Thought I'd let people know, in case they were curious.
I've only played a few minutes but...I'm very underwhelmed. For all the hate a lot of woke games get, you're often hearing only one side, and so they're often better than you might think. Not excusing wokeness, and I hate the state of modern gaming, but point is if you just hear the negative sides of a game, you might be impressed on playing it, even if there's plenty that annoys you.
This is not the case with D4. It feels like a fucking mobile game. I'm only a few minutes in, as mentioned, but it starts with a decent cinematic (not as mindblowing compared to past Blizzard games when compared to the technology of the time, but not terrible or anything), then hits with "connecting to servers" and stuff, with "accessibility" options turned on, including text-to-speech. It has an AI voice telling you it's connecting to servers, that's your next intro to the game. Already leaves you with a weird taste. Next thing is it pushes you right to the aforementioned accessibility options. Next is character creation. I suspect the characters are randomly generated, but I had four blacks, and one fatass female (Druid is always fat.)
As to the actual gameplay, as I said, it feels like a mobile game. Not far enough in to fully judge, but my initial impression was very underwhelming. And, again, was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I think a lot of woke games get an exaggeratedly bad image, since we're hearing only the one side. But, yeah, just feels kind of clunky so far, and zoomed in a bit too much. Music is good, though, from what I've heard. Classic Diablo-style music. Mutes on Alt-Tab by default though.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling. I don't want to color anyone's opinions and, if you are curious, I do actually suggest you try it while it's free. But I was surprised at just how much I didn't like my first dip into it, and thought I'd share. For all the woke nonsense, I expected to like it more than my initial impressions.
I tried as hard as I could to like D4. I wanted it to be my everyday game for years. I played for about a month and just couldn't log on anymore the game is bad. When season 1 came out I played for like 2 hours and then decided I couldn't play the game ever again.
The story is garbage. Typical mary-sue bs with the young girl character. I almost lost it when you, the main character, decide to ask the teenage girl for advice on what to do with a key quest item because you trust her judgement and think she'd be better at deciding then you... And then you and some other dude are just like yeah teenage girl has super dangerous quest item, no big deal.
Honestly, the storyline sounds like it was written by a 23yo feminist college grad who did a degree in gender studies. It was like bad fanfic.
Gameplay is just boring as fuck. Didn't matter what class I was playing I actually didn't find any of the classes fun. None of the skill combos were satisfying to use to me. Tons of balance issues. 0 content in the game. Even more repetitive than Diablo 2. No goals to work toward. No feeling of getting more powerful. A pointless paragon system. The whole game is a giant joke.
Stay the fuck away.
You tried much harder than me to like it, and still couldn't. I already had a fairly massive distaste for it before I'd even gotten to much of the gameplay. It just doesn't feel good. And the feel is one of the most important aspects of an ARPG. Woke, not woke, barely even matters, if the gameplay and feel is good. D4 fails on both counts. Too zoomed in, looting isn't satisfying, characters aren't satisfying, nothing is satisfying.
Yeah, I didn't get there yet (probably won't, not sure how far in it is an I'm just going to be playing a bit while it's free), and it still fucking blew chunks.
Gatekeeping, gatekeeping, gatekeeping. Can we please fucking go back to gatekeeping?!
So far, that's been my experience. A big issue is, as I mentioned, it's just too zoomed in. Makes me wonder if a big issue with modern gaming isn't just narcissism in general. We already knew a bunch of the people involved in this are narcissists, but playing D4 made me realize that a huge issue with modern game design is just this whole "protagonist syndrome" thing. Even when you're supposed to be the fucking Savior of the Universe, they still manage to make you too prominent. Leave me alone, Writer, I got this already...fuck off.
I sort of want people to experience this agony for themselves while it's free but, yeah, certainly don't pay for it. So far this shit is bad.
Why did you even buy it? What part of you thought it wasn’t going to be complete woke garbage?
It was a mistake in hindsight but I just thought for sure there was no way Blizzard would fuck this one up after D3. Well, D4 was worse than D3.