So I've started playing Diablo IV, though my computer's struggling to run it, and I've suffered no shortage of disconnects (though this seems to be due to my own router more than the game itself). Yay for always-online games I guess.
Anyway, these are extremely preliminary thoughts - as of this time of writing, I finally (FINALLY!) completed a dungeon, still in Act I, really just making my way through the world doing side quests rather than the main quest. I actually wondered how best to give my thoughts on the game thus far, but I've decided to simply do a stream of conciousness-type post, conveying thoughts chronologically. So on that note:
-Awesome intro cinematic is still awesome
-I don't really care about character creation that much, but the character creator's still robust, so that's neat.
-In terms of tone/setting, I'm going to cover all this in one go rather than little segments - this game is bleak. Like, really, REALLY bleak. There's nothing over the top, but without doubt, this is the grimmest Diablo game in the series. Not necessarily the most bloody or the most scary, but certainly the "bleakest." Everything I've seen so far in-game, everything from the very opening narration conveys the quintissential facts of life in Sanctuary that life sucks. It really, REALLY sucks. If you live in a town, congratulations, you get to endure grinding poverty, starvation, disease, corporal punishment, and a draconian church. You can pray to that church, but the church is run by an angel who doesn't give a shit about you. Yet even that's better than taking your chances outside the shithole you live in, as the numerous corpses of men and horses you find can attest to.
So, yes. Diablo IV is grimdark. And while that's a term that's been abused to the point of losing its meaning, by "grimdark" as I would define it, D4 meets the criteria. There's a miasma of despair that infuses absolutely everything, and it's often the little things that count. For instance, this is down to game mechanics more than anything else, but in Menestad, at night (in-game), I passed some people praying at a shrine. Even in the freezing cold, they're still exposing themselve to the chill in the vain hope that salvation will come, even if you (the player, if not the character necessarily) knows that it never will. That Inarius can't deliver what he's promising, and even if he could, it's unlikely he'd provide it.
-All that being said, there's a sense of disconnect between D4 and D3. In-universe, 50 years has passed between both games, which is the largest leap the series has ever had in in-universe chronology. From a Doylist perspective, I get why - I highly suspect that D4 is designed to be approachable to new players, and that includes its narrative, but if you ARE familiar with what came before, the game kind of leaves you in the cold in more ways than one. Of course, this is early days, but there's very little that links D4 to D3 (or anything that came before it) in an immediate sense sans Lorath. Most telling is that while veterans will know why the world of D4 is the way it is, series newbies don't. In a sense, this might fit the setting, because the majority of people in this era would have been born after Malthael's genocide, including the player character. To them, this is simply the world they were born into. Which is fine, sure, but I haven't seen a single reference thus far to the events of D3 or Reaper of Souls. There's no mention of Malthael and the Reapers, no tension between the fact that an angel is leading the Cathedral of Light, yet it was also an angel that wiped out 50-90% of humanity. Not that I expect many people to know the facts, but surely some hearsay would have reached them.
-Moving onto gameplay...ugh, skill trees. I detested the skill tree in D2, I detest it even more here. I know this is more a "me" thing, but the rune system in D3 allowed you to easily tailor your character to a playstyle you wanted, this is requiring you to lock-in decisions that may or may not pan out down the road.
-On the subject of combat, well, I'm playing on Veteran rather than Normal difficulty (what? The hints told me to, since I've played the other games), but that aside, the best way I can describe the combat is to think of the Diablo series up to this as a spectrum, with D1/D2 on one end (slow, methodical, single spell binding), with D3/DI on the other (fast, flashy, lots of abilities, cooldowns, killstreaks), and have D4 be somewhere in the middle. On one hand, combat is more 'meaty' than D3/DI. It's hard to explain, but it doesn't quite feel the same. Like, there's the sense of the character and monsters 'weighing' more. On the other hand, combat's still far more dynamic than D1/D2 - you can have multiple skills equipped at a time, there's a dodge function, the combat's far more dynamic than "click on things to make them die." I mean, that's what you're technically doing, but if you're not weaving in and out and using your abilities, you're gonna die. A lot. I mean, I did die a lot against a dungeon boss, but I wouldn't have succeeded at all if not for dodging projectiles and whatnot.
By extension, health is in this pseudo middle ground as well. D1 allowed you to potion spam to victory, D3/DI had health globes. D4 allows you to carry a single potion slot at a time that you can refill through picking up potions in combat, but health globes are gone. You might say this is a distinction without a difference, but it's not a 1:1 transposition of D3/DI. Overall, combat's pretty good - way better than D1/D2 (though that's a given), but whether it's better than D3/DI is something I'm more iffy on. But decent all the same.
-Back to story stuff for a bit. I mentioned I completed a dungeon, and while this has been a point of contention between me and other users on these forums before, the dearth of concrete lore is irritating. The dungeon (I think it was the Forgotten City?) is divided into three levels. First area has a journal (unlike D3, there isn't a journal codex that stores them, which sucks) that establishes that the Knights Penitent were there, then things attacked them from within the dungeon, killing them. After that, nothing. There's no lore on the history of the dungeon, or the creatures inside it, nip, nadda, zilch. Sure, I can make some inferences through various elements in the dungeon. For instance, I can guess that this was a nephalem city in the ancient past, and the final area is "Tomb of Bob" (forget its actual name), and you fight a boss called "Resurrected Malice" in said tomb as the dungeon's boss, so I'm guessing the boss is Bob, and he's been resurrected. However, again, this is all inference. The dungeon teases you with the lore behind it, then leaves everything else in the dark. As far as I'm concerned, this is a massive step back from D3/DI, which, in their areas, provided firm context for their dungeons/dungeon equivalents. Heck, even D1/D2 did, even if it's not a 1:1 comparison. I'm tempted to say that they just ran out of time, but I have to imagine that it was a concious decision, because all it would take to further flesh out the dungeon is a second journal entry. A third as well, preferably - one for each area.
Now, I'm going to throw some people a bone here. There's a certain type of person who likes ambiguity, a certain type of person who likes environmental storytelling. Had a debate here ages ago with someone that insisted Torchlight told a story through its world design. I certainly agree that you can infer lore from the environments in Torchlight as you head further down, but "inferring" something isn't the same thing as concrete lore. I can infer various things from an environment, but if it doesn't have a bedrock, does it really have a story behind it? I dunno, the Diablo fanbase has always had a streak of anti-storiness (is that a word?) in it that you can see in the design philosophies of D1/D2 (and why D3/DI are so different), but if D4 is an attempt to "return to form," then it's not a decision I welcome in this area. Roses are nice, but we need bread as well.
So, yeah, game is decent, but I'm wary of a lot of things - my computer's still suffering disconnects (this isn't just in D4, OW2 has the same problem, though not as regularly), and unless I get new NBN hardware, I doubt that'll be fixed anytime soon. Furthermore, as stated, my computer's specs are below what's recommended, and I've got a terrible feeling that they'll eventually become redundant (the PC I'm using cost around $2000, these things ain't cheap). But overall, yeah, game is fun. That said, I won't do a preliminary ranking as to where D4 fits in the series, because it's way too early for that. I can certainly rank the other games easily enough (D3>D2>D1>DI), but D4 is very much its own thing.
