A lot of you will probably tell me I'm playing Diablo 4 wrong. I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary minute to minute - I'm a Sorceress with a decent spread of area control attacks, ranged abilities, and melee counters, I've been regularly swapping my armour and staff for the best options, being sensible with what to sell and what to scrap, and have been trying to lure enemies together or attacking from a safe distance rather than crashing into everyone like a Barbarian. But I'm also playing it by myself and have no intention of teaming up with anybody, anywhere, for any reason, and once I finish the story I'll put it down and never return to it again. Playing the game this way makes me feel l🔴ike I have ꦐstepped through the looking glass.
I'm aware that I'm doing it the 'wrong' way here. I could have written that Diablo 4 needs an offline mode, and while I'd gladly take one, I'm not sure it does. It's an online game with in-game events and co-op and all the other bells and whistles that mean it is designed as an online experience. Just Diablo 4, exactly as it is, but in an offline mode would feel weird. It would mean taking out features and replacing them with nothing. When online shooters have offline mode, this tends to be a full campaign, not just the online maps filled with bots. This is a little different as Diablo is PvE rather than PvP, meaning the structure would be the same offline, but it would still seem hollow.
I like that I'm playing it wrong. I would never play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty as a walking sim just because I admire the maps, and then demand there be a pacifist offline setting. By playing Diablo this way, I can still get the online events, switch to public and maybe even team up with a friend to hang out, then go back to my own missions. Sometimes playing a game the wrong way is the most fun you can have, like the time I thought of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cyberpunk 2077 as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:an extravagant fashion simulator with optional stabbing people to death.
Approaching Diablo 4 as a solo player might come back to bite me later. Dungeons may require teaming up or a spread of abilities, or it might just get boring wading through blood and bones on my own. Right now though, I'm having a blast tearing through the map, discovering mini events, disappearing into caves, and following hot on Lilith's trail. The highly cinematic and absorbing cutscenes also help sell the whole adventure as something to be savoured and enjoyed, not rushed through to grind out higher numbers.
But as someone who doesn't really play online games very often, much less MMOs, it's odd to see some of the conventions unfolding before me. Dungeons appear on my map that I can never do, because they're for Druids only. I have picked up a wooden club that I am never allowed to swing, even as bears and skeletons charge at me. I enter a shop and a timer in the top corner tells me that in exactly six minutes and four seconds, there will be new wares arriving.
In a regular single-player game, these sorts of immersion breaking annoyances would derail the experience. If I'm to believe this shop really exists in this world I wander through, why would it only sell two items which change not via an in-game event like the sunset or upon completion of a related mission, but thanks to an arbitrary clock? Why did no kindly villager tell me about the pillars of blood that I must kill things near in order to break them? Why must I do that in the first place? Why are these skeletons attacking me after I paused the game? Okay, that last one is quite annoying and I'd prefer if pausing were still possible, but for the rest of them, it's like seeing how the other half live.
It makes me want to take all the CS:GO players by the hand as we wander through Dalish ruins in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age Inquisition, then watch them gasp in horror as I explain the reason we're doing it is 'to read some lore'. I'm never going to be a die-hard Diablo fan who grinds out each class, but I'm finding the online quirks more charming than frustrating. I'm playing Diablo 4 as if it's an offline game, but I'm glad it isn't.