Heed my warning: The Diablo 4 open beta will ruin your weekend if you aren't careful
There are 60 hours in a traditional weekend, accounting for the time from when I walk away from work on Friday evening to when I wake hellishly early on Monday morning. I was left to reflect on this after sinking some 40+ hours into the Diablo 4 early access beta, taking two classes to level 25 and getting a third on the road to the cap. By the time I was downing my first coffee at the office, my eyes were achy and my fingers jittery – Blizzard stole my weekend, and I wouldn't advocate that you put yourself through such an ordeal. Then again, I'm pretty certain that I'm going to do it all over again with the Diablo 4 open beta. And if we're all being totally honest, you're probably going to do the same thing too.
That's because Diablo 4 is excellent. Truth be told, I'm a big fan of where Diablo 3 eventually landed after years of refinement, and lord knows I played plenty of it over the last decade, but Diablo 4 is excellent in a way that its predecessor wasn't. There's something about it which I just can't seem to shake. The Diablo 4 beta hooked me, viciously. Much in the same way that Diablo 2 did so many years ago – compelling me to continue playing long into the night and through to the early hours of the morning with such ease that it's genuinely disconcerting.
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See you in hell my friend
I know that a lot of this sounds a lot like hyperbole, but let's look at last Saturday as proof of point. I sat down around 10am with the intention of playing an hour or two of Diablo 4 before running errands, going grocery shopping, doing laundry – you know, normal adult stuff. By the time I realized that I was debilitatingly thirsty, it was somehow 6pm and getting dark outside. An entire day flew by while I sat motionless on my couch, clearing Sanctuary of demons with methodical precision. I'm not going to tell you what happened next, because admitting that I took a small break before tumbling back into another eight hour session would be far too… not embarrassing, what's the word? Ah, yes, worrisome.
So, what is it about Diablo 4 that seems to be as effective at swallowing hours as some sort of ancient time demon? It certainly doesn't hurt that the game looks phenomenal – dark, gothic, heavy fucking metal; you can insert any adjective here that couldn't describe the visuals of Diablo 3. Oh, and definitely doesn't hurt that it plays wonderfully either. Diablo has always been a game about right-clicking monsters into oblivion, but the fourth-installment handles smoothly and intuitively with a controller. While a smooth 60 frames-per-second performance on Xbox Series X kept the action rumbling along at a nice pace, as I waded through dank hell-touched corridors and scrambled across the new open world shared with other players.
But Diablo 4's true magic lies in its sense of progression. You start out powerless and very quickly become powerful, a force of nature who is capable of cleansing despairing dungeons of evil forces with relative ease. Whether you're working alone or in a party of four, there's real pleasure to be had in the quickening pace of demonic exorcism – particularly once you start investing heavily in the knotted skill trees which accompany each of the five classes. Where Diablo 3 sought to remove friction from character progression, sacrificing depth to do so, Blizzard has taken a different route here: Diablo 4 allows for an absurd amount of customization, and the result is the ability to intuitively structure intricate class builds.
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The flexibility over your abilities and skills is paired well with Diablo's iconic feedback loop. Executing devastating attacks is as simple as a button press, and the reward is often a splash of dazzling particle effects and incrementally better gear to collect. I think this is why I likely wasted invested so much of my time into the Diablo 4 beta – I just couldn't stop myself. Encounters are woven together with fantastically rendered cutscenes and an engrossing storyline; the open world is packed with distractions and oddities to investigate; and through it all I was equipping new loot, unlocking new abilities, and gradually becoming more powerful by the minute.
With the Necromancer and Druid classes unlocking, along with another chance to try and tackle the Diablo 4 open beta world boss, the desire to sink another full weekend into its action is seductive. I still have laundry to do and I need to go grocery shopping, but then there's demon slaying to be done as well. This is our last chance to try Diablo 4 before June 6, and the long wait sounds more painful than the way my back will undoubtedly feel after another 40-hour session of play. So heed my warning before you progress past the Diablo 4 open beta character creation tools: Diablo 4 will consume your entire weekend if you aren't careful, but then I couldn't think of a better way to spend that time.
Diablo 4 is one of the most anticipated new games for 2023, and it's set to launch on June 6 for PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, and Xbox One.
