immerse urself in perfect stasis courtesy of the insatiable breast milk fiends at blizzard. u will always be two levels below the evilest demon in your area. u will respec and upgrade and +5% Crit Chance your third eye wide open ... the ideal video game budget is gigantic enough to eliminate poverty in a major metropolitan area. the ideal video game is a lifestyle choice, like equinox or erewhon. the ideal video game is a subscription to more of itself ... forever ... ! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON!

edit: its august 7 and im still playing. i keep hitting X girl... they got me — they got me — Its too late ...

The presentation, visuals, and sound are all really good and a huge step up from Diablo 3. I was surprised the game even had consistent cutscenes for the main story.

But that alone doesn't make up for how easy it is. I never felt a sense of urgency in large crowds other than a couple of bosses where dodging was actually useful. Abilities feel pointless as they all evenly contribute to the chaos, so I never felt like I had to step outside of my comfort zone to try new ones. Then the sense of progression is lost when everything scales with your level, it only made finding loot / leveling up feel pointless when enemies are getting stronger with me.

Seeing I didn't enjoy either Diablo 3 or 4, I think the series just may not be for me.

Weirdly, I think sitting through a nearly 90-minute-long debate between my coworkers about whether or not Diablo 4's dash is "lazy design" has helped me clarify my thoughts on this whole affair. I'll be comparing it to Diablo 3 a lot because that's the entry that's most clear in my mind.

I think it's an improvement over 3 in most ways. I can understand that someone might be a little put off by the shift away from the third entry's maximalism, where player health could be in the millions within an hour and landing crits for billions of damage within 5-10 hours. I suppose my level 52 rogue with 1300 health in D4 might be a little underwhelming in comparison, but the gameplay effect is the same - I run up to a pack of enemies, build up stacks using one ability and turn them into a smoothie by casting a second one.

It's generally a little more accessible and a little less frustrating, though. The aforementioned dash debate was on the subject of the new, universal mobility skill: every class can press a button to do a short-range dash, and if they want more mobility they can use a skill slot to pick up a class-specific ability. It allows for more interesting builds, more interesting enemies, and even some puzzles designed around this new button. Nothing to encourage over-reliance, of course - you're not going to be using this very often - but it's certainly nice to have. You stock multiple charges of health potions instead of having just one with a cooldown, you can actually upgrade stuff at the blacksmith, and nicest of all? All those weird shopkeeper functions in D3 that required you to burn some rare resource (upgrading gems, re-rolling gear properties) just cost gold. That's it!

The best changes to the gameplay, though, come from a couple key changes.

The first is the shift away from assembling sets of gear. In Diablo 3, picking a build mostly meant finding an ability that you could buff to comical levels by wearing one or two sets of equipment. It really limited what you could do, and it meant that improving your gear took the form of upgrading gems or finding copies of the same set with better secondary stats. D4 doesn't have any gear sets. Builds are dependent on the skills you take, the ways you choose to enhance them, and then, once you've done all that, you go and you find a legendary item and you throw it in the fucking trash. Okay, that's not technically true. You take it to a vendor who rips the legendary property from the item and allows you to apply it to a different piece of equipment. I love this system. I never would've assumed I'd play a new Diablo game where the loot actually feels meaningful, where I'm encouraged to look at items below the highest tier of rarity, where I only have to upgrade gems 2-3 times.

The skill tree: Diablo 3's system of assembling complementary skills and passives wasn't bad for veteran players, but even then, it was pretty difficult to visualize the opportunity cost of picking one enhancement over another. Now, skills are broken down into clearly defined groups, and everything from a group (plus all their enhancements) is visible on one screen at the same time. Uh oh, you've just picked a passive that applies to all your "imbuement" abilities, those are scattered ALL across the tree! Mouse over each ability at the bottom of your screen and you'll see that each one is clearly tagged with a couple properties that will make it obvious which buffs apply to which abilities.

