Diablo 4, my rating 7.5 out of 10.
Main gripes: Performance issues, high latency on servers, mount exacerbates performance issues, antisocial nobody chats.
Update June 12
I have been busy at work so no time to play in last few days, but today I got back on and did some whispers and a little Helltides. I did not know enough about the Helltides which are similar to Terror Zones in D2R, you get these embers that you must spend before the event ends something like that. I am not spending materials on gear yet and will wait till around level 70 to do so, only thing I have done is extract the legendary affixs on some items. Wondering if I should throw some low roll affixes on sacred gear due to them having higher base stats, no joke my Sorc is not super strong and I would like more ‘something good?’.
Since now I am doing more wandering around I decided to try an interactive map to find things more easily. I open it on my iPad while playing on PC to make it easy to see all the time, grabbing the Lilith statues using it, cool thing is once you get one you can mark it on the interactive map too, wonder if it’s setting a cookie in browser? Ding level 51 and more paragon points, you get a paragon every 25% of each level so like 4 each level.
Update June 9
Level 50 Sorc and got my first paragon +5 int, did a couple whisper cache runs. Decided to try out the Capstone Dungeon level 50-70, it wasn’t that hard for my Sorc and after completing walked to the World Tier Statue and World Tier III unlocked. So don’t waste time, if you can kill Lilith decently you are good enough. I am still playing the recommended lighting/arc lash spec linked down below in this post, I still have lots of the basic things to do like the Lilith statues (think I’ve found 4 total) and area unlocks. Gaining levels is getting much longer now, xp bar is blue too.
Update June 8
Tonight finished the campaign and due to me watching lots of the cinematics already on YouTube I knew what was coming, but it is better seeing them in game and going through the motions. I liked the ending with a fight vs Lilith, towards the end my Sorc had full legendaries (all of them 10 or more item levels lower than character) in all slots, not all optimal but decent stuff and was pretty powerful with lots of defensive affixes on my gear. I fought some bosses from the past, one was very frightening since I got spanked by him in D2R many times and he took a bit longer than others. The story ended and a super long credits roll, you can hit the play button to make it go faster btw.
After that finished I appeared in Firebreak Manor with some ‘what’s next’ information, sweet I already know some of it. Surely in the future we will again fight the 3 prime evil brothers again as it is hinted. In the Diablo world Baal is pretty much top dog and I would love to fight him again with all his laughing. Another note was the past few days the performance of the game was excellent to the end, very happy just to be playing it.
So now I am starting on end game activities, first thing was trying some whisper based things for the tree of whispers. Collected some grim thingies and got a cache, ding level 49. Not even gonna try the capstone dungeon for awhile which is at the cathedral and what I believe truly punctuates the completion of the campaign. So much I do not know yet.
Update June 7 later in day kept tweaking and found HUGE PERFORMANCE setting tweak here. Increased D4 rating 6.5 – 7.5 now.
There is a quest in Act V with Donan that is pretty emotional and I liked it a bunch, brought a tear to my eye yea I am a bitch at times. Level 44 Sorc at this point, my game time has been limited past few days. I am really not liking how anti social the game feels, having to get on the forums isn’t great and distracts me from the game. I have played D2R and D3 a little during this time, D3 is really dead, D2R though is full of people in the lobby playing.
Update for June 7 and a few more patches!
Something happened, I uninstalled the game and went to other games mainly Sniper Elite 5, I just could not resist going farther into Diablo IV, so I fresh installed it at version 1.0.2.42200 with no high res option and somehow the game is running 30% or so smoother. I can play more now, I can mount and run at fastest speed with no crash, something has been changed. I have updated my rating to 6.5, I really love this game and the story surrounding it. Let me emphasize this again, I am really playing it slow and reading all the interactive notes, cut scenes, all of it.
Update early June 6, after 5 days I have decided that Diablo 4 is a good game, but it is unplayable for me right now. The performance of the game on my system seems to get worse, the latency aka lag on the servers rose even higher on full release day. I got my Sorc to level 43 with a mount, had 2 crashes, 95% of my experience had latency of 250+ ms, on release day it was 1200ms totally unplayable. I hopped on a few other games and latency was 60-120ms at most so this is appears to be a Diablo 4 server/game issue.
I do not recommend the game to anyone at this point, keep in mind the laptop I use is not super specced for gaming but has never had any issue with all the other games. I have monitored the forums and see lots of people having performance issues too, even some with expensive high end GPU’s that were bricked.
June 1 2023 early release below, list updated over time.
Played a bit more today and the game was not running as smooth as the first day, but I learned more and it got more interesting. Enjoying the story and really love all Lilith scenes. After today I really felt the performance of the game on my laptop was not doing so well, slow and laggy with graphics settings set low.
Bad:
- Boss fights, my game would slow to a crawl when I got a boss down to around 30% or near that, pretty much every time on any boss. The worst was against a bunch of spiders, forget the name of boss.
- I am seeing some slow downs over the course of a few hours, possible memory leak 5-7gigs seems high to me for the game alone. I have 16 gigs with an i9 cpu, not a gaming machine but works for everything else fine.
- Lag, first day lag didn’t seem so bad, second day I felt more slight rubber banding, it’s like a constant feeling of walking too slow. It was a Friday though so my mobile hot spot internet is usually to blame. My ping was averaging around 152ms, not great. I was getting 60-90ms on other games though today.
- I am sucking and losing to the bosses. my issue. Had my first death at level 17 and the game got harder around that time too.
- The game is not easy after awhile especially if you are not using all the new options, this can be bad for some. Make sure you get the skill enchants, a passive bonus.
- I don’t like all the weather effects, snow and rain quite often. I just know it slows the computer down.
- Nobody is chatting in the game which seems strange, in D3 we chat all the time to setup groups. You can help people or get help much quicker, this may be by design.
- Gold which is used a bunch seems scarce.
- I got my mount aka horse very late at around level 40 just due to my path of questing, after getting the mount I had my first crash just running around on the mount. The stuttering and rubberbanding got worse while on the mount. This sealed the deal for me and I have decided not to play D4 until I get a new system and the game is optimized more.
Good:
- I leveled up to 30, learned about skill enchants which help a lot aka passive bonus powers.
- Reviews were not great on the story, but I am loving it.
- I refunded all my skills on Sorc and used a recommended spec after free balling skills, the new chain lighting arc lash was superior. Was using a spark lightning to start, it was too weak, now I am doing much better.
- Did a modify Install from battle.net app and removed the high res texture download which was like 39 gigs, I did not need it since I run low settings. Good thing is nothing went wrong game looks exactly the same, my hopes at better performance were unfounded though.
- Got first legendary in my 20’s, well two and then imprinted on a rare necklace which made it legendary it appears.
- Gear and character looks are really nice, in towns you can see other players and almost everyone looks different.
- The spell effects look great, I am playing lightning sorceress.
- Some pre order things were missing from my inventory but today it seems they fixed this issue for many people.
- I give more credit to Blizzard for a good early launch, I had no major issues.
- Walking in the Cathedral looking at all the wall art, some of it is clickable. Lots of stuff to click on in this game all over the place.
I really like the game a lot, but I could never imagine playing in a group with any speed in this game on my current system and with the amount of lag I am experiencing. After more tweaks this opinion has changed.