Diablo 4 — First look
A positive start to the franchise’s most recent outing
One of the most anticipated new games of the year has to be Diablo 4 (though, I think it’s closely followed by ‘Tears of the Kingdom’, which we’ll be reviewing later in the month), and the team has been lucky to have one of the editions that allowed early access before the official launch, on Tuesday 6th of June.
And first impressions are predominantly positive!
Install
Let’s start with the install. You can choose to install the base game, with, or without the 4k graphics package. The standard install is around 42gbs, the 4k graphics package — which adds support for 4k monitors and high end machines — is about double that. It’s important too, if you’re running any machine with regular graphics updates (such as mine, which has NVIDIA) to check that has been updated, as one of our team encountered a notice immediately to say the graphics card needed updated, and wasn’t supported. As soon as he updated his NVIDIA card, he got in too).
Much like World of Warcraft, there is a login system (and as we discovered, much like World of Warcraft, it’s shared world) and there is a queue warning, that we’ve both seen. Once in, the cinematic is the one that was shown to launch the game.
(watch again, below — it is M for gore, horror and violence)
Character generation
Once you get passed that, there’s a character generation screen — my partner decided to choose the Druid — who was not in Diablo 3, but was in Diablo 2 — while I chose the Rogue. Again, it’s familiarly both Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft, where tattoos, hair etc can be customised (where Diablo 3 only allows you to choose the gender of the character, whereas WoW allows for character customisation).
Then you drop into the game. Another gorgeous cutscene then introduces the story of what the setup for the storyline is, narrated by GoT alumni Ralph Ineson.
Part 2 will cover the first hour of play.
Have you tried the game yet? What did you think? Are you waiting until official launch?
