Can You Review A Live Service Game Like 'Diablo 4' Before It's Live?

Diablo 4

The Diablo 4 review embargo has lifted, and the game has arrived with a very respectable 88 on Metacritic after dozens of scored reviews came in. I gave it a 9/10, and I wrote about how I very much enjoyed my time with it, despite a few issues I have.

However, I soon heard some people wondering why critics were scoring Diablo 4 at all, even among others in the games press. After all, this is an always online live service game. How could you review it when it wasn’t live? How could you judge it without its microtransaction store online?

The thing is, there is rarely such a thing as a perfect review period, and that’s especially true in the live service genre. In this case, we had access to the full game, everything that will be live when it launches late tomorrow for early access. The entire campaign, every endgame activity, all classes, as much leveling as we could jam into around two weeks of playtime. I put in 30+ hours and thought that was enough to make a conclusion. My friend Travis at IGN probably put in more than double that to go extra hard. We both gave it a 9.

So, the microtransaction store. You really, really have to have not been paying attention at all to anything in the run-up to release of D4 to not know anything about the game’s microtransactions. Yes, I absolutely understand why there would be initial skepticism with Diablo 3’s Auction House and Diablo Immortal’s pay-to-win gems. But the Diablo 4 team also knows that, which is why last year they published an entire blog addressing what kinds of microtransactions would and would not be in the store and battle pass. In interviews, including ones with me, they’ve gone into even more detail. They are not doing anything that’s paying for power in the paid battle pass or paid store. It is all cosmetics, which they have said repeatedly. Any active bonuses that help you during a season (gold/resource collection increases) are on the free track.

Diablo 4

There is no Auction House, there are no super gems. You may not trust Blizzard but they are not going to be insane enough to just…lie dozens of times about what they’re selling and not selling in the store at launch. Past that, they also gave us a bunch of store screenshots so we could see what was coming even if the store wasn’t live in the review build. So no, I do not believe monetization would affect my score based on vast amounts of information we know already about what’s being sold. They even gave us a bunch of extra comparison shots showing that cosmetic ornaments are not necessarily cooler than in-game stuff you get.

Then, the live aspect. You can split this into two categories, the game being literally online, and the game being a live service. As to the first point, I absolutely expect there to be sever issues when Diablo 4 launches. Hours, if not days of problems. It’s a massive game, and even with its previous “server slam” it would be a miracle if it was a totally smooth launch. Again, I can cover the news of how bad servers may be at launch, but I am not going to put temporary server issues into a review score.

As for being a live service, the first season of Diablo 4 does not even have a release date yet. It’s some time in mid to late July to give everyone a chance to beat the campaign and Blizzard to react to immediate issues that may crop up. Then when it does arrive, the season itself is three months long. So the idea here is that after playing all the content available at launch, I need to wait until, what, October, to give it a score? Come on.

There is no perfect review process. Actually I take that back, Nintendo giving people its single player games a month early is a perfect review process. But for the most part, you work with what you have. If you believe in getting rid of scores altogether in reviews, I honestly can sympathize and have considered it myself. But in this case, after putting loads of time in and knowing what the “missing” information contains, I’m comfortable with my score. This isn’t to say games cannot get better or worse in time, and should not be revisited, but hey, that’s why I’m still covering Destiny after ten years.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.