As for the player's stats, my rogue has a lot of gear with buffs to intelligence on it. If you told me this in Diablo 3 I would ask how you even managed to do that, then I would assume that fate has played a cruel joke on you. In Diablo 3 you ignored every single stat that wasn't your class' favorite and had a loot system that did most of the work for you - nearly all the gear you would get would favor your class and buff that stat. D4 doesn't do this. You'll still get gear your class can actually wear, but that gear can have any kind of attribute on it, and those stats will always provide some kind of benefit to you. Intelligence isn't optimal on a rogue, but it's not the end of the world because INT gives rogues extra crit chance. This is shuffled around for each class to remain useful, but you don't have to memorize any of this because you can immediately check what applies to you when you open your inventory.

While a lot of the decisions that directly affect moment-to-moment gameplay have been clarified, the game's biggest weaknesses are still issues with information and transparency. I have been asked several times what a "murmuring obol" is. I don't know how to explain the difference between normal dungeons, Whispers, and the Helltide stuff. The current endgame content is confusing, and while it's explained through a pop-up, all of this still feels obtuse when you're tasked with deciding what you should do next after you've finished the story. You could watch a YouTuber explain how paragon levels work this time around, but you shouldn't have to do that, and best of all: my friends who do watch these videos still find it confusing! It's weird, too, because some of the better selling points of the game - e.g. co-op scaling allowing players of any level to play together - are completely reliant on information sources outside of the game itself. The oft-derided battle pass isn't out yet, but that's what makes me fear for everything I've mentioned in this section. Information issues matter less when you know the game like the back of your hand, which is to say that a profit-focused approach to this game will cater more to the Forever Players who pump endless money into this game than the people trying the series for the first time, the people trying to show something they love to a friend, the people most affected by a lack of clarity.

It takes real effort to publish a truly dysfunctional AAA game. Mediocre, unsatisfying, rushed, those labels are common, but pouring millions of dollars and hiring industry top talent to work on a project and still managing to come up with something that's not just underwhelming, but broken, that's an achievement. And one which Blizzard decided to chase after, apparently: Diablo IV is the latest in Blizzard's long running series of ARPGs, a series said to be "the king of ARPGs" by some. It's a game I have played for longer than I like to think about, desperately trying to find something good about it, and one that failed to deliver even then.

ARPGs are not particularly known for good stories, but since the first excuse the few people who still defend Diablo IV make for it is that the campaign is worth the $70 price of admission, it makes for a good starting point. D4 takes place in the world of Sanctuary, a vast expanse of land between Heaven and Hell occupied by humanity. The opening shows a group of treasure hunters delving into an ancient temple that are manipulated into performing a dark ritual and summoning an ancient demon called Lilith into Sanctuary, who then proceeds to try to take it over. The story plays out as the player's character, the Wanderer, along with a few allies met along the way, chases after her in an attempt to stop her plans of domination.

There are a couple of genuinely exciting moments during the game's prologue: Lilith seems like a fascinating antagonist at first, what with her gentle, motherly demeanor paradoxically bringing out the worst in her followers. Also, Lorath, one of the main characters, makes an impressive entrance into the story during this first hour. That's all we get, however, with the story devolving into a generic fantasy narrative not long after it gets going. Worse, a generic Blizzard narrative: a funny quirk of Blizzard's writing is that they really like using "prophecy" and/or "hot woman turned evil due to a traumatic past" as plot devices, and it worked until Warcraft III or so, but after that, it got silly. And unfortunately, Diablo IV ticks both of those boxes.

Far from that being only problem with the campaign, of course. Its six acts are abysmally paced, some rushing over their plot points blink-and-you'll-miss it style, while others feature roundabout questlines that could have been trimmed down to a third of their length at no loss for the storytelling. They're also cheapened by uneven and incoherent stakes: most notably, at one point in the story, a potential event is determined to be world-ending should it come to pass, and it eventually does... resulting in an unremarkable boss battle and in everyone forgetting all about it by the next quest. It's hard to take any other threat seriously after that point.

The initially exciting cast also consistently underdelivers: just about every character ends up being paper-thin and spouting wonky writing. The illusion of good story beats comes up every now and then, but that's mostly the pre-rendered cutscenes and/or the actors wringing blood from the stone that is the material given to them, moments that soon peter out. One could say Diablo IV's main story is comparable a Marvel movie in that it features incredibly gorgeous CG scenes, great actors and expensive tech to bring to life complete drivel. The similarity also holds in that it ends in a cliffhanger, because please be excited about the expansions to this garbage that we plan to churn out in the next few years.

