I think I like Diablo IV, but the appreciation for it stops at ‘liking’ and does not go much further. As it stands, I have finished the campaign, hit level 54 with a necromancer, and have very little desire to continue to play Diablo IV until an expansion releases. I am well versed in Diablo as a franchise, Blizzard (and all their transgressions) as a company, live service games, RPGs, and games that want you to sink hundreds of hours (and hopefully a little cash along the way!) into them. I have done a juggling act of Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV since their launches. I was there during the real money auction house days of Diablo III. I watched older family members click on little skeletons until they died in Diablo II, and clicked on little skeletons until they died when the controls were handed to me. I played Diablo and Diablo II years after they were released on my own. My dad used to have a boxed copy of Diablo: Hellfire sitting on the desk next to the family computer, and a small pewter statue of a wizard giving an orb to a dragon next to it. I might have never acquired the high level, single digit percent drop rate items, and I have never been great at min-maxing gems, but I know how to click on a demon until it explodes. I’ve seen Cow Levels you people wouldn’t believe.
I get Diablo. I understand the appeal of Diablo, both from a practical stance of it being fun to build a character and watch them decimate hordes of hell, and from a nostalgic “I will never be 8 years old sitting in front of a CRT again, but this tickles something in me that I lost somewhere along the way transitioning from worrying about paying for new swords to worrying about paying rent” stance. I knew Diablo IV couldn’t and wouldn’t take me H O M E (nebulous concept) again, but I really thought it would take me further than it did.
I didn’t have any problems with the aesthetic of Diablo III, seemingly putting me at odds with more than a few members of the fandom/community. When it was first shown, Diablo III was met with more than a little criticism for being too colorful, but I never understood the complaint. There were still grungy villages, undead minions, blood, and demons; now with some brighter areas that are supposed to look that way because part of the game takes place in the domain of angels. Far as I could tell, Diablo III was just the evolution of graphics for a franchise that hadn’t had a new game in over a decade, so when Diablo IV made a seemingly big deal about going back to dark aesthetics and themes I was not surprised, but also not impressed. It didn’t really matter to me as long as we still had the gothic stone carvings of my health orb, mana orb, and ability bar. In contrast it seemed like much of the information prior to Diablo IV’s release was about convincing people that this was going to be the Diablo you remember, because it was about looking dark like Diablo should, goddamnit. It was about bringing back classic classes because these are the classes you remember and love, goddamnit. And it was about giving you so many options for character building because you love to tinker and build your own little demon slayer, goddamnit.
We are trying to make Diablo IV take you H O M E again. How metal is that?
My Date with the Devil’s Daughter
I did my best to avoid information and trailers about the game prior to its release, so much so that I wasn’t fully sure what all the classes in the game were prior to playing the open beta. It wasn’t a full media blackout, I saw plenty of art of the Leading Lady Lilith, Daughter of Hatred, and I spoke with friends who would mention what they were excited for about the game, but I was going in blind as far as story and new features. When the open beta rolled around, I got my first taste of pomegranate the devil’s fruit. Like the other Diablos before it, you begin by picking a class and some minor visual customization for your character. Like the other Diablos before it, you being as a lowly level one wanderer, with little more than rags on your back and a basic weapon that barely does 10 Damage Per Second if you’re lucky. Like the other Diablos before it, you quickly find a reason to head to a nearby town, and like the other Diablos before it that town needs some help with some demons. I didn’t dislike any of this, particularly because Diablo IV’s opening swerves at the last minute with a small surprise, but more on that later. And to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a series that releases so rarely going back to a trusted well. It lets those jitters seep into your skin as you grin over the familiar feelings. You get excited for the plinking guitar sounds, the gothic and metal themes both visually and audibly, the stone angel cradling your health meter and the demon clutching your Resource (generic name for the juice that all classes squeeze to fuel their abilities) meter, and there is a charm to the dead seriousness of it all. There is a sense of “okay, here we go” when you get your first slightly better pair of pants, and the rush of “now this is necromancy!” that comes with acquiring your first scythe.
