Let's consider some general design principles for traditional role-playing games and modern action games.
Traditional role-playing games deeply involve meaningful choices (with meaningful consequences and no clear best choice), a wide range of possible choices, information as a resource, verisimilitude, and meaningful character development. These are commonalities at the root of almost every traditional RPG.
Action games revolve around fast adrenaline-pumping action, a very short action-reward cycle, semi-random rewards, and rapid character development.
These design principles are at odds with each other, in that weighty choices demand time spent on consideration, and information as a resource slows play even as it broadens it.
It's possible (although difficult) to implement traditional RPG principles as a video game - for example, the Divinity and Dragon Age games.
Diablo 4 is an upcoming action role-playing game (ARPG). I played the open beta through a couple of times, having poured a lot of time into Diablo, Diablo 2, and Diablo 3 over the years.
Diablo 3 was a slash-em-up which really embodied the action game design principles I outlined above, and stepped further away from the traditional role-playing game principles than either of its predecessors. This is despite the advances in technology and the greater budget available for its design, making it clear that turning the Diablo franchise into more action, less RPG was a deliberate design choice.
My tone probably establishes that this is not my preferred style of play for any kind of RPG. So how does Diablo 4 stack up?
The 25-word review is that it continues in the Diablo 3 vein of pure action game while deliberately (perplexingly) draping a thin veneer of traditional role-playing game over itself. The long review follows.
In-world choices
Diablo 3 did not offer choices. Diablo 4 does - literally fake ones, in that as far as I can tell they don't have consequences in the game. (I am mad about the Rite of Passage ritual.) There are no real choices to be made that have impact on the world. There are no time-sensitive quests, apart from 'world events' meant to encourage playing the game as a MMORPG. Key NPCs cannot die and enemies ignore them. If there's a little minigame to save NPCs, well of course THOSE NPCs can die and be targeted by enemies.
The story kind of plays itself. For example, I let the NPC Iosef kill all the cultist villagers by himself, just to see if he could. He could. The cultists didn't even try to target him, of course.
Gameplay choices
Some surface elements, like potions and skill respec costs, are walked back slightly from D3 style towards D2 style - that is, from action role-playing game game towards traditional role-playing game.
But most things still don't matter. You can unsocket items, respec skills, refine and un-refine crafting materials, etc, for little to no cost. Your character dying does nothing but reduce the durability of your equipment.
Narrative / structure
The game has a linear narrative. The dialogue is middle of the road. The plot has the modern preoccupation with surprise twists, but delivered only minutes (at best) after the initial information was given, so that the twist has no weight whatsoever.
Inexplicably, D4 has a LOT of narrative, dialogue, and cutscenes, all of which are completely at odds with the gameplay style of doing everything as fast as possible. This is the point that left me with the most confusion. Were the devs unaware of what kind of game they were making? Or did they think these narrative trappings are what makes a game an RPG? It was actually quite jarring: it's hard to take the grim, dark narrative seriously when NPC villagers are teleporting from place to place, ignoring the demons fighting on the screen, and a stranger named XXDogLover <Tongue clan> is pestering you to trade.
Verisimilitude
Diablo 4 feels very 'video gamey', for want of a better word. There is more or less no consideration given to verisimilitude, only to making the game play as fast and continuously as possible. Things phase in and out of existence or teleport around as necessary to make gameplay faster. NPCs follow you on quests and stand blankly in the middle of fights, unharmed and unreacting, sometimes chatting (this is partly a limitation of the format, but it's not impossible to give them dynamic behaviour).
The world map seems to want to be a continent, but judging by the actual time it takes to walk around it, is less than 5 km wide. Everything feels like World of Warcraft.
The MMORPG elements are firmly on display - you are forced to share the world with other concurrent players. They too appear to phase in and out of the server instance in order to smooth your gameplay experience.
Events appear out of thin air. Everything is announced: 'Event joined', 'dungeon complete' or 'cellar complete', 'You have reached your destination'. There is a big button to 'Reset dungeons'. The map just tells you in advance what the big reward for completing a dungeon is going to be when you hover over it on the map(!!!)
Information as a resource
You are told everything you need to know to accomplish something. You have map markers, and in many cases the closer you get to them, the more they zoom in(!) until they point exactly to where you need to go.
For crafting, you're given a complete list of all the ingredients and what they mean and do before you ever find them. I think that speaks volumes.
Combat
Combat is really all the game is and has, of course. This is not a criticism: Diablo 4 is an action game, after all. The tactical combat is mostly like D3, but avoiding enemy attacks feels somewhat more important (at least as the rogue and druid I played). You're given a dedicated dodge skill.
Meaningful character development
I mentioned having to pay a (tiny) cost to respec your skills, i.e., completely rewrite your character from the ground up. Very much an ARPG.