Finishing the campaign is but the first in a long list of things that are done "to get to the fun part of the game", a list that only grows for the entirety of the game's runtime. The problems begin with how the world of Sanctuary is structured, or rather, how it's not: it's an open world, and a character can go anywhere in it as soon as the prologue is done. The campaign will take the Wanderer through the five regions in a more or less set order, and as superficial as that trip might be, one might as well follow along, because despite all that freedom, there's little reason to care about any of those places: Sanctuary as large as it is barren, with vestiges of civilization -- where locals sit eager to hand out fetch quests -- lost amidst deserts, swamps, snow-covered mountains and other similarly dead places. It's hard to even remember most of the map beyond the prologue areas.

Enemies feel similarly same-y: there's little variety in their mechanics, and the entire game world uses level scaling to match them to the player level. Level scaling is an often-touted but very ugly design solution for open world RPGs, and Diablo IV serves as a perfect example of why: the mechanic fails in its purpose to match content to player as, more often than not, the difficulty is not simply in enemy stats. More pressingly, however, without a natural progression of easy to hard content, the thrill of being able to do quests and kill bosses one couldn't stand against before is lost, and thus, the emotional connection to those things is also lost. Worse, since there's a lot of grind to be done in D4, players outright ignore most areas and gravitate to repeating the most efficient content over, and over, and over again.

One might as well also skip the bossing in the game, because most of the bosses are terrible. The design railroaded itself from the moment character movement was decided to be so stiff: characters have low base movement speed, some classes entirely lack movement skills and the evade button meant to replace those is almost always on cooldown. Thus, bosses forgo mechanics that encourage movement and quick-thinking and instead are designed so to be facetanked. There's a few exceptions to that, but even those have very few fight mechanics to engage with. Boss variety in itself is also extremely low: players will tire of seeing the words "Khazra Abomination" on the screen from all the dungeoning, and the game's only (egregious) pinnacle boss is Uber Lilith, recycled from the campaign and given one shot moves to create an illusion of difficulty.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves: we're still early in our leveling journey, dipping our toes into Sanctuary. Assuming the campaign is done, the next step is to farm renown, which is a measurement of how well-known the Wanderer is across Sanctuary. Renown is increased by doing optional side content and rewards the player with more potion charges and skill points -- i.e. it's a mandatory kind of optional. Farming renown is the most fun part of the game, the only part that offers a modicum of variety and comes close to fleshing out the world. It's also near-universally reviled, mainly because every new character is made to do it again, as it's one of the few things low level characters can do if the campaign is skipped.

By the time we're done farming, it's likely we'll have most of our skill points and a complete build. In fact, it will be complete much before that, as there's not much flexibility in how to build a character. Diablo IV's skill tree can barely be called a tree: it's a linear track with skills that have clearly tagged purposes and synergies so obvious, it's more of an exercise in basic pattern recognition than real decision making. One node will have a choice of core skills, then the next one, a set of passives each designed to go with one of those core skills... there's zero room for player choice and creativity, and unfortunately, that statement is also true for every other character development system.

Once level 50 is reached, the Wanderer stops earning skill points and earns paragon points, which are used to traverse a large, modular board of tiles that yield stats and multipliers. Never mind the failure of easing the player into this complete paradigm shift for leveling -- stats had next to zero importance up to this point -- the biggest issue is that, once again, there's an opportunity for diversifying builds; once again, the designed synergies are few and blatant, telegraphed from a mile away. This is made worse from the fact that most of the character's power is gotten from the Paragon board, so by deviating from the optimal path, the player is sealing their own doom. This also has the side effect of making level 100 practically mandatory, as the whopping forty Paragon points obtained in those gruesome final levels matter. That's in stark contrast to something like PoE, where a level 90ish character is often more concerned with fighting endgame bosses and refining their gear.

