Everything Wrong With Diablo IV From a First-timer’s Perspective
For a game where the entire point is to play in a world with other players, Diablo IV sure doesn’t seem to want you to.
BE GENTLE; IT’S MY FIRST TIME
If Someone were born in the late ’80s, do you think I would have played a Diablo game before the release of Diablo IV on Xbox Series S/X? Somehow, I wasn’t drawn to it; however, the hype is powerful, and I could not resist trying Diablo IV. I had played games like it before, particularly Path of Exile. I found myself in a not-so-unfamiliar situation when I tried Diablo IV. The games are very similar, but some ARPG Reddit veterans say that Path of Exile is more playable than Diablo IV regarding end-game content in the current release state.
I was excited to try Diablo for about my first five days of gameplay. On day three, a woman said to me,
“You don’t have a horse yet? How have you not completed Act III?”
I was already in my 30s level-wise and taking my time with the game, doing side quests. The woman told me I would be behind in conjunction with my level if I had not completed Act III. Because after Act III, you receive a horse at the beginning of Act IV. I wasn’t in a hurry to get a horse until I realized how much walking is in the game.
A HORSE, A HORSE, MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE
Walking wouldn’t be so bad in Diablo IV if it had enemies on the map to keep you busy and if there were no challenges. I don’t care what your build is or how unknowledgeable you are; it’s pretty hard to die on the overworld map unless you’re just not paying attention. There are enemies, but not really; I’m walking past blank scenes half the time.
As I force-fed myself Acts II and III to get the mount, I noticed how bad the storyline could have been. An evil lady with horns doing something wrong and planning something, and you have to stop her because you’re just so courageous and powerful is the jist of it. I felt comatose through each delivered line.
The voice acting is decent, but when you have the words for the dialogue in subtitles showing while the characters are speaking, it starts to feel like they are talking at the speed of smell. They talk so slowly like the game is meant for people learning English. It drove me mad. By the time I had completed Act III at what I felt was a rushed pace, even at level 45, I was beyond frustrated with the entire story.
I resented that Blizzard made me play through three boring game chapters to get the horse I saw seemingly everyone else with, which would take my jogging-simulator experience to a horse-riding simulator experience.
It took me around 12–20 hours to get through all three acts while other players gave me the “HoW HaVe YoU nOt DoNe iT aLL yEt” response, which irritated me more. How do people do it so fast, and why all at once? Why rush through dinner when there are so many side platter quests? When I finally got the horse, I no longer wanted to play.
IT’S OKAY, DADDY; YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ ME A STORY TONIGHT
The thing about the main quest line is you will probably find yourself doing it alone because random players don’t want to sit through lengthy cut scenes they have seen before or, even worse, ones they haven’t. So you have to do it all alone. The whole thing stinks. What I thought would be an epic adventure through Dante’s Inferno was an above-ground grind fest where nothing interesting happened.
I also discovered that Diablo isn’t based on the Judeo-Christian version of Hell. Oh no, there are GODS, plural, and I wish I could tell you the name of one of them, but they are just so forgettable. That’s right, my whole life, I thought Diablo was this hardcore story about Hell, and it’s not even the Christian Hell. It’s a bunch of other made-up mumbo-jumbo.
I’m an atheist, but I still want hell to be Hell. I was shocked and speculated that “they probably didn’t want to offend Christians with the glamourization of Hell back in the 90s” when they wrote the story. It’s safe to say the idea of Diablo no longer mystifies me. It’s just not as scary as the actual idea of classical Hell. Rearranged hierarchies and multiple gods feel flat.
FRIENDS, WHO NEEDS THEM?
My excitement about the game was dwindling as I realized that even playing more than most people my age probably had time to do, I needed to catch up. The people I had grouped with the day before who were in their 30s were now up at level 70. They were no longer responding to my group invitations. It took a lot of work to keep the few acquaintances I made because Diablo IV has a real social problem.
There needs to be a group-finder system in Diablo IV. You are leaving players to resort to third-party routes to form groups. Users can use the Xbox Live LFG system on the Xbox console to sort through posts to find a group. The problem with this is that using the LFG system will automatically put you in a voice chat Xbox Live party with the people you meet. I like talking to people, but not really on Xbox.
WERE YOU RAISED IN A BARN?
The odds of everyone in the group having a decent microphone and a noise-free background are slim to none. From hot mics that pick up every little breath my teammate takes to their choice of music in the scene, to smoke alarms chirping due to low batteries, all the way down to girlfriends watching TV in the background, people don’t seem to understand mic etiquette in my experience on Xbox Live.
This leaves me with a short and selective list of people I will play with. I also value immersion, so voice chat isn’t always something I seek out in games, but with such a lousy chat system where even if you plug in a keyboard, you will have a wrong time, voice chat feels forced, but of course, firstly, you have to find how to turn it on in-game if you don’t use XBOX Live parties or Discord. In case you’re wondering, it’s under the Social tab in your menus, and you press down on the right thumbstick while on the group menu to join a party or clan voice chat channel.
