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.
You can blame that one on the WoW team, who decided about 7 Expansions ago that "you get to forge your own legendary!" was a good idea as a replacement to pure drop chance. Which then expanded to "the entire expansion is about upgrading your personal legendary item" shortly after and has been since.
Modern Blizzard has huge overlap between its IPs in terms of ideas and implementations, so its almost certainly they took the inspiration from there.
With a healthy helping of D3 eventually devolving into "get this legendary or you don't have a build" every single season, so clearly they think the entire Diablo experience should be "get wild legendary that creates an entire build around itself!" and wanted to skip the low power part of that grind.