Overview of the game Diablo IV. We have been waiting for her for 11 years for a reason.

A few days ago came the official release of the long-awaited Diablo IV.

This game has an extremely large fan base, as far as you can imagine. In just 3 days, it earned itself the title of the fastest selling game in the history of Blizzard Entertainment itself.

In addition, four days before the access of Diablo IV users managed to play 93 million hours This is equivalent to 10 thousand years.

Yesterday, actress Whoopi Goldberg was among the fans. Release it on Mac. An intelligible answer from waiting, of course, is not disclosed. However, already now every time a new product can be played on your computer almost initially with macOS Sonoma, which we played about in a separate article.

We are looking into whether Blizzard has managed to maintain the quality bar that it has set itself. 11 years have passed since the release of part of the property.

Welcome back to Sanctuary

The game has come a long way in long-term construction, following the same path as Diablo III. A lot of fate has changed over time, with game director Jay Wilson replacing first Luis Barriga and then Joe Shelley along the way.

And if earlier Blizzard expected to overestimate the expectations of the players, then after the release of Diablo Immortal decided to strive for such plans. Quality plays an important role for the company, and that’s great.

Each of the parts of Diablo stood out in some way, each had its own characteristics. All parts were good, but there was frankly not enough something just like gameplay and style. The first part was a bloody dungeon slasher, the second was the same, but with a noticeable increased scale, the third abandoned the gloomy setting in favor of more colorful colors.

“Treshka” was strikingly different from the series of past games. Although she became brighter and lost the production of hopelessness, she was still driving and “fleshy”. Yes, and ENT at her expense greatly expanded.

The “Four” decided to sum up many years of processing and put everything together. She brought back a long-lost dark generation and made the gameplay even richer. In general, it gave exactly what we had been waiting for for many years. Sanctuary is back to what we know it decades ago.

I will not dissemble and beat around the bush for a long time. Diablo IV turned out to be an excellent game, although it does not bring anything completely new to the genre. And why touch something that works so well, right?

I’ll start right away with surprise, and then about everything else.

Playing Diablo IV is a real pleasure. Even on the toaster

Blizzard has done a great job of optimizing this game. It works even on the weakest hardware.

Here are the minimum system requirements for clarity:

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10 (1909 or newer)
• CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD FX-8350
• RAM: 8 GB
• video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R9 280
• DirectX: version 12
• search: SSD, 90 GB free space

Do you hear it? The minimum requirement is a graphics card that is over 10 years old! Is this not a level?

I’m playing on PlayStation 5, but also tested the game on macOS Sonoma. For the test, we used a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip and 16 GB of RAM. With the help of an emulator from Apple, the novelty is used on highly efficient and gives plus or minus a stable 40 FPS. A decent result for an underrated Mac game in 2023.

There were no drawdowns at all on the PS5, but it is known from the Xbox Series X that occasionally noticed wonderful drawdowns. In general, it is always stable more than 60 frames / sec.

On a PC with a GTX 1070 Ti, the game runs great at 60 FPS at 1440p on an ultrawide monitor.

All in all, with optimization Blizzard did their best. For this company a huge respect.

Briefly about the plot. What is the new Diablo all about?

A powerful wizard, who has gathered his squad to search for gold, betrays and summons the powerful demon Lilith. It was she who created the Duhari along with the angel Inarius. However, then they quarreled, and Lilith went into captivity.

We play as a specially crafted protagonist who gets caught up in a snowstorm and then finds himself in a small village. the capture knows that Lilith is already taking control of some people and owning the order under the pretense of saving humanity. Of course, it’s not like that at all.

This story expands the lore of the game and brings to it a lot of the smallest details. Especially many things we can learn from side quests. Their collectors heartily placed on the crankcase.

Now we have not randomly generated locations, but a whole open world. And I’ll tell you what a guy. Only in the first 5-7 hours you can count on 30 percent of the game if you do not focus only on the plot. Pay attention to additional quests. Although they are not as interesting as a circular line, they have their own entertaining microstories.

There are various activities all over the map. And as you level up, there are only more of them. you often encounter basements, dungeons, side quests, story and random activities.

Then, after a certain level, new activities are opened. For example, there are points where demons “run” to Sanctuary take place, they work on a timer and are shown on the main map. For them, the player generously gets blown and gold, but even there a certain skill is required in the battle with bosses.

The location itself is full of small villages and cities, satisfied people. Do you feel that this world. At the moment, you can stumble upon some short dialogue or something more interesting. For example, in the first act we visit Yelesna, and there are children at the entrance who say that it is time for them to go, to be in time somewhere. You follow them, and they lead you to a crowd of other children, around whom an old man sits. He tells regular evening scary stories.

And there are so many little things everywhere. They do not let you know that this is just a decoration for the game. It seems that this is a full-fledged living world, where something is constantly happening. And you can use it for some events. Of course, this is an illusion, and often everything is written in advance, but how skillfully to play with the scriptwriters.

Pumping, customization and that’s it

At the very beginning of the game, classes are available to us: Necromancer, Druid, Barbarian, Rogue and Wizard. As before, they named each other by their probabilities and abilities.

Each class has its pros and cons, the forum already has a large number of guides on the best leveling or one of the other characters.

Personally, I’ve always enjoyed playing as a necromancer the most. He may not actively participate in the battle, contain his own collection of undead. As the level increases, more and more powerful types are unlocked: from skeletons to golems.

Each “army” can be download separately. For them, as they develop, new features open up, such as enhanced attacks or increased pumping of essence, conversion for dark magic to work. Or you can sacrifice your dead creatures in order to specifically strengthen your loved one. Then you will become more powerful, but lose your helpers.

As before, here convenient operating mode (cross platform). You can go through all the tasks available to you in a group of up to four people. But personally, I’m confused by the system of action of the main plot. As for the parallel passage, it is required to collect its progress from the players. Even if you have already completed the game and decided to replay it again.

When it comes to killing monsters, Blizzard continues to follow the quality plan. Their it became even more interesting to shred and destroy in every possible way: for example, a necromancer can send a ghostly ability that deals damage in an area.

There are many combinations, you can spend more than once on learning skills – it is really big and you need to figure it out in order to assemble the best build. It turns out the tree itself is very variable. You can turn a magician into a “melee” and even teach a barbarian to destroy mobs with just one magic. The tank easily passes into the damage dealer and vice versa.

I also liked the auto-leveling system, but not completely. On the one hand, it’s cool that with the pumping of your level, the enemies become stronger. On the other hand, it doesn’t always work well. Such experiences can devalue your efforts. They knocked out the legendary armor or weapon, but they also became more difficult. Outcome – You don’t feel a huge increase in power..

I will briefly talk about craft and weapons. This is no coincidence. Everything works the same as in the previous parts. You buy the necessary components from the auctions, knock out something in mass dungeons, then combine it and get a more powerful weapon. Stones can be crafted into weapons and armor and provide additional buffs.

There are also pvpwhere they can be abducted with other abductees. For this, too, guides on the best weapons for meaty fights between players in multi-level locations have already been identified on the Internet.

It’s frustrating that Blizzard is trying to get away with the MMORPG mechanics, but doesn’t implement something important. For example, selling loot between players. A basic thing would be found, but for some reason a target was found from it. Well, at least they guard the arrests.

It’s a great game and everything continues to work just as well as it used to.

The basis of Diablo IV has remained unchanged – this is a constant spell of demons. It is for this, including the story and other mechanics, that she makes the game that millions of players love.

Diablo IV is available on PC, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. It costs €70. There are Russian subtitles and voice acting.