Do yourself a favor and go in completely blind.
Reviewed primarily on Xbox Series X.
As I sit here, I finishedDiablo 4this past week.
Epic in-engine and pre-rendered scenes await the player in Diablo 4.
I spent a few days dabbling with its endgame and gathering my thoughts.
Diablo 4 is an absolute masterpiece.
There’s no other way to describe it.
Epic in-engine and pre-rendered scenes await the player in Diablo 4.
This review will be entirely spoiler free, played on Xbox Series X on World Tier 2.
I plan to do a separate article going over the story in more spoilery detail later on.
This may be Blizzard’s magnum opus.
Epic in-engine and pre-rendered scenes await the player in Diablo 4.
This is Diablo 4, and my tale as the wandering druid.
Diablo 4 is surely no exception.
Sanctuary is a dimension not dissimilar from Earth, strewn between the high heavens and the depths of hell.
Epic in-engine and pre-rendered scenes await the player in Diablo 4.
As such, you’ll find similar biomes across the game’s truly gargantuan, continuous open world.
Dank, fetid swamps filled with snakes and bristling with poison.
Wintry climbs beset with frost-bitten undead and starving predators.
An expansive sand-blasted desert with hidden tombs and treacherous crags.
Diablo 3 was criticized for being too “cartoony,” as well as too colorful.
Diablo 4 uses a combination of in-engine cinematics and pre-rendered full motion picture quality CGI to tell its story.
Both sides of the coin work incredibly well.
Blizzard uses these camera tricks to also showcase some of the game’s landscapes.
Diablo 4 plants the quality bar very, very high.
Boss battle music also ascends in intensity as the health diminishes, which adds gravitas to each battle.
I suspect Blizzard will win awards based on this aspect of the game alone.
Diablo 4’s story is absolutely magnificent, uncompromising, and deeply affecting.
Set some decades after the events of Diablo 3; Diablo 4 is set in Sanctuary’s eastern continent.
This is the backdrop against which your character charts their journey.
Rivers of blood awaited, and I struggled endlessly to predict where the game would take me.
Lilith is a truly complex villain whose machinations seem forever at odds with her animalistic demonic nature.
I feel as though I could write an entire article about her story alone.
Her champion mage, Elias, is tragic in his own way but still utterly hateable.
The story’s direction is subversive and unexpected.
I had no idea where it would take me or its characters.
Indeed, I’m confident Lilith will find a place among Blizzard’s greatest characters.
Look, you just need to play it.
The good news is that Blizzard nailed it wholly and thoroughly.
Diablo 4 is an action RPG nestled in the genre it helped popularize decades ago.
I played as a druid for the most part while dabbling in necromancer in the game’s beta tests.
Diablo revolves almost entirely around loot and the affixes you could get on legendary and unique equipment items.
On a technological level, competing action RPGs will be chasing Diablo for years.
Others supported my resource generation with other passive, unseeable benefits.
After this, you may start seeing unique items drop at around level 50.
The affixes on uniques are intensely powerful.
It’s not a stretch to consider just how deep and customizable the affix rabbit hole goes.
There are only a handful of criticisms I’d assault the game with.
I feel as though the keybind options on console are fairly limited.
The UI on console, in general, could use some work.
How can the same 3 adventurers wind up in the same peril so frequently?
It’s ultimately a small aspect of the game and not really something that hurt my overall experience.
You don’t reallyneedto explore each and every dungeon available to you in the game.
I just wish they were a little more interesting.
They’ll often have new dialogue, reacting to the changing world around them.
It’s a great touch and shows some serious faithfulness to keeping the game world feeling immersive and alive.
I’m not blind to discussions of Diablo 4’s monetization.
Since it was impossible to experience these aspects in the review build properly, I will review this separately.
But that’s a story for another time.
Truly, Diablo 4 is yet another Blizzard masterpiece, and its story is just beginning.
Epic in-engine and pre-rendered scenes await the player in Diablo 4.
Some of Diablo 4’s projected texture work is truly awe-inspiring.
A diverse array of biomes makes Diablo 4 a broad canvas for future updates.
The player in Diablo 4 is known as the wanderer.
Lilith, flanked by Elias, who helped her escape imprisonment in the game’s initial cinematic.
Inarius languishes in Sanctuary, banished from the High Heavens.
A large variety of boss battles await players in Diablo 4.
I don’t think Diablo 4 will be accused of being too cheerful.
Diablo 4’s merchant settlements allow players to vendor items, manage legendary affixes, transmog appearances, and much more.
Diablo 4’s architecture is just stunning.
I am Diablo 4’s wandering druid, and this was my tale.
