After the destruction of the Dark Soul Stone, the defeat of the three sources of evil, and the final fall of the angel of death, Massair, countless lives were lost, and the inhabitants of the Shelter Land were languishing in the darkest of times. Years later, as everything recovers, a threat as old as the land begins to move.
The first open beta of Diablo 4 did not pull its crotch, although it was not shocking and eye-catching, but it was also worthy of the name of Diablo, enough for experiencers to leave hope for the future of the sheltered land.
When I first entered the game, Diablo 4 gave me a little dark shock.
In fact, from midnight on March 18th until the end of the test on the 20th, it would always have to queue up whenever I entered the game. When the server was opened on the 18th, the queue time was even as long as 180 minutes, and the server was blown up once, which shows the world influence of the "Diablo" IP.
Fortunately, while breaking into sheltered places is harder, the in-game network is still fairly stable. After turning on the accelerator, even if the game needs to be fully connected, I have not dropped the line during the entire trial stage, the character hits, the delay in skill feedback is also very low, and the online service performance is very good.
I blanch, MMO?
In this demo, Blizzard opened up the first chapter of the game and about 1/6 of the free exploration area in the open sanctuary.
Don't look at this area, there is actually quite a lot of playable content - in addition to the complete story of the first chapter, the demo content includes more than 20 side dungeons with exclusive rewards, dozens of side quests similar to the Diablo 3 bounty, a vast collection of elements and random world quests, and a half-day refresh world boss.
Yes, this content is very MMO at first glance...
In fact, the first 3 hours of Diablo 4 content is almost the most jailing stage of the entire trial process - players only have 2-3 skills to use, there is no linkage effect between skills, there is no effective means of energy recovery, and most of the more powerful AOE skills have a cooldown of more than 10 seconds.
If you encounter a wave of elite monsters early in the process, you can enjoy a prison feast. In the face of elite monsters, the player's character has to run a skill CD such as running positions after playing a complete set of output, and then slowly rub the injury with the basic general attack that cannot return to the blue. At the beginning of the story, the game's difficulty curve is steeper than the story stage of Diablo 3, and the feeling is completely inadequate.
What's more, the most effective way for players to improve at this stage is to do random events and side quests that are widely distributed across the map. Since these activities are multiplayer content, the difficulty is relatively high, and the more efficient way to tackle the problem is to find a team of players with peers.
As a result, Diablo 4 at this stage is not so much a brush game as a 3D top-down MMORPG.
Yes, it's all a lot like an MMORPG until I dropped a legendary item at level 20.
Finally the right taste
When I dropped the first piece of legendary equipment at level 20, the dark flavor of the Diablo 4BD building system was revealed.
In the demo version, Diablo 4 provides a set of class skill trees with a more "stitched feel".
First, following the design of Diablo 3, the skills of each class are classified according to function, and each class has basic skills that do not consume resources and core skills that consume energy as the main means of output. And each skill has a reinforcement system similar to the Diablo 3 skill rune, and players can spend skill points to customize the form and additional effects of the skill.
After that, Diablo 4 designed a linkage similar to Diablo 2 for each class's skill tree.
Taking the ranger I mainly experienced during the trial stage as an example, the ranger's skill tree has three independent damage enhancement systems: "stealth backstab", "easy to damage" and "critical hit", and the skills are related to each other, players can freely match skills and choose different combat styles, not only can use ranged weapons to fight explosive AOE in the face of large groups of monsters, but also rely on melee skills in boss battles to experience the thrill of instant second-kill.
To be honest, this skill tree is not very impressive, and it is far less customizable than the skill links of Path of Exile and the professional mastery of Dawn of Terror. However, with the new equipment building system of Diablo 4, this easy-to-understand skill tree still bursts out quite playable, making people feel the "qualitative change" of the dark game BD after it is formed.
Just as the Class Suit saved Diablo 3's crude skill rune system, Diablo 4's equipment creation also made Diablo 4's Class Skill Tree shine.
Diablo 4 removes the class suit and adds "Legendary" level equipment under the Dark Gold item, and the legendary equipment will have a legendary affix that can be stripped off (similar to the Rubik's Cube Extraction Power of Diablo 3), and the effects range from increasing damage and returning energy to changing the form of the skill. Players can add the extracted affixes to the yellow equipment in the designated location to create their own "unique equipment".
This system is similar to Diablo 2's Rune-Language system. However, compared to runes that can only inherit the substrate panel and fixed affixes, Diablo 4's handmade equipment will completely retain the attributes of the substrate and have a stronger randomness. The end result is that even if the legendary affix variables of the two pieces of equipment are identical, the final product will have a huge difference in performance.
Thanks to the crafting system and Dark Gold's unique equipment, players can build a complete BD style early in the game, customize their characters from damage, survival, and loop, and gain the thrill of "qualitative change" like when the Diablo 3 class suit was formed. Due to the continuous increase in equipment level and enemy strength, in the official version, players may have to go through multiple rounds of equipment building to successfully complete the story, and they can also experience a variety of different BD types.
This new equipment building system greatly expands the depth of Diablo 4BD construction, making the game more continuously playable, and quite in line with the needs of the production team to create a continuous operation product. But given the free-to-trade nature of Diablo 4 and the disastrous consequences of the Diablo 3 cash auction house, it's hard to say exactly how this design will perform in the official version of the game.
Does your next class Diablo have to be Diablo 4?
To be honest, even after a 26-hour trial of the liver, my current attitude towards Diablo 4 is still very ambiguous.
As a veteran of the series, Diablo's strong single-player experience has always been an important trait that appealed to me in the series. I can ignore my teammates' routines and preferences, fight the monsters alone in the shelter until dawn, and then take away the golden light all over the ground.
Therefore, I am still resistant to strong social MMO elements such as map random events, periodic world bosses, and free trading.
However, the core system of Diablo 4 still conveys the familiar pheromones to me, showing me the unique charm of this IP that has been fresh for a long time. It may no longer represent the most advanced understanding of diablo-like games, nor can it show the imitators the way forward, but it does seem to be on the right path.
The official version of Diablo 4 is still worth looking forward to, and your next dark-like game may have to be Diablo 4.
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