According to D4 Armory website I got over 600h of playtime. Now that out of the way.
It is no secret the original producers of the game have left the project some time ago, and despite multiple closed & open betas, early tests, etc. We got an undercooked game. At launch we received:
GOOD:
* Super fluid combat
* Amazing graphics and sound effects. When you hit or cast a spell, the timing and sound just feel right
* Good old Blizzard-level top notch cutscenes
NEUTRAL:
* Soundtrack was overly meh IMO, nothing stuck in my mind, except a single overly eerie WB fight music which is great. But it's a subjective topic, so...
* Unlike most people, I'm kinda ok with the lack of trading of leggos & uniques. If done right, this could've been acceptable. I don't have a strong opinion for or against it, yet.
* Abattoir of Zir is a nice touch, and kinda brings the Uber-Tristram/torch farming type of grind to endgame
BAD:
* Overly mediocre but unnecessarily complicated itemization
* No resistances... in an ARPG... in 2023!
* No ladder-system, again in a live-service ARPG... which relies on seasons!
* The horse, oh the horse! Before they fixed it, the horse could drive any sane person crazy with its quirks and bugs and artificial limitations, like cooldown; the horse should have NEVER EVER left the devs' computers in this state to production, it was an abomination.
* The end game loop was boring, and still is. Crafting is basically non-existant, "grailing" would be a joke. When they make Helltides, Legion Events, ToW stuff attractive, they make them redundant again with the next NMD XP buff or whatever.
* Dependence on external websites & apps; yeah, we all want to track mystery helltide chests via a 3rd party site
* A backwards step in social features, trading & LFGs via Discord, because in-game would be too comfortable
* Boring endgame loop, and with every update they make either the Overworld redundant then fix it and then make it redundant again, in favor of NMDs or lately Uber-Bosses
* Sidequests are only for masochistic completionists. You will do the "same" cellar prob 100 times; there were a lot of copy-paste there.
* Inventory management, stash space, and character limitation. Oh come on, we don't need an infintite stash space as in some other games, or 50 char slots for mules, but 4 stash tabs? For a total of 10 chars? And all of it shared so no muling? What's the point of an ARPG whose core is *items* if you cant store them?
* That major facepalm "we load everybody else's stash into your memory when they're nearby" tweet; it might have its reasons, but still unacceptable to any developer - and I mean any developer, not just game developers because it's basic data structure and memory management - to release it as it is. Imagine WoW, POE, any MMO or ARPG doing that.
* and a ton of other missing usability features: codex & aspect management, missing search features, lootfilter in many places, random max limits on mats.
This was mostly the launch state of the game and some problems still remain after 5+ months. I am 100% convinced that if the devs & testers had done more end-to-end leveling tests instead of point tests, they would have realized many, many, many problems and fixed them.
The itemization & end-game loop are by far the biggest offenders, IMO in that order.
The affixes are very similar to each other and redundant; the DiabLol video hit the nail on its head "Damage on Thursdays" meme. First crit & vuln were necessary, then they were supposedly not anymore... but guess what they are still necessary and most other affixes are just there, in a giant vague blur.
And second, the white & blue items have absolutely zero use in the game, except until level 2 :P In D2R for example at least white, grey or blue items have a contextual use, as a runeword base, or BIS PVP item or whatever. In D4 they're just litter. The lack of an even the simplest loot-filter makes this worse. I'm still hopeful that they will find a use for these.
Yes, yes, they are still working on those, but my main critic point is NOT if current D4 deserves a full AAA price-tag (I paid for the ultimate edition mind you) after so much broad testing, feedback and numerous hotfixes, but IF it deserved the price at launch. If you tell me "yes, it did" you're either lying to me or to yourself. So I lost interest and moved on to more polished games. As the saying goes, this is literally more live development than live service: Missing features are brought in after the launch.
Tl;dr: Too early, too undercooked. Full AAA price tag completely undeserved, was so at launch and still is IMHO. If Blizzard had taken their time, say 1-1.5 years, this could have been an amazing game. As it stands it's lost many players. Regardless, I'm still full of hopium, instead of copium.
