Saturday Morning Gaming: Diablo IV Proper

First off, lemme say that the first thing you see when you log onto Diablo IV is that the online store is right there. Buy cosmetics using Platinum! Buy armor using Platinum!

Oh, you don’t have any Platinum? Don’t worry, we have you covered:

That right there is *SEVERELY* off-putting. But let’s move past that real quick.

So, my buddy and I went through and we beat Act I over the last week with some off and on playing, but last night we sat down and we said “We are going to beat Act II.”

I played a Necromancer. He played a Sorceress. His wife played a Druid. We beat Act II.

The first thing I really started to notice was the auto-scaling. I mean, this allowed all three of us to play together at the same time. My buddy and I were about 8ish levels ahead of his wife and all of us were able to run up against the various monsters and mini-bosses and bosses we were fighting. So, it was good that we could all play together but…

Well, we switched from “World Tier II” to “World Tier I” and noticed a handful of things. Primarily that the game didn’t change that much. Officially, they say that World Tier II is more challenging and monsters give more experience and money but we saw that mobs took about 20% longer to defeat. So, if they’re giving 20% more experience but it takes 20% longer… what in the heck are we really getting?

Speaking of taking longer to kill, I’d say that the thing I’ve noticed most is that the bosses feel like damage sponges now in a way that they didn’t in Diablo II or III. The previous games felt like you were trying to overcome whatever resistances they might have and then, whammo, hitting them for numerical damage. The Amazon hit a whole lot of times for a little bit of damage each time, the barbarian hit less often but for BIG damage, Paladins reduced resistances, so on and so forth.

Diablo IV feels like you’re doing percentages of the boss’s damage. You hit for 2% of the boss’s damage at level 10, 2.2% at level 20, and 2.5% at level 30. I mean, I guess that’s progression? But it doesn’t *FEEL* like you’re moving forward. You’re just on a treadmill.

One major thing that happens somewhere around level 30 is that you get the option to pick a “Key Passive”.

Once you establish that, you begin to feel your build “click”. That’s the point at which the game became a bit more fluid for me for fighting anyone but the bosses. The bosses are just percentile sponges.

As for the quests, well, the big change from Diablo II is that now there are mini-quests. Hey, go out and farm some bones. Farm some spike monsters meat. Get 15 of them. Get 30. Come back here and get the next quest. Go out and find a particular part of the map. Defeat mini-boss. The upside is that these mini-quests provide some excellent backstory to the universe and local flavor and make Diablo IV’s storylines feel more intimate. The downside is that they are also part of the scaling.

It’d be like if City of Heroes had purse-snatchers be as difficult to beat at level 20 as they were at level 1. On top of that, the rewards scale as well. Why not put off doing the miniquest for a little bit? It’s not like you won’t get just as large of a slice of experience if you just go full steam ahead on the main storyline for a bit.

Now, as someone who *LOVES* side quests and quite often gets stuck in what my friends call “side quest hell”, I resent that there is no particular benefit to doing a sidequest right now. The sidequests that give you an item? They give you a higher level item if you beat it at a higher level. You get 3 or 4% experience whether you beat it at level 8 or level 18 or level 28.

AND TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY, YOU CAN ONLY HOLD 20 IN YOUR QUEST LIST AT ONE TIME!!!

So there’s no real benefit to doing them now, there’s no real benefit to collecting them all and doing them while you’re waiting for your friends to log on and you can get back to the main storyline…

There’s no urgency. Why bother? Going up a level won’t give you much of a benefit. Everything scales with you. Getting new equipment won’t give you much of a benefit. Everything scales with you. If you really want to move ahead, you probably want to play with a group of friends… but the monsters scale against that as well (that said, there’s a serious benefit to having multiple targets wandering around a battlefield instead of just one).

That said, I casually mentioned to my buddy that I felt like I wasn’t doing any damage and that he and his wife were killing all the monsters. He told me “Dude, it feels like you guys are killing everything and I’m just a tourist.” We asked her and she said “It feels like you guys are killing everything and it’s just my job to die.”

Which is an interesting thing for the game to be doing. I don’t know whether it’s deliberate. If it’s not, they probably want to fix it. I mean, it’d be awesome if you could make each player feel like an important team member but even something like a count telling you that you’re pulling your weight would be nice. Unless they meant to do that, of course.

The visuals are amazing and it’s great to wander around an unforgiving dungeon:

Or an unforgiving savannah:

Or an unforgiving woodland:

But, for the most part, the game feels unforgiving not because the world is so pointy, but because it is scaled to you.

Which is not particularly rewarding.

So… what are you playing?