I did my best to make Diablo IV as fresh an experience as possible. I played a barbarian in the beta, as I had enjoyed barbarians in the past, so for the first time ever I played a necromancer when the full game launched. I had very little experience with casters and pet classes in general when it comes to RPGs. As mentioned above, the start of the game (gently) subverts expectations by having your character almost killed by the town they agree to rid of demons when they are forced to ingest the blood of Lilith, who is the final boss you will spend the game chasing. Not a huge thing, but an interesting rug pull from a series that otherwise thrives on letting you save towns and them welcoming you like a hero after you do. You then meet a crotchety old man who is past his demon slaying prime, and is a Horadrim (scholar-warriors that fight demons and study arcane arts, been around since Diablo 1). To be sure, Diablo IV’s opening hour or so threads that difficult needle of familiar and fresh, and to its credit generally seems to do a good job of on boarding new players. While I didn’t have experience with a necromancer, I rarely felt lost or unclear on the best abilities or equipment to take to continue to be an engine of destruction. It felt nice to be able to fairly clearly understand what my skills were doing, and getting around the world is generally clear and easy with waypoints and the ability to just have the game give you a path to your objective by right clicking on the map. Where it starts to become a decomposing corpse, is…well, in the rest of the game.
How to Kill a God in 10 Days
Diablo IV is broken up into a prologue, six main acts, and an epilogue to ominously set up future narratives. I described the prologue above, and once you have dealt with the opening village and met your Horadrim cohort, you set off for the large central city of Kyovashad for more tutorials about game systems, introductions to factions and characters, and the game turning you loose to explore the world. Kyovashad is all snow and stone, with large gothic buildings and miserable little villagers who speak in generically appropriate eastern-European accents of various quality. The citizens of the city will offer you side quests, sell you wares, buy your old weapons, dismantle your old pants for materials, and otherwise offer colorful world building dialogue to remind you how miserable life in Kyovashad and Sanctuary (the world in which Diablo takes place) in general is. There is, of course, a big church with a big statue of their living angel god. The church is, of course, heavily based on Christian themes and iconography but definitely different in some key ways that will make sure people don’t get too uncomfortable. There is, of course, Something Rotten in Denmark the ranks of the church. You, of course, do a few missions for the church and you and your character get the feeling that these guys might not be all that great. You will eventually meet the aforementioned Living Angel God named Inarius, and he is, of course, a pompous prick as the angels so often are. I know the tone of those last few sentences sounds flippant, but as I said there isn’t anything wrong with playing the classics. Blizzard knows how to play the hits. Like StarCraft and WarCraft, Diablo is entertaining enough genre fiction. And like StarCraft and WarCraft, Diablo lets its own antagonist down by the time the last chord fades. The narrative overstays its welcome by more than a few hours, never makes good on the most interesting things it sets up, and ends in a way that is utterly lacking courage, unsatisfying, and feels like someone playing you a classic rock album you’ve already heard then looking at you and asking “pretty fuckin’ metal right?”
Yeah, I guess. Hey, by the way, the price tag is still on that shirt.
Spoilers for the game are ahead, but if you’ve read at least two fantasy novels, seen at least two fantasy movies, or played at least two videogames, you probably know what’s going to happen.
Acts I through III are open to you all at the same time, and can be completed in any order, thanks to the game’s leveling system which scales enemy power to your own. These acts encourage you to explore significant chunks of the world and introduce you to more plot relevant NPCs, while steadily supplying you with loot and side quests to supplement the narrative and gameplay. Giving you three acts to complete at once is not something the game will repeat, but it doesn’t really detract from anything either as none of the three opening acts have significant overlap and you won’t be missing anything from doing them out of order. Based on their placement and proximity to where you start the game, I suspect most players will just do them in sequential order. Act 1 largely involves the church, and introduces you to Neyrelle, a young scholar-thief type girl who is wise beyond her years and needs help finding her mother, who she hopes wasn’t tempted by Lilith’s vast knowledge. Her mother was tempted by Lilith’s vast knowledge. You find her dead, then undead, then dead again after a boss fight with you. Act 2 entails meeting an aged Horadrim warrior named Donan and his eager warrior-son, Yorin. Donan is worried that his son, in his haste to help fight demon hordes, will perish. Donan’s son, in his haste to fight demon hordes, is possessed by a demon and perishes. Act 3 sees the player hunting down a man named Elias, ex-Horadrim and current summoner of Lilith. This is also the act where we meet Mephisto, who is Lilith’s dad and would like for you to please allow him to introduce himself, because he has a proposition for you. That proposition is to please stop Lilith, which you were going to do anyways so a tenuous alliance is formed.
