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.
From my understanding, the builds are shoe horning the player into two subsets of each class. It doesn’t allow the player the freedom to choose. Just holds your hand and gives you two choices.
Also I hear there are absurd micro transactions in the game. They already charged $70 for the game and expect people to pony up more?
D3 certainly had problems when it was released. I revisited that game years later and they had mostly fixed the issues and I enjoyed the game.
I’m not holding out the same confidence for D4.
D3 was not bad, I played it for a while. It was not great but it was fun to play with friends for a while. But It never reached the same addictive quality as POE.
It was also missing the creepy vibe of D2 and arguably an incredible bad story. You are a nephalem, descendent from mixing angels and demons, this makes you immune to fate and you can follow your own path. Now go and fulfil the prophecy?!?