Speaking of which, it's truly baffling how badly botched the itemization is for a game in a genre that largely revolves around loot. There are five types of items in Diablo IV: Common, Magic, Rare, Legendary and Unique. There is no crafting system in Diablo IV (no, making cute potions in town whose only real effect is +5% exp gain does not count) so those lower rank items are trash that is going to suck forever. Thus, there are three types of items, but wait: most of the uniques that matter are those are insanely rare. In any other game, one would just trade for them, but Diablo IV doesn't just lack an economy, it outright impedes the trading of Uniques and Legendaries, making it so players are highly unlikely to have a unique they desperately need. Incidentally, the only viable way to play a Necromancer Minion build is through one of those ultra-rare, late game Uniques.

We're down to two item types, Rares and Legendaries, which really are one and the same: a Legendary item is a Rare with an Aspect applied to it, that is, a modifier that enhances a skill or group of skills -- sort of an unique one can create themselves. Yet again, a system with potential for diversity further railroads the design of builds: any viable build has Aspects clearly made for it, which sometimes are the one thing that makes it playable, and one would be silly not to include them. Far more concerning than the Aspects that makes builds work, however, are the ones that don't.

While it should be pretty clear that Diablo IV's systems are shallow, the truly offensive part, the part that makes it likely that no amount of patches will ever fix this mess is that most of the game doesn't work. Among item affixes, Aspects, Uniques, and even the nodes on the skill tree, there's so much absolute garbage beyond any level of consideration that's scattered around to create the illusion of complexity. There's even a running gag amongst the community about item affixes that's along the lines of "I found an item with '+10% more damage to stunned enemies while vulnerable on the second Tuesday of the month'", referring to the multiple, bizarrely situational affixes that exist only to flood the affix pool and make the itemization seem deeper than it really is.

Furthermore, while it is true that every build in the game was designed by Blizzard, with very little room to deviate, theirs was an extremely hands-off design: in theory, the synergies are there, so say, this build is meant to bank on Vulnerable, while that build relies on Overpower... In practice, there are clear winners and utter losers that should have been clear not only from any sort of playtesting, but from the systems' design in itself. In that example, Vulnerable multiplies the damage, while Overpower adds damage, meaning the former scales much, much more steeply than the latter -- they are not equivalent, even though the designers seemed to think that they are.

The game is riddled with these fundamental mistakes: defensive options not called "Armor" are useless, with resistances to elements being especially pathetic; critical and vulnerable modifiers, along with cooldown reduction/resource generation to counter the absurdly high downtime suffered by most builds, are the only things most respectable builds will care for in any piece of gear; a couple of classes, namely the Barbarian and the Sorcerer, are completely unplayable compared to the rest, and notably both good Barb builds so far have been the result of now fixed bugs that caused damage to scale in a way that it shouldn't have.

It's a thoroughly incompetent game, and that has to be emphasized: in this breakneck industry, many games end up being rushed, but come out with specks of brilliance and a clear vision of what the production was aiming for. Diablo IV, however, wasn't simply released before it was ready (although it must be said that it was absolutely rushed out to save face after Diablo Immortal and to make Kotick and his goons a quick buck while the ActiBlizz sale closes). Diablo IV is a game without a vision: an ARPG made from the most generic of parts, by people without a single clue about what makes an ARPG work, or even how the game they made works. For proof, look no further than the dreaded patch 1.1.0.

Patch 1.1.0 was the canary in the mine for anyone still holding out hope that the 70 dollars spent in this garbage were going to pay off in any way. Blizzard saw the state the game was in: everyone was stacking armor and CDR, Barbs and Sorcs were in the dumpster, and builds with multiplicative mods dominated the meta. Exp was also a point of contention, leveling was slow, and people straight up paid others to boost them through the endgame grind. Seeing all this, what did Blizzard do? Nerfed everything in the game.

It's hard to fully illustrate just how inept, if not outright malicious, this patch was. To call it a balance patch is a stretch and a half: the patch created the illusion of sweeping changes through numerous small, irrelevant power shifts like "+0.04 base" or "-5%" to stuff that needed reworking from the ground up or that was too powerful to even feel the difference. Among the largest changes, multiplicative damage sources were reduced by a percentage, then additive ones were buffed by a similar amount, all in the name of "shifting power" -- ignoring that the problem was the underlying maths of damage calculation and not the tuning, and that no power was shifted, it was instead reduced.

