Diablo 4 has been a long time coming, as Blizzard has tried to right past wrongs by taking its sweet time and making sure it’s fully ready before bringing it to the masses.
We’ve had a couple of weeks to play through what is a massive game ahead of its launch next week, and everything we’ve played has given us the firm impression that Diablo 4 might just be a “forever game” for a whole heap of people very soon.
Portal to the depths
Diablo 4 is a time portal - you start playing it and lose an evening in a heartbeat, with a gorgeous gothic world to explore and a range of classes to experiment with, making for a compelling package.Platform tested: PlayStation 5
Back to Sanctuary
Diablo’s story can be about as simple or as complicated as you like - depending on your inclination, it’s either a sprawling tale of human greed and demonic insurrection or a skip-the-dialogue shortcut with very, very cool cutscenes.
The good news is that if you’re not up to date on which demonic princes and powers have been vanquished in games gone by and which are still very much out there, even if potentially trapped in soulstones,Diablo 4doesn’t require any foreknowledge.
It quickly establishes, through an unbelievably gorgeous opening cinematic, that there’s a new baddie in the world of Sanctuary - Lilith, daughter of Mephisto and an all-around bad egg.
She’s come back thanks to a pesky ritual and is here to do absolutely no good whatsoever, so it’s up to your player character to stop her, with the help of an assortment of variously doomed side characters.
You’ll meet cast members trying to figure out what Lilith’s up to and how to stop her, and Diablo 4 continues the series' penchant for killing these nice people off with abandon, making for some fun dark moments.
On the technical side, the game’s storytelling is much-improved over predecessors thanks to a higher frequency of in-engine cutscenes that mostly look great, with your character’s custom looks and armour all present and correct, and a decent range of emotion on show.
Blizzard’s pre-rendered cinematics are second to none but cannot bring that immersive touch, so it’s nice to play through Diablo 4 while seeing and hearing so much from our character.
Technicalities
It’s the technical side of things that really feels like a leap forward for Diablo 4, in fact, even if some of the trappings of the game will feel super familiar to those who sunk hours into Diablo 3.
First, an impossible-to-ignore factor is that the game is always-online, requiring a persistent connection to function properly and this brings with it some significant drawbacks.
Back in the game’s beta periods there were a rare handful of times when we were told to wait an hour to get from the main menu into the game. That’s a big issue on the face of it, but only time will tell if Blizzard has completely mitigated things for the full launch.
Ending your game session, meanwhile, is now an imprecise matter - you’ll quit the game without being able to create a manual save, and when you turn it back on it’s a bit of a lucky dip as to where you’ll be loaded in and with what degree of repeated progress required.
Each time it happens there’s no denying the annoyance it causes, and it did leave us longing for a proper offline mode that would let us plug away in peace.
However, online persistence means that the world feels alive in a way that had us basically feeling a bit like we were on a small World of Warcraft server at times, with other players buzzing around and in-world events to take part in together for better rewards.
This also means that co-op is easier than ever and so simple to swing into action with, while same-screen action is also accounted for handily.
These two concepts, that of the offline dungeon-crawler and the online community, are interesting to observe in coexistence, and it’ll be interesting to see how busy the world feels when launch fills the servers up (like it or not).
Hack and slash
If those technical annoyances sound troubling, it’s important to add the context that they haven’t stopped us at all from absolutely sinking into Diablo 4, bouncing fromTears of the Kingdomonto a new obsession with barely a gap.
So, for those worried, this is Diablo back near the peak of its powers in our opinion, with loads of friction sanded away to make the experience buttery smooth.
Hack-and-slash combat is rarely this satisfying, with cooldowns to juggle and synergies just waiting to be discovered - each class offering up so many of these options that it gets mind-boggling quickly if you start to track combinations you’d like to try.
A redesigned skill tree is simpler to navigate and easy to reassign for new builds and experiments, and finishing the game’s lengthy campaign does indeed leave you wondering if you should start again with a new class immediately.
Mobs of enemies are plentiful and generally easy to mulch through, but you can easily up the difficulty of your entire realm if you want a stiffer challenge and greater rewards. The difference between the first two world tiers is notieable and makes things immediately more rewarding and challenging.
The world of Diablo 4 is also massive, with a range of distinct and different areas to get through, some huge bosses to fight and some really involved and well-designed dungeons alongside procedurally-generated endlessly-looping ones.
We’re huge fans of how easy some things have been made, too. A new emote wheel includes the ability to teleport out of a dungeon at any time, while nipping to town and back into the depths for a quick run to the blacksmith or merchant has never been easier.
It has us remembering the challenges of hoarding town portal scrolls in years gone by and praising the gods that we no longer have to worry.
The addiction factor is back and couldn’t be more powerful, too. Loot fountains are as compelling as ever, the powers and variables they offer as beguiling as possible, and the rarest tiers of loot are kept back really intelligently to ensure that they truly feel special when they do spawn.
You can now change your armour’s looks without any limits whatsoever, too, so long as you’ve salvaged one piece to get the design into your wardrobe, which makes fashion more malleable than ever - something that will surely fuel some grinding once the full game releases.
A dark place
We played Diablo 4 on aPlayStation 5and it was graphically nice and impressive, albeit without much control over settings to speak of.
This is a good-looking game that might not necessarily blow you away with its fidelity but won us over thanks to its attention to detail.
The world of Sanctuary is once again as dark and brooding as players demanded back during Diablo 3’s reveal, and its winding mines and blood-spattered ruins are impressively grim.
Dungeons feel rewarding to explore but the thing that really ties the whole world together is how reactive it is - every bit of set-dressing can be broken apart and scattered, sometimes for a small pile of loot but more often for the sheer fun of it.
This ensures that rooms are left in chaos after a fight, and the sound design that accompanies each reaction is so satisfying, from crunches to wood clatters to chests opening.
Playing as a sorcerer, our spells were rewardingly kinetic and sparkly, and when the screen filled with enemies we didn’t notice any slowdown in the frame count.
The default camera position does feel a little close at times, making it slightly hard to manage fighting from range or bigger mobs, but you can get used to this pretty quickly over time.
We also want to shout out the audio design - using ahigh-end PS5 headsetdungeons feel claustrophic and expansive in equal measure, and every sound is nice and precisely located in the mix.
Diablo 4 feels like a welcome return for the series - a game that promises an almost limitless amount of content for those who want to really sink into its endgame, but with a fantastic campaign for those who want a more finite experience.
It looks and sounds great, the classes are extremely fun to experiment with, and it’s all suffused as you’d hope with a layer of grim darkness to make for a gothic good time.
