I've played three times today, around my work schedule, and I'll probably try again later tonight. Queue times were 38 minutes, 16 minutes, and then 44 minutes, and those seemed to be relatively accurate.

The actual game obviously has iterated on a lot from Diablo 3, in a good way, in my opinion. I'm playing a Rogue so far, level 10, and the skills, movement, dodge-roll etc. feel pretty good, although I feel like the Rogue AoE up to level 10 is basically shit. Your only good ranged 'aoe' is the penetrating arrow, which is actually amazing, but it's 30 resource out of your 100 max. Caltrops aren't bad, but the cooldown is around 8 seconds? 10? The game looks amazing, animations seem extremely well done, every NPC that has more than 1 flavor dialogue has full face motion for their lines.

I probably shouldn't even bother talking about potential balance, it's too early in the life of the game, and too limited in what we're actually seeing. Melee seems rough, I did get stun-locked or frozen-locked a few times and only barely managed to escape with some of the rogue dashes + the dodge-roll, along with potion use. Whenever I find a decent melee AoE that still generates resource on the rogue, that should change, perhaps. I did encounter some players in the open world portion, who were apparently level 20 about an hour after the beta went live, unless they kept their characters from the previous beta? Either way, Sorcerers seem strong as fuck at low levels, nice AoE farming class, just like D2.

Definitely an AAA experience in terms of visuals, audio, and the overall fit and finish of the game, as well as the cutscenes, of which there seem to be full Blender pre-rendered ones (obviously) as well as in-engine scenes that seem to use your character with his/her current gear, and still look amazing. Climbing, Jumping gaps, sneaking through cracks (to load between zones?) looks awesome. Lots of purposely nostalgic sounds and sights in the game, which I did enjoy, I hate to admit. Hopefully I'll get time tonight to take a more leisurely look at the crafting and so forth, it was a little ambiguous whether it was more useful to sell junk for straight gold, or break everything down for resources, assuming I ever get some decent blueprints.

I think I'll pre-order the vanilla version, I don't care about an extra mount enough to spend an extra $20, at least at the moment. I believe there is an incentive to get to level 20 with one character in the beta, to get the stupidly gorgeously rendered wolf pup backpack, that said, in about maybe 3 hours or so of total playtime so far, I am already level 10, and not really speeding through the beta in any sort of rush.

Respecs are 'free' until level 15, at which point you start getting charged 'a lot.' Although I did notice a price pop-up around level 8 or 9, for like 2-3 gold per point respec? Not sure if that's a bug or the price it'll be at Level 15. Also, they kinda cribbed from Grim Dawn, in terms of their skill tree. You cannot remove points earlier in the tree if they are needed to unlock another node in the tree, to prevent people from having all of their skill points in the late game uber skills, I guess. I know I've played games that handled that aspect in a more user-friendly way, but it still works. The view of the skill tree is annoying as fuck, however. It must be a console concession. Same for the lack of a full screen overlay translucent map, I think, it's either full map OR play the game, which is a marked departure from all previous Diablos(except maybe Immortal? Never played that)

Anyway, it's looking good overall, looks like a nice relaxing (to maybe slightly tense vs some bosses) ARPG, a nice throwback from everything being a Dark Souls clone these days.

Not clicking any BS clickbate articles that pop up for every new game now. But queues are normal for Blizzard titles, they handle this well with WoW and I'm sure they will with D4 too. The queues will drop way down to irrelevance after the first week like always.

The real question is if this will be actually a great Diablo game like 1 and 2, or piles of garbage like 3 or Immortal launches.

Shock wrote on Mar 23, 2023, 20:20:
Long as I don't have to queue for single-player, who cares?

The client automatically boots into a login queue, there's no offline play. It sucks for sure but the game itself is great fun.

i knew the headline only ment the beta. I am not even going to try. it sounds like it is awesome, I will prolly get it on launch day even, but maaaan ive got a game back log a mile long, i am not get excited for anything except the next ff14 patch.

Shock wrote on Mar 23, 2023, 20:20:
Long as I don't have to queue for single-player, who cares?

Mate, that is in so many an hilarious statement that I wonder if you know... that neither D3 nor D4 have actual Singeplayer - you can play alone, ONLINE - but you can't mod, you can't do anything you could do in a single player game.

In fact D4 forces you into the HUB world, even in "solo" play.

Garbage click-bait article. What they SAID was the beta will have intentional queue times to help stress test their system. They never once said the release will have intentionally long queues. Disingenuous garbage "journalism".

I've pre-installed already but am honestly in no hurry to jump in (I'm working when it launches anyway). If I get in over the weekend then great. If not then I'm not really going to lose sleep over it.

Shock wrote on Mar 23, 2023, 20:20:
Long as I don't have to queue for single-player, who cares?

You will queue just to see the main menu, as it's a live service game. This is part of why I wanted to play it last weekend, though... As rough as it was that first day, the free public beta will no doubt be worse in terms of the sheer number of faces pressed against the proverbial glass, trying to get in.

Long as I don't have to queue for single-player, who cares?