The already shaky baseline power for characters was devastated by these nonsensical changes, and it was the off-meta builds, that were already hinging on unviable, that suffered the most, further narrowing the set of reasonably playable builds. Meanwhile, the exp changes made a game that was already some 50 hours too long even slower in the name of stopping boosting, and then failed to stop boosting anyway -- in fact, relative to normal leveling, it was made even more effective. Furthermore, changes to monster levels further intensified the funneling towards optimal content since, now, grinding a small set of Nightmare Dungeons was the only activity in the game that still gave decent returns.

This makes Nightmare Dungeons the final step in the list of "things before the fun part", and what a dumpster fire they are. For all the big talk about Sanctuary being large and open and how the player gets to walk around it on a stupid horse that moves at a glacial pace and gets stuck behind ankle-high obstacles... for all that talk, most of the player's time in D4 is going to be spent indoor in dungeons. They could have been just mazes with monsters to kill, but instead, they're that plus some inane task for the player to perform: best case scenario, it's clear the dungeon of monsters or of a certain type of monster; worst case, it's get one thing from one end of the dungeon, backtrack all the way to another part of the dungeon and open a door with it. Regardless, there's an incredible amount of downtime on the thing players have to do hundreds, thousands of times.

And then you grind your life away and kill Uber Lilith, and what do you do next? The fight is awful; she doesn't drop anything special, and even if she did, there's no economy in the game for you to become rich. There's no crafting either to allow for creating neat gear, and since 99% of the loot found is for your character's own class, you probably only have gear for them anyway. So if you do reroll, which is supposed to be one of the pillars of the genre, you're going to be restarting from almost scratch. Wanna stay and collect uniques, then? Even if there were consistent ways to get them, there's not enough stash tabs to keep them in. To have stash tabs, we'd have to load every one of your fancy uniques for every other player because... you know, I'd pay to hear an explanation of why stashes are coded how they are. Whatever that explanation is, though, four minuscule stash tabs is a tasteless joke.

The stash, with its few tabs and no tools to organize or filter them is but one of the ways in which there's no quality of life whatsoever in the game: basic ARPG features like loot filters and map overlays are also absent, and if you're playing on PC, hoo boy, prepare for some clunky UI and for having to aim absolutely everything manually, as only console players get targeting help (to be fair, the UI is also bad on console). Also, despite it being a premium game and there being heavy restrictions on trade between players, there is no way to play offline by yourself, and the game is plagued by lag spikes and rubber banding even when soloing dungeons.

Do you know what the game does have, though? An in-game store filled with outrageously expensive microtransactions, like a $28 set of cosmetic armor or $13 for a horse skin. What else? A paid seasonal battle pass, with more cosmetics and a barrage of annoying in-game messages trying to create FOMO. Seasons which, by the way, aren't good, as one might have expected: Season 1 further complicated itemization for little benefit to the players, and had people not loudly complained online about the loss of armor from replacing socketed skulls, every single Malignant Heart would have been ignored by the player base in favor of survivability, because apparently no one in the dev team plays the game at a reasonably high level.

The maths behind damage calculation is also being worked on in Season 2, after months of complaints. One might think this is the team taking feedback from the community, but don't be mistaken: they have come out multiple times to call complainers a "vocal minority" and who would ban people who said words like "endgame" in their campfire stream's chat. The fact is, high-profile players have been pointing out most of what I mentioned in this review, including the basic math issues, since early on in the Beta, and no one cared. The change of stance now is presumably only because, after the predictably poor reception of Season 1, this live service game of theirs has been dying a slow death, and someone will have to fix it if those expensive MTX are to be sold.

And even then, even if they listen, there's points even the community gets wrong. It's important to understand the idea I've been hammering about there being an ever growing list of things to do before the fun part of the game: a lot of players have negative feelings on D4, but clamour for more content as a solution: "we need Primal Ancestrals and World Tier V!". In reality, Diablo IV already has a lot of content -- god knows this is the best game to give to a person that puts a dollar value on games based on playtime -- but that content is terrible: it's slow, it's easy, it's shallow, it's broken. Adding World Tier V and one more level-gated tier of Rare item would only serve to make the experience worse, turning WT4 into yet another of those intermediate steps that must be taken in order to play the real game. D4 would, in fact, have been better had levels been capped at 70 and the "Content" ended at WT3.

