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.
D2 basically had Marius as some sort of PC stand in, where he was always 5 steps ahead of you showing how things were fucked up in this new Act and then the game itself was you fixing it.
Which is how it should be. It maintains the "ultra power fantasy" aspect that the game's seem to be trying to achieve with you killing Demon Lords, without needing to lobotomize your character into pure retardation to keep the plot moving by having them in the thick of it helping free them.
Also D3 was really bad at the same thing. Like, one of the classes was the Demon Hunter who literally exists on a resource called Hatred. Yet in the Heaven act he is talking about praying for the Angels to find peace as he rescues them. The same Angels who have been a smidge less evil than the Demons until suddenly in this Act they are suddenly the Shining Perfect Good Guys that everyone worships.
Seemingly only because the writers are so basic they couldn't not exist in a binary of Good vs Evil. Which considering the dialogue in that Act, I'm almost certain it wasn't even proofread by anyone before being shipped with how stupid it sounds.