Writing
The descriptive text badly needs a copy-edit. This ingredient fluff text somehow uses FOUR qualifiers in just ten words: "Only mostly toxic in spite of its beauty, but still [...]"
The fluff is belied by the crunch (which from an RPG lens is very bad design). In the crafting system, 'Crushed beast bones' are "Found by killing beasts and animals [...] wild creatures". Except you notably do not ever get them by killing the foxes, deer, rats, etc, which wander the overworld. I'm pretty sure deer have bones. Interestingly, they did think about this for the 'Demon's heart', where the fluff text goes out of its way to explain why every little Fallen doesn't drop one.
Setting / style
There's a stylistic mixture of grim, bloody tone and cartoonish, childlike design. For example, you can harvest chunks of metallic iron from big blocky columns standing proud of the ground. But you will also find impaled bodies everywhere.
This version of Diablo has far more influence from specifically Christian motifs than previous ones did. They leaned HARD into it; so much that I am generally curious if the designers were looking for specifically Christian themes (rather than fantasy religious themes), and if so, why.
Gameplay loop / action-reward cycle
Absolutely everything in the game is a tiny quest and grants you a tiny reward. In practise it feels like nothing really matters. After a while as quest text constantly pops up and disappears, you have to pay attention to even notice it. If you're playing as fast as the game wants you to, you will complete the tiny quest before you have time to read it. Fortunately there are no meaningful choices offered, so this does not matter.
You'll get quest updates for every little thing - opening doors, unlocking waypoints, getting closer to the right spot on the map, etc. The quests are D3 style, very small and quick, such as 'slay this miniboss' ones that pop up when you get to a site. The rewards are correspondingly too meager to care about, and you get them automatically. Compare the D2 RPG-style system: six big, chunky quests per act. You had to go find things instead of the text telling you exactly what to do then finding the right symbol on the map and teleporting towards it. And the rewards were large and you had to go seek them out: Cain's identification, imbuement, the Horadric Cube, etc.
In D4, gear basically doesn't matter for at least the first dozen hours of play: just scan for green numbers and click to equip it without reading. Time spent comparison shopping is wasted compared to fighting things for more loot and experience. We only get 25 levels in the beta, but presumably it's like D3, where the specifics of gear just doesn't matter until the endgame (beyond the end of the campaign) where you spend most of your time. Compare D2, where you would sometimes switch your entire play style when you got an early unique item, buy new gear to support that item, and only reluctantly retire it many levels later.
I found only a few small secrets in the game. If there are big ones which you'd be proud to find, they're either beyond the scope of the beta or well hidden.
Modern meta-gameplay elements
Like D3, there are tons of unlockable cosmetics to (non-meaningfully) customise your character.
Like D3, there are achievements ('challenges'), some of them infuriatingly only attainable in the beta.
Like D3, rather than trying to make gold wealth relevant, Diablo 4 has meta-currencies for all the actually useful stuff. I counted literally fifteen different meta-currencies and meta-progression systems before I gave up. XP and bonus XP, levels, tiers, combo points, challenges, aspects, emblems, titles, renown, potion charges, skill points, obols, max obols, paragon points, etc etc. Very video gamey.
There's a crafting system, of course, because it's the year 2023. Like D3, crafting materials stack infinitely rather than taking up inventory space.
You choose your own difficulty. Everything about the world is relative to your power level, with enemies scaling up with you. You can't save something and come back to stomp it. I tried to get somewhere where I was seriously outmatched but couldn't get more than a 2 level disadvantage.
Bugs and annoyances
It's a beta, things may get ironed out.
- I had one crash requiring a restart for my graphics card to start working.
- I saw some animation errors when you approach a quest object from the 'wrong' angle and end up e.g. kneeling down and simultaneously gliding across the map.
- If there's something to do in town and it requires a loading screen, you lose your town portal. You can also lose progress in other quests when this happens.
- I found the loading screens pretty annoying, especially for a game where you have to teleport yourself all over the map constantly.
- Having stools you can accidentally sit in (and take a while and an additional click to get up from) while you're trying to get around seems like an obstacle to the extremely fast play experience they're trying to create; I'm surprised that made it as far as beta.
Summary
All in all, Diablo 4 builds directly on Diablo 3's foundations. Those who know what the implications of the D3 'treasure goblin' are for gameplay and tone will understand what I mean when I note that D4 features treasure goblins too.
There's lots to like, of course. The monster designs are compelling, the visual effects impressive, and the soundtrack stunning. The game is meticulously inclusive. There's incremental character improvement, adrenaline pumping action, and a strong multiplayer focus. There's a few good narrative beats - the vision of Tristram and the soulstone, from way back in D1, got me right in the nostalgia. I enjoyed clearing out the enemy occupants in a stronghold to turn it back into a friendly encampment, like in a Far Cry or Soulsborne game.
Overall, not much of a fantasy RPG, but a compelling action game.
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