Alas, play time KPIs had to be met at all costs, and this was what we got instead: a glorified skinner box that desperately wants you to put more hours into it and that magnifies every weakness of its genre. The king of ARPGs, you say? I was never one for monarchy in the first place. Diablo IV is a mix of malice and incompetence, and Blizzard having the gall to ship the game in this state and sell it for seventy dollars is a testament to not only how much of their talent they've lost, but also to how much Kotick and his goons are willing to drain the company while on the way out. Don't waste money on this: just go back and play Diablo 2, or Path of Exile, or Torchlight, or literally anything else.

Diablo 4 has the bones of what could’ve been the best Diablo and one of the best action RPGs of all time, but it’s weighed down by its poorly-designed, heavy-handed games-as-service systems that make it difficult to enjoy the good video game buried under it all.

Ignoring all the live service nonsense for a minute (as difficult as Blizzard makes that to do), at its core, Diablo 4 is a really good action RPG. The world design is incredible - it’s the first open world Diablo game and it executes it pretty well, even if it sometimes feels like they lean too far into the whole “misery porn” thing where everyone is dead, dying, or sick. The game feels great to play and all 5 classes feel unique and fun in their own ways. The game looks fantastic. I never thought bloody, dirty environments could look so gorgeous. I’ve never really cared or even paid attention to the story in Diablo games in the past, but the main story in Diablo 4 is actually great. There’s good voice acting, cutscenes actually include your characters, and I was surprisingly invested in the plot. The side quests are basically all the same, though - either kill a bunch of enemies, or find someone’s relative who ends up being dead. The end of the game escalates in such an epic way that we couldn’t even put the game down in the final act and then they completely stick the landing and deliver on a solid ending. It’s a shame that looming over all of this greatness is the giant wet blanket of live service games.

Diablo 4 feels like a game made by two different teams of people - one is a team of devs who lovingly made an incredibly well-crafted action RPG that delivers the Diablo sequel that fans always wanted, and the other is a team of money-hungry executives who waited until the game was done so they could make tweaks to every system in the game to keep dragging players along and get them hooked on the endless grind. Things like resource use, gold cost for skill tree respecs, XP scaling, item drop rates, etc. are all designed in such a way to require hours of grinding. And the most frustrating thing is - all that stuff could be tweaked pretty easily to make the game more fun, but why would players log into your game and play it every day if they just got what they wanted from the activities after only one or two attempts? The skill tree in Diablo 3 had no respeccing - you could just move your skills around and try new stuff whenever you wanted. It encouraged constant experimentation and allowed you to adapt your build when you got new items. Diablo 4 takes the opposite approach in that respeccing gets more and more expensive as you level up. The devs even said that it eventually gets so expensive that it’ll be more time effective to just create a new character rather than respec your current one. It’s insane to me how much the game is literally crafted around grind. I’m not even inherently opposed to live service games. I’ve got about 2000 hours across Destiny 1 and 2 combined, but I eventually quit Destiny when I realized how little the game respects the time of its players and Diablo 4 doesn’t even pretend to care about your time.

On top of that, the monetization in the game is absolutely wild. A cosmetic armor and weapon set bundle for one character will run you $26. Yup. For almost half of the price of the game you can buy one (1) armor set for one (1) character. If you happen to have one of every class, outfitting all of them with a cool cosmetic armor set will run you over $100. The battle pass seems more reasonable at $10, until you examine the contents more carefully and realize that it comes with one armor style adapted to the 5 classes and not even remotely enough in-game currency to rebuy the pass for the next season or buy anything in the shop. All of this in a full price $70 video game. I feel like a broken record, but every time a new live service game comes out with offensive, predatory microtransactions, I wonder why they don’t copy the model of Fortnite (a free game, mind you) which has fair cosmetic prices, is generous with its currency, and still somehow manages to be wildly successful.

Diablo 4 was my second-most anticipated game of 2023 and it took me over 2 months just to finish the campaign, not because I wasn’t enjoying the story but because I had nothing to look forward to when I finished it and I constantly felt the threat of a grind looming over me. After getting the Plat in Diablo 3, and spending over 100 hours with multiple characters over several seasons, I never thought I’d finish the campaign in Diablo 4 and put the game down for good. If you want to just play a fun action RPG campaign, grab Diablo 4 on a sale. But if you’re looking for a new longterm game to continuously dip back into, there are better games that respect your time and your wallet than Diablo 4.

