Kripp is a huge fan of the Diablo series. In fact, Diablo 3’s release in 2012 played a pivotal role in his decision to quit his job to focus on streaming on Twitch and creating content on YouTube—a move that has clearly paid off in spades years later.
It’s not surprising the 35-year-old, best known for streaming Hearthstone, dabbled in the Diablo 4 beta over the weekend, and like Asmongold, his first impression was lukewarm.
The Twitch streamer praised aspects like graphics, textures, and details. He even said the amount of “character depth” it has to offer will “take people by surprise,” claiming it’s a “lot deeper” than people it seems on the surface, which he’s a fan of.
In spite of that, however, he is predicting Diablo 4 will be a “six star out of ten” game at launch based on what he’s seen so far. “A lot of that comes from the fact that I think a lot of mechanics in this game just need a little bit of work,” he said. “There’s a lot of mechanics that are really rough and kind of unfinished.”
He highlighted issues with dungeon mechanics in particular, claiming they’re “not fun,” bosses are repetitive and not melee-friendly, and the overall balance between classes in them is “not finely tuned.”
Kripp also has some reservations about the “forced multiplayer level scaling party system,” which makes higher-level characters significantly weaker in zones with lower-level characters because the monsters scale to levels.
“When you level up, you are always weaker,” he said. “It’s not like a traditional Diablo 2 style game where it’s like, ‘Oh, this zone is too hard. I’ll just go to a lower-level zone.’ There is no lower-level zone. You can drop the difficulty of the world and probably get crappy drops and experience or you can just try to fight through it anyway, but I personally hate that. I think it’s a terrible system. It just doesn’t feel good.”
Kripp also isn’t a fan of the user interface, describing it as one of the weakest parts of the game due to the mini-map with no zoom, cluttered item and quest windows, and more.
Still, Kripp believes Diablo 4 has what it takes to be a “masterpiece.” He said it’ll take a lot of tweaking that could last months or even a year, but if the developers play their cards right, it could end up being a “nine out of ten” or maybe even a “nine and a half out of ten” title.
Even if that doesn’t end up happening, he’s planning to play it for hours on end and stream it. If the endgame loop has some longevity, which he isn’t sure about at this stage, it could even be his main game for the next couple of years.
