1 at least, it seems pretty spiffy... for a filthy pleb like me who didn't play the renowned Diablo 2. For a filthy pleb like me who actually, dare I say it, enjoyed Diablo 3.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt if you're a hardcore Diablo player. xD I'm just a casual. For all I know, "proper players" are screaming in agony while I'm sitting here squealing with glee.

 

Until next time! 🙃😈⚔️

 

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_{Diablo 4, open beta.All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the game:}