All three of these acts see you traipsing around snowy crags, with a smattering of sandy dunes and crumbling desert cities in the back half of act 3. This new sandy area is a welcome change of scenery, but not a significant one. The tone is still that of bone, blood, and metal, and weirdly even the desert for all its sun and heat seems to be visually dark. Some of the skeletons have been replaced with giant sand bugs and cannibals, but you’ll still be clicking on them to steamroll them with the same 4 skills like all the other enemies you face. The aforementioned cannibals are serving under a clan leader who is big and tough and ruthlessly violent, and a fairly challenging boss fight, but (as far as I could tell) it is otherwise unclear why they elected to eat human flesh instead of animals, demons, or anything else I saw littering the world. It isn’t bad, and nothing I saw was tasteless, but that’s sort of the thing. It wasn’t bad, and that’s about all I can say for much of Diablo IV’s world building and story telling. Frankly, after starting the game with a cutscene where a villager beats in a priest’s skull with his own holy symbol, and a quest where someone dies wearing an iron maiden shaped like a suit of armor fighting with you, cannibals are a little trite. Diablo starts strong, but once it’s shown you how cool it thinks it is, the blood loses its luster. The darkness becomes rote. The bones are made of plastic. The horror more Tim Burton than Hell Raiser. I was sort of hoping for something new from this band, not a cover album. The same genre, but not the same song. It’s your friend in high school coming in wearing an Ozzy Osbourne shirt after playing Guitar Hero all weekend and asking if you knew that Ozzy bit the heads off of bats on stage back in the day.
Pretty fuckin’ metal, amirite? Yeah, I guess. Sure man.
Act 4 and the first half or so of Act 5 are largely macguffin chases. This isn’t terrible in and of itself, but the problem with Diablo’s version of this is just how long it goes on. It reaches a point where even the game seems hard pressed to come up with compelling reason to make you run around the world, and is aware of how tedious it all is by having characters remark that of course the item you need won’t be where it should be. I stopped doing side quests, skipped most of the dialogue, and just wanted to mainline to the end of the game. We need to fix a crystal. To do that we need to see a witch about a potion. To do that we need to gather ingredients. But the witch isn’t home. Also we made the potion wrong the first time. Now we need to take the ingredients back to the crystal and–
It goes on like this for, by my estimation, nearly 6 to 8 hours. I cannot stress enough how weirdly long this part of the game is, and how it is little more than going to and from the same few places, interspersed with boss fights. I know that I risk sounding reductive, but when you start a quest to get something that will let you get something, that will then let you acquire a third thing, for the third time; the nesting doll of macguffin chases looks more like naked padding than a mechanism for storytelling. As with the desert part of the map, Acts 4 and 5 introduce you to new vistas with fleshy, hellish caverns, a burnt grassland, a craggy highland area with ship wrecks, and (my favorite) a slithering swamp with oozing trees, snake creatures, and mystical cultists. Each new biome is a welcome change of scenery, but they all still have the same almost-too-dark, metal and ruin, sensibility about them. While trekking through the bogs and mires of Sanctuary, I couldn’t help but miss the sheer strangeness of the swamp and bizarre lucent castle from Savathun’s Throne World in Destiny 2 and how they are unlike any other location in the game. Diablo IV certainly has a cohesive look, but that cohesion trends closer to descriptions like ‘safe’ or ‘similar’ and the consistency never lends itself to admiration. The towns are all vaguely radial, the merchants all devoid of personality, and the NPCs all have the same flavor of sorrowful slurry. I mentioned earlier that I found the grim seriousness that Diablo IV has charming, and I do. The problem is, this part of the game has you traipsing about Sanctuary for so long that you get to see how big, empty, and miserable it all is. Turns out, the folks over in Scosglen are having a goatman problem just like the Dry Steppes. No longer does Diablo feel like the dark decent of a sole traveler like in the first, or the long journey of a band of companions who you spend time with and learn about as in the third. Sanctuary is a strip mall and all the shops are Spirit Halloweens. Buddy, we’ve all got skeletons with crossbows. And cannibals for that matter.
