Diablo IV, one of the most anticipated games of the moment, opened beta last weekend, and as a fan of the franchise, I couldn’t resist giving it a try. Unfortunately, I couldn’t devote much time to it, but it was enough to draw important conclusions and gather information that I want to share with you today in this article.

I thought about writing a classic article focused on the technical level, but the truth is that Diablo IV does not have any important mystery in this sense, at least in its beta state, so I preferred to approach it as a dedicated review Five things that are important and that you should be clear about. As always, if you have any questions after reading this special, feel free to leave them in the comments and we’ll help you out.

Before we get started, I’d like to remind you that although the Diablo IV open beta is over, there are still a few months left until the game launches. This It won’t arrive until June 6 this year, if Blizzard’s predictions are met and there are no further delays. There are no signs to suggest a possible delay, so basically this is the final release date.

1.-Diablo IV is no graphical marvel

This was something that was already quite clear to me when I found out that it was oa intergenerational developmentand that it will come to PS4 and Xbox One The truth is that Diablo III was no marvel either graphically, but it made up for its shortcomings on this level with a very careful setting and fantastic design on all levels.

Once you start playing the Diablo IV beta I really liked the modeling and the quality of the characters on the selection and customization screen. Of course, there is an important improvement over Diablo III in this sense, as well as in the complexity of the geometry and the quality of the lighting and shadow effects, but nothing that surprises or positions this title as something truly innovative.

The truth is that it’s a shame because a Diablo IV could look a lot better if it was brought up as a PS5, Xbox Series S-Series X, and PC exclusivebut in any case, it must be recognized that the Blizzard saga has never been revolutionary on a technical level, and in this title, without much fanfare, Blizzard submitted graphically and gave shape to a remarkable technical section that does not disappoint.

If someone tells me that Diablo, the original, was a revolution on a technical level, it’s because that person clearly doesn’t know Crusader No regretsa great game with an isometric perspective that came to compatibility in 1995, long before the first Diablo, and that was the real precedent for this marvel and others like Fallout.

2.-It has excellent artistic direction

And this greatly compensates for its shortcomings on a graphical level, as was the case with Diablo III. Blizzard is known for taking the utmost care in both character and enemy design, as well as the scenery, decoration of each area, and lighting and shadow effects. create a unique atmosphere capable of capturing players.

In Diablo III, the execution was so good that it made Westmarch look great despite the low polygon load and technical simplicity. I had the same experience again in Diablo IV. For example, in the first village we visit, we find an absolutely oppressive aesthetic and environment that has been taken care of in detail to fully draw us into the story.

This meticulous environment and art direction of Diablo IV is another example of Blizzard’s genius and takes this title to another level compared to Diablo III. It should also be noted that this is a game with a much more mature tone, more serious and from what we saw in Diablo II, which I really appreciate as I never really liked the casual touch of Diablo III which reminded me of World of Warcraft in certain aspects.

The icing on the cake is the careful setting the level of detail of settings that are perfectly crafted to tell stories with their simple presence. This is something we’ve also seen in previous installments of the franchise, and Blizzard does it masterfully. It also makes us feel the need to pause more to think about scenarios and breaks up the monotony between fights a bit.

3.-The gameplay has changed a lot and has a touch of “soul”.

In Diablo IV we have something that would have been unthinkable in the previous works, although it was already present in Diablo III in a passive way, reserved dodge moves. Once we start the game, we realize, especially when we get to the first boss, that dodging and knowing when to attack and when not to is essential to getting out of a fight alive.

We also have another big change that concerns health potions. The amount we can carry is limited, but we can recharge them by eliminating enemies and interfering with bosses. If we run out of all the potions we will be “sold”, so we have to plan the hardest fights well and be extremely careful when switching attacks.

In my case I had no problem adjusting Thanks to this new method of play, I never found myself in a difficult situation and once I understood the mechanics of the first boss, I ended up killing him without spending any more potions (I only used two at the beginning while learning his mechanics). Some friends were not so lucky, but because they were too used to Diablo III and/or Diablo II mechanics.

I think Blizzard did well with some of the changes, but at the same time I think increasing the durability and toughness of enemies and bosses has a slowing effect on the game which we actually saw already in Diablo III and that in the end not everyone liked it either. Be clear, you won’t find this extremely fast-paced gameplay style of Diablo II, as Diablo IV builds on Diablo III and reinterprets it to be even slower.

4.-It is very well optimized and is very affordable

This is something that was made clear when Blizzard confirmed the minimum and recommended requirements for Diablo IV, but seeing it on paper isn’t the same as checking it. To play the beta I used my personal computer, which consists of Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB 3200MHz DDR4, GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and I installed it on a PCIe Gen3 x4 SSD.

Configured at 1440p, with maximum quality and DLSS2 in quality mode, I recorded an average of 285 frames per secondand I had max peaks above 300 FPS that were close to 400 FPS at times. I can also confirm that at the CPU level it draws more IPC than cores and that With a chip with 4 cores and 8 threads, you will have no problem gaming.

SSD significantly reduces loading and production times there is no interruption or stoppage. The new information guarantees that it will be compatible with DirectStorage technology in its final version, which is not officially confirmed, but the information is quite credible, and of course it would be good news, because if the mentioned technology is implemented correctly, the storage time will be practically zero.

Starting with a Core i5 4000, Ryzen 3 1000, 8GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon R9 285, you’ll be able to play at 1080p without any problems if you adjust the graphics quality to medium to maintain a good and stable frame rate. Fluency matters in this game, and a lot, so it’s better to lower the quality than drop below 60 FPS, be clear.

5.-Supports NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and will have ray tracing

In Diablo IV beta you can use DLSS2 and FSR2. Both technologies use upscaling to improve performance, but they do so in different ways. To enable DLSS2, we need a GeForce RTX 2060 or higher, as this technology uses tensor cores and deep learning to scale and rebuild the image. intelligently.

FSR2 the said acceleration and the smart side are missingand the results obtained are of course inferior in both image quality and performance improvement, but as a counterpart supports many more graphics cards. We can use it for example with Radeon RX 570 and also with GeForce GTX 970.

Thanks to both upscaling technologies performance can be improvedand with FSR2 we can give a breath of air to the less powerful models and improve stability to maintain 60 FPS. In 1080p it would be ideal not to drop from the quality mode, and in 1440p we should not go beyond the balanced mode, because the performance mode is very aggressive and reduces the image quality a lot.

I can confirm that FSR2 has some issues and graphical glitches, but since this is a beta version, we assume they will be fixed in the final version. And speaking of the final version, this one will be compatible DLSS3 and frame generationwhich means we can further increase the FPS speed if we have a GeForce RTX 40, and in the future it will also include ray tracing.

Given how well optimized it is and how light on PC hardware it is, it’s clear that ray tracing will really make sense when using DLSS and FSR with mid-range and high-end graphics cards, as it will consume a significant amount of resources and significantly reduce performance, something we will be able to compensate for with DLSS and FSR.