Diablo 4 Hands-On Preview: We Played Act 1 and Hit Level 25
It’s rare for a game to come along that I can’t stop thinking about, even when I’m not playing it. There are plenty of great games out there, don’t get me wrong, but a precious few keep running in my head even after I’ve walked away from my PC. As you’ve probably guessed by now, I can’t stop thinking about Diablo 4. Even in its current unfinished state – Blizzard wouldn’t let us capture our own gameplay footage, likely due to the placeholder audio in my build and other normal in-development stuff that doesn’t make for a pretty video, so you’re looking at b-roll they put together for us here – Diablo 4 is absolutely crammed with story, content, beauty, character customization, and so much more. I played roughly 12 hours of Act 1, bringing my Barbarian from a barely clothed level-1 bodybuilder to a decked-out, blunt-force-trauma-inducing level-25 powerhouse by the time I reached the end of this build’s content.
One of the first things that struck me in the first couple hours of Diablo 4 was just how much story there is. Relative to previous games in the series, you’ll spend a lot of time watching cutscenes of both the cinematic and in-game variety (the former are, per Blizzard tradition, always gorgeous, and the latter are impressively varied in both camera angle and length). If I’m being honest, I think the frequency of the cutscenes in the early game combined with the unavoidably lousy feeling of being at the lowest point on the power curve when you’re just starting out makes Diablo 4 feel a bit slow for the first hour or two. This isn’t really a complaint, though, as I applaud Blizzard’s effort to layer more story into Sanctuary. Making it feel more alive and filled with more history is a good thing. Besides, you’ll
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