I am stopping. I am forcing myself to stop. I am enjoying Diablo 4 too much to throw another 30-plus hours into this only for my PC review copy to kill off my powerful Necromancer for a clean-slate start on launch day, as no progress saves. But after playing this long, beating the story
D2R Items, exploring the map, tasting the endgame, I can tell you what I think about it all.
Diablo 4 is an ocean. The map is vast, no longer broken up into disparate, walled-off pieces, but sprawling and wide and explorable. The story probably took me 15 to 20 hours or so, and then you can add some extra sidequest exploration and dungeon crawling on top of that. It’s big, and that story path carved me through maybe half the map, if not less.
The rest is just… there. You need to go explore it. You have to find the PvP Fields of Hate manually. You have to root out dozens and dozens of hidden permanent stat boosts that apply to all account characters. You have to beat all the dungeons and farm all the unlocked aspects. And you have to power up to progress through world tiers.
And this is before the live service stuff even starts in July.
It is easy for me to say that if you like Diablo 2 or 3, you will like Diablo 4. If you have previously found the series overly grindy, and repetitive and endless farming holds no appeal for you
cheap diablo 2 resurrected items, there may not be much to change your mind here. Except, perhaps, the story this time, one that held weight for me in a way the past games didn’t. But I’ll get to that.