CLICK THIS, THEN THAT, TYPE HERE, AND CLICK THAT, THEN PRESS X WAIT WHERE DID MY GROUP GO?
Unfortunately for people like me on Xbox, the on-screen chat system in Diablo IV is exceptionally tedious to use. I have to press up on the d-pad and then down on the pinwheel and then select open chat, and then press the A button to find an on-screen keyboard blocking my entire screen, tediously typing out the message with my controller, closing the onscreen keyboard, hoping I didn’t accidentally erase everything I just typed out by hitting B instead of A, and then pressing X to send a message finally. By this point, your teammates have probably moved on and wonder if you are AFK. Oh, and you sent the message to the local channel instead of the group channel, so no one saw the message it was meant for, and it didn’t send because the local chat happens to be broken right now.
If you have a keyboard, it makes it a little faster depending on how fast you type; if you plug a computer keyboard into your Xbox on Diablo IV, you get a big fat mouse cursor that pops up in random places on the screen, and it does not go away until you unplug the keyboard.
This is highly annoying, time-consuming, and ineffective when communicating with other players. You’ll be able to use some quick voice emoticons with your character, but more is needed. You can say hello, tell someone to follow you or ask for help, but that’s really about it. It’s safe to say that most players aren’t talking in the Diablo IV chat. It’s a quiet world where most people aren’t interested in group invites.
To top it all off, the local chat channel for the immediate area around you has an error saying that it’s not a valid channel every other day. So people are left to party chat, whispers, and clan chat regarding what chat channels are available. There will not be any text-based role-playing on Diablo IV, at least not in the Xbox community.
HELLO, HALT, LOOK, I NEED HELP, COME WITH ME. THANK YOU.
Finding a group to help you with something or even joining in and helping out and grinding with other people is like pulling teeth. The best you can do is walk up and give the character a voice emote for hello and then help or send them an invite. Sometimes, people take it, but most of the time, people can’t be bothered. They don’t know you, and they don’t seem to want to.
Even if you’re not looking to get on the microphone with others in Diablo IV, you might be looking for other players to play with. There’s no real need to talk in Diablo IV because it isn’t that challenging of a game, although the on-screen company is always a plus.
IT’S A BIG CLUB, AND YOU AIN’T IN IT!
Your other option for finding a group is by joining a clan. This would be pretty simple since they have a clan finder built into Diablo IV. You can set what language you are looking for and the activities you would like your perspective clan to focus on, whether leveling hardcore mode or player versus player. Some clans do all of these things.
The problem is that you’re not going to find any of them. This is because the clan finder only shows the top 30 or so clans with maxed-out rosters and overflowing applications, meaning that the clan that was already full was 149 people, to begin with, has so many people who have applied that they can’t even accept any more applications until the clan leader sorts them out, but of course, they would have to kick people out to take new applicants because clans are limited to 149 people it seems.
Why not just join a more minor clan? That’s a great idea if you can find them, but the clan finder limits you to about 30 search results. All of these clans will be full, and you cannot apply to any of them. So, what use is this to anyone looking for a clan? The answer is absolutely nothing.
Your only real options to get into a clan are to:
- Get lucky and be randomly invited to a clan whose name may or may not be something you like.
- Seek out clans on other platforms like Reddit and go through a job interview to do something different than Dungeons alone.
- Could you make one yourself and invite acquaintances you meet along the way? Please remember that no one will ever find your clan via the clan finderbecause it only shows the most populated clans in the top 30 search results.
WHAT THE HELL KIND OF NAME IS THAT?
When I first logged into Diablo IV, all the players I saw had actual ROLEPLAY names! “So cool!” I thought. I thought the naming box didn’t let people do weird names. I was ecstatic! Then I saw a guy named BigBalls, run by zoomers in general or fart-loving casual player dads; many people never learned the joys of immersion and creating something that adds to the game universe. Diablo IV is no exception.
Don’t expect an immersive experience because Blizzard doesn’t care. All capped names? Come on down, you’re on the Price is Right! Maybe you will win some currency for the cash store to look as badass as you already feel since the first 50 levels are a cakewalk if you only have access to Tier 1 and 2. To reach Tier 3, you must complete the main storyline series of quests to take on the Cathedral of Light dungeon. Then, move on to Tier 3. Are you asleep yet?
DAMN DIABLO TO HELL
The final verdict for me at this point is I feel like I just wasted five days of my life, and all I got for it was a horse that would expedite my suffering and confusion. I haven’t even completed the central starting region (which is enormous), but I notice other areas on the edge of the map that I can’t even see yet.
Do you know which one of them is named Hell? None of them! Although I hear eventually you get to go. I’m over the hype hill, and it’s all downhill from here. I will give it more of my time because maybe it gets better, and I’m sure I will cry for Mommy at world tier three, but I don’t know if I can forgive Blizzard for my level 1–50 experience. Hats off to Blizzard for not stylizing the characters to be shaped like Pixar movie characters as they do in every other game.
The only positive is that when you fight bosses and manage to get other players in your group, it is fun; everything else is not. The sad truth is you could get the fun parts of this game for free by just playing Path of Exile.
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