Sympathy for the Devil’s Daughter
This brings us to the end of Act 5, Act 6, and the epilogue where the game wraps up (for now). The player has spent the entire game to this point running after Lilith, seemingly always two steps behind her as she spreads her influence and lays siege to parts of Sanctuary. We learn about Lilith through marks of hers on the ground you can see thanks to he townspeople at the start of the game who fed you her blood. At the time, this seems like it might be important. In practice, it services as a device to show you cutscenes and nothing more. You learn that Lilith and Inarius created Sanctuary. You learn that Lilith and Inarius had a child who was the first necromancer, and that he was killed by Inarius because Inarius believed it would help him get back to heaven. You learn that Inarius wants to get back to heaven, and that he and his worshipers believe he will be allowed back into heaven if he kills Lilith. You learn that Lilith actually isn’t terribly fond of heaven or hell, and that she would like to end the Eternal Conflict between the two. Where the church punishes and chastises humans for giving into their sins and impulses, Lilith makes her stance clear: you aren’t wrong for having desires, you aren’t terrible for sinning. After all, “Sin is their birthright” she croons in one early scene.
Indeed, the game seems to portray Lilith in a light that is… well, a little confusing. She is portrayed as a caring mother to her son, and seems to have some amount of care for the humans of Sanctuary in a way that Inarius, other angels, and other demons do not. She is seen offering humans choices rather than kill them. She’s also portrayed as slaughtering dozens, if not hundreds of humans with little regard. And the few people that we see join her become devoid of empathy, and wanton in their punishment of themselves and others. Mephisto (her father, as a reminder) wants her dead so she doesn’t overthrow him and/or end the Eternal Conflict between heaven and hell. Inarius (her ex-lover) wants her dead so he can get back to heaven. The game does not establish why the two of them fell in love in the first place, why they created Sanctuary, or what caused their falling out. After finishing the campaign and fearing I missed something, I ventured to a wiki for more information and found that while there is backstory, it is not in the game and is of questionable quality. The short version is that Lilith captured Inarius after a battle and instead of killing him immediately she kept him to toy with him. While captured Inarius spoke about wanting to end the Eternal Conflict, because he was tired of it, an opinion that Lilith shared. The two of them and a bunch of other rogue angels and demons stole a big magic crystal called the World Stone and created Sanctuary. But for some reason peace did not last (unclear why, when all these angels and demons were tired of fighting), the angels and demons began fighting again, until Inarius banished Lilith somehow and then heaven found him and told him he could never come home. That’s it.
After writing that last paragraph, I found this video summarizing backstory as well, straight from the official Diablo IV YouTube channel, so you can check for yourself.
I bring up outside lore to underscore how confused Diablo IV seems to be about how it wants to treat Lilith, and how it wants you to feel about her. This confusion felt intentional for a brief moment near the end of the game, where I thought it might give me a choice about whether or not to help her (it doesn’t). One moment she is portrayed as sympathetic, mourning the loss of her child, hated by her father and ex-lover, and I understood her anger. She wants to end, or at least escape, the eternal conflict of heaven and hell. Understandable as well. But Diablo IV as a game seems to want to retconn old Diablo lore without having to shake it up too much, but doesn’t have the gall to build new or interesting lore. And it simply can’t have it both ways, but wants to. Nor is it particularly good at having it both ways, as I remember this piece from Nico Deyo at Waypoint a few years ago. With Lilith, Blizzard seems to be continuing their confusing portrayal of ‘villainous’ women. Hell, even some of Blizzard’s devs expressed concerns for the writing around Lilith per this piece. Lilith was the leading icon for all the marketing, the center of the box art, and was portrayed with all the power, terror, and vague sex appeal that made people on social media lose their minds like they did for Lady Dimitrescu. If you are familiar with the likes of Kerrigan, Queen of Blades, Sylvannis Windrunner, Widowmaker, or have ever played any videogame ever; it may not surprise you then that Lilith’s tragic tale ends with you cutting her down after a two stage boss fight. She is, seemingly, permanently destroyed as she crumbles to ash, leaving little more than a Unique Ring for you to equip in her wake and her father Mephisto trapped in a crystal by Neyrelle (another young, traumatized girl), who then takes the crystal and runs away, clearly slowly being corrupted by Mephisto’s presence and setting him up for a grand return. By the time this final scene plays out, Lilith feels less like the star of her own game, and more like a stepping stone to say “Hey! Remember Mephisto? He was cool, right! Let’s get you back to Diablo II as soon as possible!”
