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.
Diablo has gone so far astray from the original, it isn't funny. Especially when it comes to itemization. D4's is just straight up boring. And keep in mind I did not consider D2 an improvement beyond the addition of a stash ... it's only gotten more .. generic .. as it's gone along, and all the creepy charm of the original is long gone.
At least 2 and 3 could be played for a while for the hell of it, (once 3 fixed its early issues, like that dumbass auction house) and 2 had a decent storyline and gameplay, but this one .. is just dishwater dull.
Yeah, I don't need to play it, I just looked at the gameplay and that was more than enough for me. However this isn't even the biggest joke, realistically Diablo 4 is this iddy bitty ARPG and I am sick to death of big game studios getting a pass for their 90gb+ installation folders when they know full well if they just made their stupid HD textures optional to download among other things it would likely instantly halve the size and it would make life a bit more pleasant for everyone.
Then there's this weird shader cache obsession they have which makes everything load slower. They swear up and down even on their loading screen "Oh if you do this it will load faster from now on!" but it runs like fucking trash. I realise this is a weird thing to get hung up on but stuff like this on top of everything else makes it an annoyance to even install their crap along with all the third party launcher garbage. Launching a game should always be a one click affair. If I was in charge of steam I would ban any publisher that makes me have to click through their crap multiple times just to play the game I bought.