I wasn't going to play the Diablo 4 open beta. I had decided it was going to be too much hassle to wait in long ques and barely get to play over what was already a short time. I would just wait for people to give their written impressions and take a look at some videos to get an idea of what things would be like. Then as the weekend crept up I bent to the winds, reinstalled Battle.net and downloaded the massive 85 gigabyte limited access demo. So stick with me in my little op-ed and I'll tell you what I thought about it.

Before we get into it, forgive me for having very few screenshots and virtually all of those contain the AMD Relive hardware monitor, I'll talk about why that is briefly as we go.

The open beta started Friday at 9:00am and immediately I was assailed by a forty minute que. This lead to character creation and some game play before crashing due to a persistent memory leak that was slowly eating away at VRAM until it was full and wanted more thus giving an "out of memory" error and closing the game. Hence the hardware monitor. As long as that was running thereafter I could see if the VRAM usage was getting high and I could drop into the menu to change to a different preset and back to medium quality. This would reset the VRAM and I could play about another thirty to forty minutes before doing it again. Why medium? Well, because it allocates less VRAM so I could play longer before the next reset. It also barely looked different than the equally smooth running high preset at 1440p. High would allocate 13 GB right away and count up to 15 plus GB in just a few minutes. Medium would allocate more like 9 GB and count up slower. Traveling to towns really kicked up the numbers fast though requiring more resets to remain stable. Game play was also interrupted by a lot of server disconnects and those were followed by error codes that would make you repeatedly restart the game and put you back in a long que - every time. Friday was a mostly bad experience.

Then came Saturday morning and a small patch that fixed virtually all those problems. No more server disconnects. No more error codes. No more ques. The memory leak still persisted, but all things considered for a beta the workaround was simple enough that it didn't have too terrible an effect on game play. I've also looked around some and haven't been able to find information on whether this memory leak effected all GPU brands or if it was just an AMD thing. Though I would assume it was a broad issue. I found some evidence that it could have been related to a high resolution texture pack, but I've not been able to confirm that. In any case I feel pretty sure it will be a non-issue come June 6th at release.

Outside of the initial issues which were fixed fairly quickly, Diablo 4 plays like a dream. There is a lot to do in the relatively small portion of the game the open beta weekend allowed. The Shattered Peaks are a pretty sprawling area and they did feel well packed with denizens of evil to crush, shock, explode, slash etc etc. Towns and settlements are plentiful and most contain way points for quick travel to and from. This is all fine and good, but I do kind of miss way points being out in the open fields thus encouraging more map exploration. And to equivicate a moment, you do still have to explore to find the towns with way points anyway so in reality it's not actually that different. That said, the map really felt legitimately designed to be explored with lots of twists and turns and elevation changes rather than vast open flat areas to zig-zag around until you find every corner.

 

Game play itself is quite smooth and felt really well optimized. This isn't a huge surprise given how long Diablo 4 has been in production. By now the tech we have to run the game has long surpassed the tech used to create it. Combat feels like typical Diablo with a simple UI showing your characters globes of health a primary resource. In Diablo and Diablo 2, this was simply health and mana. Diablo 3 brought about different resources but they functioned essentially the same way and Diablo 4 has carried that over. For instance, I created a Druid and they use Spirit as a resource. This was consumed while using skills and casting spells and regained by dealing basic damage. Each resource acts a little differently for each class but it's all basically mana. Damage types are a little more varied containing normal damage, overpower, critical and a combination both overpower and critical damage. This could really use a little clarification in-game.

Folks complained a little about the always online multiplayer only requirement. The simple fact is that essentially every game now is always online and whether it's a single player title or not you probably can't play in an offline mode. It's not good, but it's not changing now or any time in the near future. I would expect the full release to use some sort of DRM as well. Easy Anti-Cheat or Denuvo, whatever it may be.

Diablo 4 is more MMO like than previous titles, even Diablo 3. But I will say that it had very little impact on game play. If I happened across someone in the over world I could just run right by and continue my single player experience. I even found that random people helped in the case of world events as they give higher tiered rewards the more efficient they're completed. Grouping, if one wanted, was made easy and the game scaled to party leader.

Sadly, I didn't get to fight the world boss, Ashava. I missed every spawn opportunity except the first one, but I was only level nine and completely ineffective as the fight was level 25 plus so I didn't even go assuming I would have my chance once I was ready. Ashava was an open event involving up to twelve players at once whether grouped or not. It sounded like fun and I would have liked to have had a go. One of the strongholds had a larger event that would repeat and I did get to play with others that a few times there. While I do agree that it would be nice to have the old functionality of creating a private lobby for friends only, I do feel that we're all going to have to just get used to being in a shared world. Dungeons are instanced though as well as loot so you don't have to worry about leeches ruining your session.

I can imagine there will be a slough of balances and changes before the full release. Some skills feel pretty overpowered while others feel almost useless. I chose to be a werewolf and one of the core skills is called "shred", this is up to three continuous frontal cone attacks that while channeled do increased damage. It was vital to the build. However, it hits everything in melee range making quick work of anything right in front of you. This sort of harkens back to whirlwind barbarians of Diablo 2 and how eventually whirlwind was nerfed to hit a maximum of - I think it was - three targets. I can foresee shred being nerfed similarly to "work as intended" at some point. I point that out because no matter how much players are encouraged to experiment, Blizzard has always decided the right and wrong way to play one of their titles with balances and skill adjustments to "work as intended".

