First of all, this is not an advertisement!!!
To be honest, since the national uniform was closed, I thought Activision Blizzard and I had broken off.
Anyway, as long as the news stained with the four words "Activision Blizzard" over the years, there is nothing good, and the only exception may be the much-anticipated "Diablo 4".
Guess what, I didn't even pre-order the game, so I didn't catch the first wave of testing.
But last Saturday, "Diablo 4" held a public beta, and everyone could download the test client for free to play, and I went to experience a wave when I was idle.
After all, it's free, it's not too much for me to be an old dark player for nothing, right?
As a result of this experience, I knew that I had to pay for Diablo 4.
Of course, if you still hate Activision Blizzard, it's too late to close this article.
But if you happen to think like me that "games are games, companies are companies", then this review of mine may help you.
Let's put the conclusion first: "Diablo 4" can be said to be the culmination of the series, and it is impeccable in terms of art, feel, and depth of gameplay.
Diablo fans, meat pigeon game fans, Diablo Like game fans, as long as you meet any of them, you can buy it brainlessly.
Let me tell you about my experience.
I've been testing for about 12 hours and have only experienced part of the first chapter, while Diablo 4 is an open-world game with six chapters, followed by "Dark Gold" and "Ancestor" equipment, a peak skill system, and more.
I estimate that the overall gameplay time will not be less than 100 hours.
The style of "Diablo 4" has finally returned to the "Dark" series: eerie, dark, bloody, heavy.
This can be intuitively felt from the art style, and everything in sight reveals a smell of ruin, stale and decay.
There were many "Diablo" fans who did not like "Diablo 3" before, the main reason is because the various special effects and color grading in "Diablo 3" are too bright, resulting in it being more like a Western fantasy online game.
"Diablo 4" returns to the classic dark style gothic design, beauty and impact, oppression coexist, making people feel desperate.
These elements can be seen everywhere in the game, cutscenes, environment maps, etc. are the most superficial, and they are more deeply embedded in every detail of the game.
Maybe it's a piece of equipment, maybe it's a painting in a dungeon, maybe it's a collection...
Image source: Zhihu @William plays games
From these details, it can also be seen that Activision Blizzard is at least very attentive to Diablo 4, because not all players will go to see such a painting, but its quality has not shrunk without any reduction.
And the so-called "dark" style is not only visual.
This also relates to the part I'm going to talk about next: the plot.
The plot of "Diablo 4" is very "dark and deep", even if we can only play it until the first act at present.
The main line of the whole story revolves around the story of the creators of this world, "Lilith" and "Inares" and their son Rasma.
And the "Nepharem" played by the player is actually the descendants of the god and demon couple, belonging to the classic father and son filial piety.
We are surrounded by almost "all the evil people", the protagonist has just helped a village of people solve the devil, and when he turns his head, he is fainted at the celebration banquet, and he is almost opened and the blood sacrifice is broken.
Or the kind old priest was beaten to death by the crazy villagers in the church.
In short, the plot of this work is more "explicit", more direct, and the taste is very positive, whether in cutscenes or text descriptions.
As for the improvement of the overall picture of the game, there is no talk about 4K high frame rate and the like, high configuration plus this style of art, it is cool to watch.
The game is also well done in terms of feel.
Whether it is the various hand-to-hand combat skills of the barbarians, or some long-range skills of the legal system, there is very good feedback.
And when it comes to feeling, I have to mention the dodging mechanism added by "Diablo 4".
It has been said that "Diablo" is actually an ARPG, but the action elements represented by this "A" are not well reflected.
The dodging system added this time is the essence of it, and the damage such as monster damage and trap traps in the game has been significantly improved, but these can be avoided.
It is precisely because of this that we can no longer look at this game with the same mowering gameplay as before, because the combat difficulty of "Diablo 4" is much higher than before, and there is a feeling of "low-end soul" game.
Finally, there is the build system at the core of the Diablo series.
This generation of the system can be seen as a fusion version of Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, with a lot more equipment entries, including core/base skill damage, suppression damage, skill level increase, and so on.
These gear entries greatly deepen the depth of the game's gear combination, not to mention the various legendary powers.
In Diablo 4, the effects of each legendary piece of equipment can be extracted individually and transferred to another piece of equipment.
Moreover, the Legendary Power will also increase its strength in different parts.
The game's skill system is more like Diablo 2, in the case of limited skill points, we must make trade-offs between skills and try to use skill points on skills that suit our own "routines" to improve combat power.
And the so-called "build" is a combination of the two.
Some legendary power effects are very perverted, and can even change the gameplay of a certain class, such as my open beta is playing a necromancer, and there is a blood mist that triggers the evil explosion special effect is very powerful.
Originally, "Blood Mist" was a life-saving skill, but with this effect, it can become a powerful attack skill.
The effect is probably like this.
The purpose of playing "Dark" games is to brush out this equipment, put together a set of powerful builds, and then brush monsters to improve the efficiency of brushing monsters.
Increasing efficiency while getting more equipment, trying more builds and gameplay, and repeating is the charm of Diablo.
Others are fine voice acting, background music, and side plots, and the feeling of Blizzard on these little things on me is a sentence to describe "dreaming back 20 years ago".
Even some of the supporting characters in the side plot have full dubbing, and the side plot is quite full, anyway, I am satisfied.
All in all, after the experience of this test, I felt that this was exactly what I thought "Dark" should be.
Of course, this game also has disadvantages, mainly because of the configuration, especially the CPU and memory.
The test suit alone can occupy about 15G of memory, the official version of the visual test is at least 32G, and the CPU is at least Intel 9th generation U up, otherwise it will be very stuck.
However, the experience on PS5 is very good, and the auxiliary casting is very useful.
Finally, my thoughts on Diablo 4, I think it has the potential to save the now-infamous Activision Blizzard.
As can be seen from "Diablo Immortal" and "Diablo 3", Activision Blizzard has always wanted to continue and expand the influence of the "Dark" IP.
To put it bluntly, it's "attracting casual gamers and maintaining hardcore gamers", but neither captures that point.
Experience the full public beta, I feel
Diablo 4 clearly strikes a balance between the two.
It adds certain action elements to increase the difficulty of the game a bit, but it is not particularly high, it is challenging for new players to play, and old players will be attracted to the new gameplay.
I've played both Diablo Immortal and Diablo 3, and many veteran players are dissatisfied because they don't think these two games are pure enough.
I think Diablo 4 might satisfy them, at least for the old friends around me who play Diablo.
However, I heard that "Diablo 4" may join the in-app purchase system after that, which is a buyout + in-app purchase.
This is actually understandable, after all, even the badly reviewed "Diablo Immortal" can still make $100 million in two months, which has already given Activision Blizzard a taste of sweetness.
Whether "Diablo 4" can be achieved or not depends on Activision Blizzard's brain cramps.
Don't engage in small actions such as dark changes in the official version, or let the krypton gold system affect the most essential "brush brush" fun of the game (such as the silly operation of "Dark Immortal" spending money to increase the drop rate).
After all, this test has proven that Activision Blizzard can still make games that players like if they are serious.