As a lifelong Diablo degenerate, my first few hours with Diablo 4 were marred by confusion, frustration, and minor bouts of rage. It felt like everything I did was harder than it needed to be, and I couldn’t understand why so many things seemed intent🐟ionally designed to slow me down.
Why does it take multiple hits to kill a single skeleton? Why are all the vendors I need to visit on opposite sides of the town? Why is there so much walking? In the past, Diablo has always been a slot machine that pays out more the faster you yank the handle. Decades of mindlessly grinding greater rifts has conditioned me to value efficiency of time above all else, and so much of Diablo🐻 4 is intentionally disruptive to the pure, unbridled grind.
It took a good dozen hours for me to accept how much has changed in Diablo 4, and start to appreciate the🅰 new direction. Gone are the days of clearing entire rooms with a single ability and effortlessly sprinting through dungeons - or lowering the world tier until it proves effortless. Efficiency had to be sacrificed to make Diablo 4 a less shallow and more engaging experience, and while that change won’t please everyone, the result is a far more satisfying game that has much more to offer than the one-dimensional power fantasy gifted to us by the Ghost of Diablos Past.
Diablo 4 has a vision, and commits to cohesively executing that vision across every facet of the game - 💖even at the risk of alienating long-time fans. A bold new direction for such an institutional series is the kind of big swing that made Blizzard the revered studio it once was, and while imperfect, Diablo 4 lays an incredibly strong foundatio𝕴n for the next ten years.
This creative vision can be distilled down into a single moment: the second your hammer smashes into a giant spider. You can feel the weight of the hammer as your barbarian heaves i𒐪t over their head and brings it down in one smooth, highly detailed animation that ends with a deafening, screen-shaking impact. All at once you can hear the shattering of the spider’s carapace, the oozing of green blood that squelches out of its body, and the shriek of the arachnid’s death throes. The sound resonates through the cavern, giving a sense of shape and scale to the map. As you wade through the shiny fresh viscera on the ground to pick up the rare boots it dropped as your reward, the moment is so well realized that it can be easy to forget that the dungeons is filled with several thousand spiders just like it. It’s not just higher production value slapped on top of the same old skinner box, it’s a fully-realized world that earns your investment through its attention to detail and thoughtful, intentional design.
The campaign does a lot of the heavy-lifting when it comes to building Diablo 4’s world, and even though many Diablo players will only go through it once and never think about it again, it does so much to establish characters, themes, and player motivation that greatly enhance the grind. The structure of the campaign is a clever twist on Diablo 2’s story, which has you follow in the track of Marius and the Dark Wanderer across Sanctuary. Here, each act brings you to a new part of the world where you’ll discover how the demon Lilith’s influence has corrupted the people there, while also slowly unraveling the mysteries about her origins and plans. Along the way you assemble aღ group of misfit heroes, each with their ow🦩n connection to Lilith, and together travel to hell and back to stop her.
It’s the first Diablo story that doesn’t feel made to be ignored, and the solid writing and impressive performances (particularly from Ralph Ineson’s Lorath) endeared me to the characters and made me care about their fates far more than I expected to. There’s a great balance of fan service and fresh lore that makes Diablo 4 feel like a new chapter rather than some kind of self-indulgent reference-fest. You can get a lot out of Diablo 4 even if you’re only playing it for ꦿthe story, which is not something I ever expected.
The story gives your character a lot of personality and agency. They’re invested in stopping Lilith and protecting their friends, which in turn made me more invested in my character. This isn’t a narrative device Diablo 4 invented, but it’s a unique direction for an ARPG, where generally your only relation to your toon is how big the ꦕnumbers are that fly out🤪 of their weapons. This narrative intimacy is reflected in gameplay. The camera is closer so you can see every detail in your character’s clothing and every frame in their attack animations. Combat is always dangerous, and you’re incentivized to use defensive tools, including the new dodge ability, to protect your character, just as much - if not more - than building their offensive capabilities.
With a closer view 🌞and less density to the mobs, the fights are slower and require you to plan and react more than previous Diablos. Even the nig๊htmare dungeons, D4’s version of greater rifts, are untimed, further reinforcing the idea that this is not supposed to be the thing you play idly while watching Netflix, like Diablo 3 was. It may take longer to do things that used to be automatic, but Diablo 4 is a better game for it.
The world opens up a lot after the campaign. The skill tree, which requires very little engagement during the leveling process, completely transforms once you unlock Paragon boards at level 50. The map is filled with timed activities like Helltide, Legion events, world bosses, and the Fields of Hatred PvP 𝓰zones that provide a lot of variety, as well as deterministic ways to fill your gear slots.
Higher world tiers have stronger gear and unique aspects to pursue, and the nightmare dungeon affixes give what was onc☂e a tedious grind a lot of interesting new challenges. These aren’t just minor buffs you have to deal🎃 with. One nightmare dungeon I ran introduced a giant relic that chased me through the entire dungeon, periodically creating damage zones that stunned me. The affixes can change the experience dramatically and make randomized dungeons feel like unique experiences.
I appreciate Blizzard’s commitment to its vision for Diablo 4, even if I don’t always enjoy dealing with some of the decisions. I’m still annoyed at having to walk all over town to get my vendor chores done, and I can only assume that process will g♑et more grating as time goes on. I don’t enjoy traveling to each dungeon when I could just teleport into 🃏them in Diablo 3, and I’m constantly running into things that feel like they need a quality of life update. How on earth this game launched without loot filters or search functions for the stash and skill tree is beyond me. Diablo 4 is a living game that’s going to change a lot over time, but there’s some glaring issues here that need to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Missing features and minor annoyance🍌s aside, my main concern for the future of Diablo 4 is that combat just won’t be complex enough to support this slower style of play long term. Though I’ve learned to appreciate slower combat, I’m not convinced that it’s engaging enough to hold my attention season after season once I’ve leveled every class and figured out the five play styles that work best for me. We’ll need more than just new aspects and balance changes to keep things interesting from season to season.
Diablo 4 has a solid foundation, but Blizzard is going to have to keep finding new ways to justify this slower take on the series forever, or else revert back to the mindless grind of D3, which isn’t what I want to see. Players are going to push for faster gameplay and less friction, and it's going to be up to Blizzard to stick to its guns here and maintain the vision of Diablo 4, while also managing the natural effects of power creep over time. It’s an unenviable position, but I respect the hell out of this team for choosing the path of most resistance and pursuing a unique identity for this game, especially in light of what Diablo Immortal is and what Overwatch has become.
An action RPG from Blizzard, Diablo 4 follows on from Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, taking place 30 years l🐻ater. Lilith has returned, and as a Nephalem, you must preven💙t further destruction.