Yesteryear. Now that’s metal, right?
A Queen By Any Other Name
My issue with how the story treats Lilith is rather than portray her as a woman against the world, which might not have been incredible writing but would have been better, she is portrayed as just universally hated, and the game does not seem terribly concerned with endearing the player to her. Family and ex-lovers hate her, the named NPCs you meet along the way hate her, you the player likely hate her, and if you don’t your character seems to regardless of how you feel. Her loyal subjects don’t hate her but they consist of vicious vile demons and humans devoid of empathy and driven to madness. Don’t get it twisted, this isn’t me trying to say “why can’t you hug the demons in DOOM?” I know that she has the title Daughter of Hatred. It’s more than I am perplexed by a game that focused so much on it’s leading antagonist being this scary, powerful, austere, demon woman who legend foretold would return, who Blizzard went out of their way to get Halsey to make a Diablo themed version of their song Lilith (it’s bad); is given so little beyond being a bad lady. To be fair, I think Blizzard was trying to give her some nuance and make people go “oooh, maybe she does have more going on than wanton killing!” as seen with what I referenced above about her care for her child and desire to escape Eternal Conflict. But when that nuance comes off the back of other bits of story that indicate she still wants to kill any ‘weak’ humans, she might not have ever cared about Inarius and used him as a tool to create Sanctuary for herself, and actually she wants to conquer Hell, create and army of demons and powerful humans and march on Heaven…we are getting away from what made her plight interesting in the first place. She wanted to escape the Eternal Conflict, and instead of doing that decided to become the dictator of eternity? While I was writing this blog post, a piece went up on IGN wherein one of the developers describes that they did not want Lilith to just be a “giant demon out of hell that is just doing terrible things and we have to kill it”. Unfortunately, I gotta say that after finishing the game and trying to understand what I missed about the lore, that seems to be exactly what she is. In trying to assure me that this wasn’t my dad’s Diablo, but also make my dad happy that Diablo was back, they turned an interesting character into my dad’s Diablo boss. Writing compelling villains is hard. But in their quest to have it all, Blizzard accidentally wrote the same genre fiction they’ve been doing for decades. Hatred is Lilith’s birthright, both as a character in the world and a fictional character in the real one. Hate her until she drops you a cool ring, then forget about her. She can’t break the fictional or real cycle her creators have inflicted upon her.
I Do Bones, Motherfucker. Actually, All of Us Do.
Whew! That’s a lot of talk about Lilith and lore. How does the game play though?