Basic quality of life changes have been made already giving players among many things, inventory tabs for specific items - quest items, special items etc have their own storage location. But do you know what doesn't have it's own tab? Gems. The little buggers still stack up in the main tab taking up valuable room and generally piss me off. Gems also have to be combined into higher qualities by an NPC now. In terms of crafting I could see an extra tab being added for eventual armor dyes as the wardrobe allows you to change your appearance as you see fit. Dying armors wasn't available in the beta, but items are colored and that portends the addition of customization to be added.

Gold is actually valuable. Crafting, repairs, upgrades, aspect placement, skill refunds, general purchases etc all take gold, but I can see Blizzard making adjustments to how much things cost pretty quickly. For instance, skill refunds get ever more expensive for each refund you make. I can only assume there's a cap for that cost but I don't know for sure and the skill tree is built to let players experiment with builds so with gold being more vital than in other Diablo titles it could hamper the experience pretty fast if skill refunds cost a thousand gold each or something. I will say that I do like the penalty for character death being simply equipment damage. This is something that carries over from WoW. People complain about it because it can feel like you're not held to the same account for your actions like losing experience as a death penalty. And to be fair there is sort of an in between from simple equipment damage and something like a hardcore character. However, we don't know yet how higher difficulties will handle the penalty for death. Nightmare and Torment world tiers may give steeper punishment. One thing I can say that really enjoy is the addition of a dodge action to avoid an incoming special attack or quickly move out of a circle of death. I feel like there will be additions to decrease the cooldown for dodge that will become pretty vital in later difficulties.

Dungeons are generally pretty fun but the complaint there is that even though they're procedurally generated, the modules used to generate the maps are relatively few. It's pretty easy to predict a layout after a couple of entries. They all consist of a general entry point with a goal of finding some item to place on a pedestal, or a jar to fill with souls of the defeated, perhaps a pair of levers to pull to unlock a door in which you must travel to either fight a boss or clear completely of enemies. I like the rewards of dungeons being class based aspects which players can use to create legendary items that benefit class builds, but I do hope there are more modules added and a few different goal types for dungeons because right now they feel a little too similar and kind of repetitive.

On a fun note, veteran players will recognize familiar faces in form of enemies, from Quill Rats, to Horrors and Goat Clans, to Balrogs, Ghouls and the always present Carver demons we find ourselves beset by the enemies of old. We also hear some familiar yet updated sound effects that those old enemies came with. Not a single "Rakanishu" was uttered, but it's a cool callback. Something that didn't come back is the full screen map overlay. I find this pretty easy to adjust to, but I can certainly understand missing it as a feature since it was a ubiquity in all previous titles.

There have been complaints over the simplicity of the UI - people comparing it to long outdated titles or mobile entries and so on. I personally happen to feel the UI is just fine. It's not that visually striking, but that's okay because it's probably taking up fewer system resources that could be used to simply run the game. This is especially true in towns where system and VRAM numbers would spike pretty heavily by comparison to the general map and dungeons.

Gone is the potion belt and I say good riddance. Instead it's replaced by a potion slot on the UI. When you pick up a potion, it goes in that slot becoming just another resource instead of an object to use. Only a small amount can be carried at once, up to 5 in the beta once you're leveled up. The alchemist NPC in Kyovashad can increase potion effectiveness based on level as well and boy are there a lot of potion tiers.

Further complaints came about criticizing the art direction in Diablo 4. This is of course more of a personal preference than anything else. I have always enjoyed Blizzard's stylized art direction.

I do appreciate that there's a progression state for the overworld in general. For completionists there is a counter for the various things a places to be found in an area along with rewards for collecting "renown" and how many strongholds you have to look forward to. I'm not as much of a completionist as some people I know, but I definitely like seeing the effect I'm having as I move through the quest lines and discover new things. Speaking of which, there are a ton of side quests. The beta gave us 35 and it feels like Blizzard left some out. I happen to like the lore presented in games and all these quests give us a look into what's happened in Sanctuary. There's even an option to reset your dungeons if you so choose.

Overall I greatly enjoyed my time with this gone-to-soon beta weekend. After the first day of relentless issues were solved it was a joy to play and I found it pretty hard to log off for the evening as I just wanted to keep pressing forward. I and perhaps many others may agree that the open beta would have benefited more from a full week of play time. A few days was great for me, I got my character to the max level and played a little with build options and still had room to explore more and find everything I could. Sadly for a lot more people it wasn't possible to play the beta at all due to work schedules and what have you. I have a friend who downloaded it for her PS5 but never got the chance to even fire it up because there wasn't time in her life to do it in the three days it was available. We can all hope there will be one more open beta between now and June to further stress servers and test a release build for the game in general. That in fact wouldn't even surprise me to see as Blizzard is very likely currently using the data collected to modify and improve things. After all that's what beta play tests are for.

I created a Druid. His name was Relikesh and he was a werewolf who could cast lightning to smite his enemies while commanding a pair of wolves to distract and harass others. He wore a demon skull and the furs of his tribe. He was immense, he was satisfying, he was a force of good in a dark and deadly world being overrun by the legions of hell and he will be missed. Rest in peace, Relikesh - Legendary Goat, of the Diablo 4 open beta weekend. Until your namesake is remade in June and your presence is once again visited upon Sanctuary. "Stay a while and listen" as the ghost of Deckard Cain watches over you. May hell quail at the knowledge of your eventual return.