D4 had over 1 million closed beta access players, with multi-millions expected this weekend. Wow.

Review embargo lifts in a few hours. Expect a lot of 7 and 8s out of 10.

Same day, SF is fucking stomping home with 8s and 9s. I suspect FF will do the same.

We said it before but it bears repeating: Capcom, Squeenix and Blizzard all releasing new, deeply innovative entries to their main IPs in the span of a month is unprecedented.

And it can be summed up in four neat letters: XVIV.

hoho here it comes.

Agreed this should be interesting, mostly becaue of the casual/elite dynamics I have been debating in some other threads.

I bet the reviews swing significantly based on audience. Will the hardcore, thousands of hours, PoB warrior types find D4 to their liking? Doubtful. But it was never meant to be that.

They will buy D4, burn through it easily before the end of the month, and be bored. Thats actually fine as far as Blizzard is concerned. There is far more money on mass appeal and accessibility than trying to constantly placate a player, that quite frankly, cannot ever be satisfied.

As a side note I won't be posting much here past Thursday for a number of weeks. I do hope everyone has a fantastic D4 launch. The success of D4 could actually be beneficial to PoE's 4.0 development scope, and ongoing efforts to whatever vision they have. (Unless they go full Ruthless)

There isn't any logical reason to root for either to fail, but there will always be room to voice a personal opinion on where you would like to see a game go. I do hope that this isn't a permanent poisoning of Wraeclast vs Sanctuary, but I fully expect this to be a bit bumpy early on, especially before Exilecon.

I erred on the side of caution. 9s and 10s after all.

Glad to see the beta weekend content wasn't Blizzard frontloading the quality.

You can be sceptical of media and paid reviews and agendas, but don't pretend a huge swathe of great, well-argued reviews are somehow insignificant or meaningless.

And yes, D3 got good reviews at launch too but anyone who played the D3 beta or had even an inkling of the RMAH knew better; the d3 beta was fine but at no point did it convince me the game was worth buying -- a certain lead dev of a certain ARPG had to gift me a d3 key just to get me to try it. No such warning signs are apparent here. I spent 65 hours in act 1 of DIV and was nowhere near done with it.

Christ this year is a gift for 90s gamers. Such a gift.

I am with you on the absence, Diabloski. Between Elden Ring, Diablo IV and it seems SFVI, I am gonna be one busy little bee. Rather, not with you but you get the point. :)

Enjoy Sanctuary, Exiles. ^_^

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Agreed this should be interesting, mostly becaue of the casual/elite dynamics I have been debating in some other threads.

I bet the reviews swing significantly based on audience. Will the hardcore, thousands of hours, PoB warrior types find D4 to their liking? Doubtful. But it was never meant to be that.

They will buy D4, burn through it easily before the end of the month, and be bored. Thats actually fine as far as Blizzard is concerned. There is far more money on mass appeal and accessibility than trying to constantly placate a player, that quite frankly, cannot ever be satisfied.

As a side note I won't be posting much here past Thursday for a number of weeks. I do hope everyone has a fantastic D4 launch. The success of D4 could actually be beneficial to PoE's 4.0 development scope, and ongoing efforts to whatever vision they have. (Unless they go full Ruthless)

There isn't any logical reason to root for either to fail, but there will always be room to voice a personal opinion on where you would like to see a game go. I do hope that this isn't a permanent poisoning of Wraeclast vs Sanctuary, but I fully expect this to be a bit bumpy early on, especially before Exilecon.

We will be here when you get back rooting for the next Diablo project.

"

xPiranha wrote:

We will be here when you get back rooting for the next Diablo project.

Spoiler

Well, I will definitely be back for some thoughts on Exilecon in July. I honestly cannot say what will happen there. You would hope that it would be a slam dunk for GGG with PoE 4.0 marketing on their home court, but they havent exactly been killing it with messaging or communicating well on this (or PoE1 for that matter) for what will be nearly 2 years come July.

I'd say it's 50/50 whether it's a disaster, or a hype victory. That Beta better be amazing. If people are left with a feeling of "this is it after nearly 5 years?", that's a worst case scenario for them.

"

鬼殺し wrote:

You can be sceptical of media and paid reviews and agendas, but don't pretend a huge swathe of great, well-argued reviews are somehow insignificant or meaningless.

I think this is an important, but nuanced, point. Getting a broad sense of things is valuable, as long as the reviewer(s) don't frame things in a myopic fashion. I'm absolutely not waiting for IGN or Zizaran to tell me how to feel about D4, but I will consider points that I might not have realized, or weigh commentary, from folks like Paul Tassi, or SkillUp, or someone along those lines.

Edit: and for clarity this goes for both positive and negative reviews.


This launch is a unicorn. Unprecedented in this genre and there is going to be money flying all over the place. Sticking to whomever you trust or value will be more important than ever when it comes to decison making, or helping to understand inevitable friction points.

I had fun with the server "slam" a few weeks back, but won't buy Diablo 4 on release. Partly because I wonder (or worry) what they will do about the monetisation aspect of the game. But mainly because the game is absurdly expensive, at the equivalent of $85 for the basic version. I'd like to buy it eventually, but not for that price. And the advantage of waiting before you buy, is that you have better information to base your decision on, and the developers have time to fix the game, which are practically always released in a terrible state these days. Wait a few months, or 12, and it will be in better shape.

Got to level 20 (or was the cap 30?) as a sorceress in the "demo", and had a lot of fun. Was nowhere near done with the chapter, and felt like I had barely touched the actual quests. Look forward to diving more deeply into it at some point. Had fun with Diablo 2 Resurrected for a wee time, after never having tried the original back in the days. Was actually amusing to see that POE had pretty much done a blueprint copy of the game, at least at the start. Just a shame they brought over some bad things too, like the 10% XP penalty upon death. Then again, I think Diablo 4 had the same too, so they all make mistakes ;-)

Anyway.... good luck to the people forking out for the game on day 1. If nothing else, you can drizzle some streamers' salt on your chips from the recent non-event.

PS I am deeply surprised at the praise for the endgame. Figured the campaign would have been the big draw and the endgame somewhat incomplete to set up content dripfeed. Which wouldn't really detract from reviews given the time limited nature of release reviews. But reviewers were given over a week of access -- more than enough time to finish the campaign and give the endgame loop a good thrashing.

We shall see soon enough.

@DS44: fextralife's review was enough video for me -- very kindly spoiler tagged the endgame section which I skipped -- yep, even I am interested in experiencing that one without spoilers. Tassi knows his shit as a semi-casual reviewer and I suspect SkillUp's take will be a victory lap based on his beta impressions.

After looking through all datamined info, Im skeptical this game has anymore longevity than d3, and in terms of builds unless seasons add a lot of skills, I think build diversity is worse than d3


With all that said Im playing tomorrow. It's a Diablo game. Blizzard shouldn't get my money, but that name still rings a bell plus the release day(s) are always fun.

Going to try rogue even though I suck at high apm and positioning play.
All the other classes kinda boring to me besides the Druid.


I will say that Blizz making quick and good changes based on open beta feedback was a pleasant surprise. The balance is much tighter, although I will argue with the way things scale it shouldn't have been this out of wack in march either.