+ Great open world design
+ Shockingly good story campaign
+ Really good gameplay feel
+ All the classes feel great to play
+ Visually stunning

- Live service choices looming over every system
- Skill tree discourages experimentation
- Game is designed for grind over fun
- Insane microtransaction prices and terrible battle pass
- Sometimes felt like I did more running than fighting
- Side quests are pretty same-y
- Misery porn

What can I say, I’ve always been a sucker for the Diablo series and I guess I’ll always will be. I can’t stand the hating left and right, just go play something else and leave me the fuck alone, with headphones on, some weird ass jazz music and the zen of mindlessly killing monsters for that one shot to your build.
Is the game perfect? Of course not. Does it have a lot of things it can improve on? Of course it does. Is it still addictive af and devoured me basically from launch till now: yes it did. It’s one of the best foundations of a live service game in recent years and it has far more potential for longevity as d3 had. And for everyone who’s constantly trying to (obviously) compare it to POE - why? POE is still around and it’s good, so go play it. It however has 10 years of intense developing and community feedback under its belt, so it’d be a shame if it wasn’t more refined and with more content than d4 at launch. Anyway,
I’m not mindlessly defending blizzard here, I do think they deserve most of the scrutiny, but saying d4 is not a good game I just can’t understand. It’s exactly what it wants to be and exactly what I want it to be. I’m not sure I’ll be spending as much time in season 1, because first of all, I’m like 200hrs deep in 1,5 months and I need to play some other games and secondly, the recent patch as preparation seems to be kinda shit. So I’ll wait it out for a while and then go in when they revised some of their decisions (which obviously they will, look at all the hate).

Diablo 4 came at a perfect time, I kicked it off with a classic lan party, which is tradition in the family and I was able to spend a lot of time with it recently. I love most about this game and I’m looking forward to how it will develop over the years.

Muito bom!
Pra mim o aspecto principal foi a gameplay, conseguiram criar um fluxo que combina muito bem a gameplay do diablo II com a do III, trazendo assim mais pra perto os fãs antigos que reclamavam do D3 e mantendo a base dos novos jogadores.
A história é bem boa, confesso que gostei mais que a do 3! Me perdi em diversos momentos mas isso é mais culpa minha e da vida adulta de trabalhador do que do game, porém no finzinho eu me situei e deu pra entender tudo.
Alguns recursos eu gostaria de ter visto bem mais no early game, como por exemplo a montaria...é uma puta novidade pro jogo que colocaram só no ato IV, até chegar la vc ja ta experiente no jogo e a montaria acaba sendo "hmm ok", perderam o timing da novidade.

Com certeza essa minha nota é provisória, tem tudo pra virar um 5 depois, mas isso só vou conseguir depois de jogar meu modo preferido, temporadas.

A huge step up compared to the third instalment. Diablo IV goes hard and wild in the story of Sanctuary, and it's a good thing the franchise goes back to those roots.

Loved the voice acting (especially Ralph Ineson, my oh my do I wish I had his voice). Narration goes beyond the simplistic separation of 'good' and 'evil'. Humans are flawed, and so are the so-called gods. They're driven by their emotions, blindly following their hopes and desires.

I'm really excited for the future of this game. If the endgame of Diablo IV had me thrilled and emotionally engaged, I'm sure the team behind it will deliver something very special next.

I'm not "done" playing this game, but I really have just hit a point where I don't have much fun playing the game anymore, and am just sticking it to hang around with friends.

There's a million reasons why I could go into why it's kind of draining, but I'll just sum it up, it's just shallow, it's the Call of Duty of ARPGs, the gameplay is too easy and boring, it's laggy, there's a lot of clunkiness and the game is full price yet shoving MTX up your ass, with plans for paid DLCs in the future.

The nice things I can say of the game start and end with the visuals, it's a beautiful game, but there's no substance anywhere else, the story sucks, the characters aren't interesting, the cutscenes are boring and the pacing is glacial.

Just play D2 or even D3, this just isn't worth your time in it's current state.

