DIABLO 4
this time around it opens with a hellraiser cutscene and no immediate barrage of Live Service Sludge, which is nice, but the horror pretense chafes against the bubble boy level scaling real fast and sooner than later i find the dedicated Premium Season Pass hotkey, which is not so nice
the skill tree's certainly better than D3's, even if a large part of that's due to how it's presented rather than it being any kind of sea change. don't love the earn&spend meter component, and the skill cycling's not far from being an mmo rotation, but my last run of D2 had me using the basic attack til level 30 to preserve points so i can't really talk much shit here. it's fun to press buttons and carve slabs off healthbars, and that's a decent enough place to start
but it's not long before i get that open world wooziness and the WANNA SKIP THE WHOLE CAMPAIGN? pop-up i got an hour in starts to look a lot more prudent. there's just Too Much Shit, and since everything's scaled to your level there're no real peaks or valleys, just a sprawling content plateau. everything bends around the player's current status at all times, which is a disaster when the moment-to-moment gameplay has next to no value when isolated from the progression
the genre's perennial metagaming techniques have always favoured bypassing as many monsters, dungeons, and quests as possible, so you'd think the goal would be to try and solve that by making the campaign more taut and muscular -- but no, they made it bigger, filled it with more fucking junk, then provided their now-ubiquitous self eject button as a bandaid
eventually i decide to just press it, which turns the game into a sixty level world of warcraft reputation grind instead of a bad open world rpg and clears up the illusion that there's anything actually going on here. i crank the difficulty up to penitent, try nightmare dungeons, and run as many of the timed world events that're blistering up on my diseased map as possible, but it's all so unbelievably boring. this is vampire survivors. you paid $59.99 for 75GB of vampire survivors
once again i understand that the fanbase will say stuff like "you didn't even do tier x" or "wait until y", as if the technology's simply not there yet and spending untold hours without meaningful interaction's completely unavoidable. but do you know when diablo(1) gets interesting? the moment you turn it on