Diablo 4 Hands-On Preview: We Played Act 1 and Hit Level 25 - IGN

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I can’t stop thinking about Diablo 4.

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.

Besides, you’ll still spend an overwhelming amount of your time slaying monsters in combat.

I only ended up undoing one point, near level 25, in order to pick a different branch of the skill tree to spend my action point on.

The heart of any Diablo game, though, is of course the way you utilize your skill point choices.

And using all of your attacks within one battle – as you’ll need to do quite frequently before too long – makes Diablo 4 look like a demon-slaying orchestral performance that you get to conduct.

As I carved up Hell’s minions (except the times where they carved me up!), my time traversing Sanctuary never got old – not just because of the surplus of side quests that frequently popped up (heck, even some of the random dungeons with no side quests attached to them were so big that they took me half an hour to clean out), but also the seemingly random in-game events, both public and private.

Heaven help any game that ships anywhere near Diablo 4, because I know I’ll be too absorbed in my adventures in Sanctuary to care about anything else.