It’s good. It’s fun to click and push keys 1-4 on the same few enemies until they explode. I say ‘same few enemies’ because there are spiders, skeletons, goatmen, demons, cultists, snakes, religious cultists, and swarms of bats and scorpions for you to cut through, most of whom will be felled by a click of your hand regardless of their designs or attack patterns. This isn’t bad, as with most games like this it feels good to watch hordes of enemies wither before my scythe and summons. But given that this is the first fresh Diablo I’ve played since Destiny launched, I did have a moment of missing the ways that different enemies and enemy factions in a game like that make me approach them. There are a plethora of dungeons and cellars to explore, with cellars being single room encounters with treasure at the end and dungeons being frequently just a little too long and almost always consisting of the same few mechanics. These mechanics are (as far as I have seen) a variation of gather three statue pieces and reassemble a statue then fight a boss, push three buttons then fight a boss, or kill all the enemies then fight a boss. The loot collection is streamlined to factory efficiency, as you can teleport back to town instantly to sell your wares, then warp back to where you were once your pack is empty again. Convenient! You acquire a mount late in the game that I frequently forgot to use because I was so used to not having it. Said mount did not feel much faster than walking to me. As you level up and explore the world you gain skill points for acquiring and upgrading skills, which you can reconfigure for a fee. Once you hit level 50, you move on to paragon levels which instead of proffering new skills allow you to increase stats like dexterity and the size of your resource pool. This, theoretically, offers vast character customization. In practice however, it seems shackled to the same fate that most stat based online games are, which is to say: there is the optimal build for each class that most everyone is using at difficult endgame content. Likewise, from what I’ve seen online and in friend circles, it seems like optimal abilities that you simply must be using have emerged for most classes. The hottest sorcerers use fire. The best barbarians use the spin attack. The most powerful necromancers do bones, motherfucker. Certainly this could change as time goes on and the game’s seasons alter things. As a necromancer, I didn’t do much changing of skills or play styles. I started with an army of skeletons and bone spears, and ended with a bigger army of skeletons, wraiths, a golem, and bone spears. Nothing wrong with building on a toolkit, not at all. I liked seeing my little army grow. I just didn’t feel terribly compelled to try anything else, apart from some tinkering with other ultimate abilities to see what they do. And if my anecdotal experience of seeing other necromancers in the field is any indication, most necromancers do bones too. I can’t speak significantly to other classes, but for example necromancers have the option to sacrifice their summons for greater character power. If people are taking those options, I have not seen them. Nor have I seen significant use of things like blood magic from other necromancers. To the game’s credit, it does a good job on-boarding you for how to make a build. Skills are labeled with qualities like “bone” and “corpse” and it seems like skills with similar keywords will synergize well together and they generally do. I just fear that some of that becomes less interesting as you reach higher levels and the builds seem to become less diverse.
Need to Get Something off my Quest
Speaking of endgame, this game sort of has one. Once I finished things in the campaign there were some post game side quests that unlocked endgame activities like Whispers of the Dead, which are bounties you can take on for a tree full of decapitated heads called the Tree of Whispers. I actually really like the Tree of Whispers, it’s a neat weird thing, but said bounties generally involve roaming the over world and killing 100 creatures that spawn a little too sparsely or repeating a dungeon again. Once you have done enough of this, you return to the tree for a cache of items that so far for me, have not been significantly better than the unique or legendary items I have currently. Endgame content also consists of events called Helltides which involve a section of the map becoming overrun with demons, which you slaughter for little red crystals. Once you have enough little red crystals you can open chests in the Helltide area that will theoretically proffer you better loot, but if you die you lose a fair amount of little red crystals. Thus far I have only caught two Helltides and the jewelry I have received has been decidedly unfabulous and unhelpful. This is not to say no progress is made, even if the loot sucks your earning experience points which by this late in the game draw you closer to more paragon points. So you’re always earning something, which feels nice, but I am less compelled to chase +.3% dexterity than I am something like a new exotic weapon or armor in Destiny, particularly when the aforementioned seasons that Diablo IV will have require you to make a whole new character each time a new season starts. I am not terribly compelled to incrementally increase endgame stats when I can’t really chase new pursuits with said stats when the time comes. Diablo IV does not have raids, and the only other endgame content that I am currently aware of is PVP, nightmare dungeons, and increasing your world level. I am less than uninterested in PVP in a game like Diablo, and frankly I don’t think it’s a primary draw for the fanbase. Not unhappy it exists, but also entirely uninterested in trying to kill a druid named Porkbunzz with the title Corpse Trash for some currency to buy new pants with when I could do literally anything else. Nightmare dungeons are more challenging versions of dungeons you likely have already bested multiple times before with new modifiers to ideally make things more challenging, but so far from the few I’ve done on World Tier 3 I haven’t noticed much of a difference. Speaking of World Tiers, they are something I really like! Think of them like game difficulties. You can start at Tier 1 (easiest) or Tier 2, and upon completing the campaign and doing some additional quests will unlock Tier 3. As tiers increase so will the gold you earn, the quality of the loot you earn, and ideally the challenge of the enemies. The game does a good job of recommending you to move on to new tiers, and I felt like the difficulty of each tier is balanced well. Also as a cool thematic touch, as you increase your world tier the statue of Inarius in Kyovashad becomes more corrupted and crawling with ichor and claws. I like it! I’m currently at world tier 3, and unfortunately world tier 4 (the highest as of the time of writing) only opens at level 70 which do I not feel compelled to reach.
