... resolved. That was easy!

OK, I've done it. I've played Diablo IV's open beta. It's not awful, but it didn't blow my hair back, and I still have no desire to spend $70 buying this thing.

Here are my thoughts about the game's various aspects, with grades assigned.

Technical Details: B

I was playing on a Steam Deck (Zen2/RDNA2, and SteamOS instead of Windows). The game had trouble identifying my GPU, and kept reporting it as unsupported, but it still ran well enough (thanks, GloriousEggroll!). There were a few crashes, one of which crashed my Deck entirely, and some odd lagging, rubber-banding, and asset pop-in, but nothing more than I'd expect from a beta, especially given that's running via the Proton compatibility layer, and not natively in Windows.

Narrative: B+

The story is actually pretty decent, and may well be D4's best feature, at least for the solo player. It's a little hamstrung by the amount of empty-open-world grinding that's required in order to get to each new chunk of it, but the pre-rendered cinematics are excellent, the in-engine cinematics aren't bad (they're able to incorporate the player's character model, which helps), the voice acting is solid, and the writing is definitely a cut above D3's.

Sound and Vision: B-

The music is very Uelman-esque, which helps a lot with tone. It's still not as good as D2's, but again is well above D3's.

Visuals, as expected, are nothing special. The first area is all wintry tundra landscapes, and the de-saturated approach means that very few of the visuals get a chance to really impress. To be fair, I'm not exactly running with bleeding edge specs, but my Deck is definitely good enough to clear the game's recommended specs, so I doubt that the average player is going to see results that are much better. Yes, if you're running an RTX4090, you'll get all the prettiest reflections and lighting effects, which will help a bit, but most players won't have that.

Gameplay - lower level: B-

The game is definitely an MMO, and if you're a solo player by preference, that's going to be immersion-breaking. The shared open world is mostly empty except for some sparsely-scattered main quests, side quests, and some procedurally-generated random encounters, which is just as boring as any other empty-open-world sandbox game you're ever played. If this sort of thing is your bag, then have a party, but after Elden Ring showed us just how chock-full an open can be with fun and engaging content, this feels very mid.

The skill system is better than D3's, but not as good as D2's, and well behind the curve when compared to more modern offerings like Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, Wolcen, and especially Path of Exile. It's serviceable, but it's not fun, and it's really not that interesting to engage with; you'll have to be really enjoying the game's other activities a lot for theory crafting to be worthwhile.

Itemization is not awful, but it's also not interesting. Much like D3, deciding whether to equip a newly-found item mostly boils down to whether the item is showing enough green indicators to be worth the effort, with most of what you pick up just getting recycled for crafting materials. Crafting, so far, is also boring. There might be enough depth here to be worth exploring, but once again, that exploration is something you're only going to bother with if the rest of the game's activities are fun enough to keep you playing. 

Gameplay - higher level: C-

Class balance is awful, and D4's devs have no immediate plans to fix any of it. Early access beta Barbarians complained bitterly about the lack of options for melee characters, with boss fights and other major encounters clearly having been designed without melee in mind, and I can confirm that the Druid is no better. I ran into a boss battle that I simply couldn't beat, for no reason other than my lack of ranged offensive options, which is definitely a quit moment. 

Note that class design and class balance will likely not change all that much between now and launch. The devs' response to negative feedback about class balance was to claim that it was working as designed, and that testers just hadn't seen enough of the game yet to really judge, a response which will definitely be triggering for anyone who remembers the disastrous launch state of Diablo III... which also received only a limited beta, also mainly to test servers and performance, and where feedback about gameplay and balance issues was also ignored. 

They've since walked that back a bit, acknowledging that it sucks for any class to feel so weak early in the game, and promising to look into the issue... but they stopped short of promising significant changes. Count on the game launching with only three playable classes: the Rogue, the Sorceror/ess, and the Necromancer. If you love the Barb or the Druid, you'll want to wait until theyre patched post-launch.

