Diablo 4 could be shaping up to be one of the series’ finest games

Playing Diablo 4 really digs up a lot of nostalgia for the Diablo II days

Diablo IV doesn’t even have a release date yet, but Blizzard has provided us with an early (but frankly, a bit limited) build of the game to test out. After about a week with it, we’ve got a pretty good grasp on what it’s all about, what it’s doing right so far, and what players can look forward to when the game eventually launches. 

Diablo IV starts with character creation, as all good games do. Unlike past Diablo games, there’s a surprising amount of depth to the character creator, with options for different hairstyles and colors, skin tones, and tattoos and markings. It’s not quite on the level of something like Cyberpunk or Elden Ring, but it’s a big step forward for the series, which has offered little to no customization options in the past. 

Diablo IV’s character creator is a lot more involved than in prior games. 

After creating a character, and sitting through some cutscenes I’m not allowed to talk about, you get thrown into the world of Sanctuary. The first thing you notice about Sanctuary is that it’s a dark, foreboding place. Previous Diablo games have felt dark and scary, but Diablo IV takes it to the next level, and then some. 

Sanctuary is a terrifying world, it’s tense at every moment, more akin to a horror game than anything that came before it in the series. Visually it maintains a little bit of the cartoony style that made Diablo III such a joy to exist in, but it feels harsher, more hostile and unwelcoming. 

The sound design plays a huge part in setting the spooky atmosphere, too, with wind whistling in the background and trees creaking in the distance. Footsteps, your own and that of monsters, fall heavy in the hushed world, giving a sense of danger but also a sense of urgency. There are places to go, things to see, and monsters to slay, but every part of Diablo IV’s design tells you that you should take your time and tread carefully. 

For this preview, we only had access to one zone, Fractured Peaks

After getting through a little bit more story, and learning some of the basics of combat, the world is your oyster. It’s difficult to overstate just how vast Sanctuary feels, with its open-world design doing wonders to invite players to explore. 

There have been plenty of times when I’ve set out to do something, only to stumble upon a dungeon or a slightly hidden path and get wildly sidetracked for a while. In that regard, Diablo IV feels a lot more like Diablo II than it does every other game in the series. 

That’s actually something I felt a lot when playing through D4. I started my Diablo journey on the second game of the series, and playing D4 really dug up a lot of nostalgia for those early days. The tone, the combat, and the design of just about everything all felt a lot like Diablo II, which I guess explains why Blizzard opted to remaster that game before going all-in on the next game. 

Speaking of combat, Diablo IV feels like a real refinement of the series’ combat, taking the best parts of the games’ combat systems and mashing them together in a way that makes sense. It feels very dynamic and snappy like Diablo III’s combat, but there’s a weight to it all, like the first two games. Everything you do feels intentional and impactful, compared to Diablo III where it often felt like enemies were little more than paper dolls. Now, when you hit something, you know you’ve hit it, and when something hits you, you know you’ve been hit. 

Diablo IV's combat takes a little bit from each Diablo game

In the build provided to us by Blizzard, we had access to three of the five launch classes: the barbarian, the sorcerer, and the rogue. I would have liked to have checked out the other two classes, the necromancer and the druid, as those have been some of my favorite classes in previous games, but sadly it just wasn’t an option. I went with the sorcerer, because, frankly, who doesn’t like to throw fireballs? 

But that’s the interesting thing about Diablo IV; my sorcerer didn’t have to necessarily be all about throwing fireballs. In fact, there’s kind of a sub-class system going on, where there were three different skill paths I could spec into. Instead of throwing fireballs, I could throw lightning bolts or fling icicles around the place, and there are entire skill trees dedicated to each of these three playstyles. 

I ultimately went with lightning, and that had skills like Chain Lightning, which spreads lightning bolts to nearby enemies upon striking one. Unfortunately, we were restricted to level 25, out of the 100 levels in the final game, so I didn’t get to see too much of how that path unfolded. Still, it feels like there’ll be a lot of opportunities to customize how you engage in combat. 

There were a lot of things, in the build provided, that weren’t accessible, so it’s hard to make a solid judgment about what the game is like on a grander scale. PVP wasn’t available, though I haven’t been much of a PVP fan in most games like this in the past. I also did not gain access to a mount, which is a little bit disappointing, but Blizzard says that mounts won’t be available to players until a pretty deep way into the game anyway. 

Each class has different paths to take in the skill tree, with different skills, passives, and abilities

The build also only offered access to the prologue area and a zone called Fractured Peaks, a mountainous, kind of snowy region filled with wolves and other terrifying creatures. There will be more zones available in the final build, and each of these is supposed to be unique and interesting, filled with biome-specific monsters, so it will be interesting to see how those turn out in the final product. 

At the time of writing, a release date for Diablo IV has not yet been announced, so it’s difficult to know how much the game will change between now and its release. Despite that, if Blizzard continues down the path it seems to be on now, Diablo IV looks like it could be shaping up to be one of the series’ finest.