I knew it, I’m Surrounded by Trash-holes.
This section is me telling people to get a better joke. Diablo IV has a title system where earning in-game achievements unlocks words for you to smash together to form a title. For example, mine is Grave Traveler. You get two words. For the first two weeks this game was out, I am not exaggerating when I say almost every other player I passed had the suffix Trash in their title. Legendary Trash got a chuckle out of me the first time, but by the 66th player the joke is old. Like any other meme everyone else got in on the action and murdered any mitrh from it in mere days. This isn’t Diablo’s fault. I just wish people knew when a joke was mutilated.
This does, however, also bring up a small gripe I have with the game, which is that I don’t know how much of a benefit Diablo recieves from being an always online always multiplayer game. On one hand, you can’t control how someone is going to engage with a game and how they might want to express themselves. On the other hand, it feels decidedly less goth and metal to come out of a dungeon or warp back to town and see a bunch of undressed players standing around the town portal with names like bigdude, QWERTY, LilithsToy, and other names that skirt the line between perverse and offensive. I like to try to take a world and story seriously and role play a little more than most, so maybe this is on me, but when your fire and blood world is covered in player jokes, it makes it harder to want to take Hell seriously. I didn’t find interacting with other players necessary for forging ahead in the game anyways. I cleared campaign, dungeons, and so far all other manner of activity on my own with little struggle. There are world bosses present on the map that spawn every few hours that multiple players can and should tackle, and that’s charming to complete as a goal and thank everyone with ingame emotes afterwards, but beyond that, I found little interaction with my fellow heroes. To be clear it isn’t bad that I could do it all on my own, but this observation feels like more of what I’ve described: Diablo IV wants to live in purgatory. It doesn’t want to have to choose which type of game to be and wants to have it all. It wants to let you play the game solo and never interact with anyone so that it doesn’t scare you, but also wants to be just online enough so that you’ll put some some money in the hat and buy a cosmetic or two. In doing this, it neither suceeds nor fails at either. It isn’t bad to play alone, quite the opposite. But it isn’t as immersive as it could be. It isn’t bad to play with friends, but isn’t challenging enough to require it from higher level play. Also given the isometric view of the world, the cosmetics feel nearly pointless, despite the cash shop constantly reminding you its there. For now, the cash shop is the friendly, anime-fied succubus in the room. Not particularly dangerous, and easy to ignore, but certainly present. Each over-priced armor or horse armor set as uninteresting as the last, and supposedly her sister, BattlePass, who is coming near the end of July; won’t hurt you either because she’s just cosmetics too. Don’t worry, they’re not like those other cash shops and battlepasses. Okay. But is anyone biting on these cosmetics that they can barely see? Doesn’t a live game like Diablo now is need steady income? And I’ve seen what Diablo’s sibling Overwatch has been up to. Forgive me if I lack faith.
We Already Know the Devil
So where does that leave us as we wind this down? I think Diablo IV is totally fine. I am not unhappy that I purchased it, but I don’t think I will be going back for more when season 1 rolls around. I suppose the next time I step back into Sanctuary will either to test out a rogue for a few levels a few months from now, or more likely when the inevitable expansion hits. Diablo IV lives in purgatory. Neither solo game like some of its predecessors at least could be played, nor totally multiplayer like its inevitable rival Destiny. It’s developers are cool if you take a break and come back when you want to, but have designed a live service game with a cash shop and potentially addictive number-go-up game design, which leaves me wondering if they will be beholden to The Money People if the blood cash does not flow. It made a great deal about being a new game with a cool new demon lady, only to merc her with no sign of revival in favor of tantilizing you with her ‘cool’ dad from Diablo II. Diablo IV wants to go forward and take you back, and safely is just okay at both.
And what could be more metal than safety?
StarDisk City 