Gameplay - boss level: F

Not only does class balance make boss fights awful if you've picked the wrong class at the start, there's another awful thing about boss battle design: if you fail a multi-stage boss battle, not only do you take a 10% penalty to your equipped items' durability, it also resets the boss battle. Not just the phase you were in the middle of, mind; the entire boss battle, back to the start of phase one. Apparently there's an option to rejoin a boss battle in progress, but only if you're partied up; solo players don't get the option.

And don't tell me to just party up and go back. This is an early-storyline boss, not some uber difficulty endgame challenge, and every class in the game should be able to beat it, especially on the Adventurer difficulty setting. Resetting the entire boss fight, rather than just the phase you were killed in, is a terrible design; adding death penalties on top is salt on the wound.

I haven't decided yet if I'll start D4 over again fresh with a sorceress, just to get past that boss battle, but I have to say, right this moment, I'm not feeling it. Knowing that your choice of class will make major boss encounters either entirely impossible, or completely trivial, kinda ruins the fun of both bosses, and classes. 

I hit a similar boss-battle wall in Wolcen, BTW; it was a quit moment there, too.

Overall grade: C+

• Is the game great? No. It's not bad, but overall, Diablo IV is merely mediocre. It's not massively multiplayer enough for real MMO fans, while being too MMO-like for classic ARPG fans, and its vaunted open world implementation is passé. We haven't seen much of the end game, yet, but I can't imagine it's much different than what we've seen so far; I expect more of the same, just with bigger numbers.

• Is the game worth playing? Do you love empty open worlds full of procedural-generated busywork, sharing that world with anonymous randos online, and playing one of the only three viable classes the game offers while doing so? If so, then D4 might be for you. If not, then it's a safe skip.
  

• Is the game worth buying? For my money, no. The story's not bad, but the bad stuff that is in there is bad enough to be immersion breaking, frustrating, boring, or simply un-fun. It's not an all the time thing, but it's a too-frequent thing for me to recommend buying D4 at anything other than a deep discount.
  

• Is this Blizzard returning to their form of ten, twelve years ago? No. They've been reduced to imitating themselves, chasing an open world trend that ended five years ago, all while adding free-to-play monetization to a full-retail-price release; the Blizzard of old would not have done any of those things. 

  • This is still the same company that released Diablo: Immortal, after all; the leadership is the same, and one mediocre game does not prove that they've radically overhauled their corporate culture or priorities. Diablo IV isn't as bad as Diablo: Immortal, but that's not saying much.

Pull quotes: 

"Diablo IV isn't as bad as Diablo: Immortal, but that's not saying much."

"Overall, Diablo IV is merely mediocre."

Updated: Sorceress Sunday

After the frustration of Druid Saturday, I actually did roll a Sorceress for Sunday, because nothing speaks quite so strongly of Sunday as a good dose of sorcery. I can confirm that the game feels very, very different when playing a stronger class. After one-shotting the boss that made me quit the day before, I advanced the story a bit, and roamed the empty, open world a bit, and can confirm that everything is exactly as medium as I expected.

My previous verdict stands. If one of the three good classes (Rogue, Sorceror/ess, Necromancer) appeals to you; if empty open worlds full of randomly-generated "events" (I encountered multiple duplicates in just a few hours) appeals to you; and if anonymous randos intruding on your play time appeals to you; then and only then should you put down $70 (or $90) for Diablo IV.

If you're hoping for a mind-blowing story... then you have a dilemma. You can wait for the game to go on sale, and risk having the entire story spoiled for you; or pay full retail for a story which is merely competent, and not all that special. It's not bad, for sure, and it does seem to be laying the groundwork needed to go in a direction that might even be interesting... but I'm a narrative guy, and I won't be buying this game to experience its narrative. It's just too little story spread over too much empty open world mMO grinding for my taste.

And, yes, that small "m" was deliberate. This is definitely more of a medium Multiplayer Online experience, than a Massively Multiplayer one: too much multiplayer for solo lovers, and not enough for MMO fans, much like Devilian and Marvel Heroes. The only difference is that Blizzard aren't betting the entire business on this one game, and it's probably too hyped to properly flop, anyway. Although Diablo II: Resurrected flopped, so who knows?