Another one of those games I'm glad I got to it late since it's one of those the internet decided to hate in unison in accordance to what their braindead favorite youtuber said.

My only problem with it is, due to it being online only, I experienced multiple cases of rubber banding or being killed while the server caught up. Aside from that, is without a doubt the best Story presented in an ARPG. It made me care about the characters presented in it and the production values and voice acting were on another level from what you typically see in most ARPG's.

Lilith lived up to the hype and can't wait to experience Vessel of Hatred when it comes out.

To be fair, I did not play this very long. I was expecting it to be extremely corporate and predatory, which it is. What I did not expect was for it to be very poorly made, which it also is. It crashed within the first 30 minutes. Character models are unreadable, homogenous blobs. Action animations look incredibly stiff and artificial. Environments are drab gray smears. The cutscenes... oh my god the cutscenes are SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. The characters are so torpid they make Geralt of Riviera look like Sonic the Hedgehog. It's like they inserted a 5 second pause before every line to give it dramatic weight. The actual result is that this action game simply has no energy; the whole thing seems like it's on the verge of a heroin overdose. Combine that with all the on-screen movement consisting of these blobby characters shuffling randomly back and forth, and the writing and voice acting being bottom of the barrel bad, and this whole package looks incredibly amateurish.

Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.

I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.

"Not Enough Spirit, I'm Low On Spirit" my favorite druid quotes. Blzrzirzrad has truly revolutionized teh action RPG genre once more with their best work yet since Duplo Immoral, having to spend time riding a barely functional horse through an empty openworld is exactly what us Full Spectrum Gamers have all been craving for in our loot em ups. The itemization? Out Of This World, soMany conditional damage multipliers that rly make U think outside of the box ((Moar DAmage against slowed enemies...? HolyShit). Not to mention the incredible Game ChanGIng legendary powers like "this skill now does moar damage" or "this skill is now actually functional". My fayvorite character in the DARK and EPIC narrative was Mareyrelle Sue of course, she was sO cool and and Interesting and SMart, and I must admit I rly geekd out and even clapped when Duriel appeared and said "Looking For a Refund?". All In All I CanNot wait to purchas thePRemium BattlePass each season!!! 9.5/10

Much like taking a dead corpse and putting puppet strings on it and making it flop around, Diablo IV is a shadow of its former self.

We are once again witnessing the Greed of AAA game companies destroying great games on banking on peoples love and nostalgia for once great game series that just don't give the same experience they should bring. My great friends introduced me to Diablo 3 back in Highschool and I was instantly hooked with it and became a fan and like many others was excited for Diablo 2 remaster and this. It was unreal how despite the areas and gigantic open world to explore and many different enemy types and stuff like that I was practically bored the entire time playing through it hence why it took me literal months to finally finish it. Literally played and started with several friends on several occasions and everyone lost interest and even one friend couldn't even last after just one session of playing this snorefest. It just gives such a lifeless experience with monotonous and worthless repeating side quests and the legendary drops that used to bring excitement and joy have lost any kind of meaning with all the same abilities and very limited designs to them, and I would literally get the same two looking helmets the whole experience. Oh! No fear, because they made sure to get more unique designs of armor and weapons through the expensive store with ridiculous microtransactions. No matter how unfinished this demonic turd of a game is they will always make sure there microtransaction is open on launch of a albeit 70$ fucking game.

They couldn't even let you use your first character once the first season came up for it you had to start all over. Repeating all the same side quests and exploring everything again is just another classic case of "Hey! We want you to stay and play our game and only our game forever!" They did add an update to fix it between all characters, but with the experience the game initially gives you its not that big of a game changer since regardless you still have to hit all the fast travel points again in each town. I like to explore and I get the game revolves around fighting shitloads of enemies, but barely taking two steps and constantly having to stop to fight a horde makes the experience grow old pretty quick.

I'm grateful that I have the first Diablo left to play and I am sure it will give me a better experience then this did. Much like how I felt with DOOM 3 the best looking part and section of the whole campaign is when you finally actually are able to go to hell and its very aesthetically pleasing and just really cool to see, but its literally at the last point of the game and you are there for not long at all then the game ends. Thank god they recently introduced a new class for the mobile game and made sure to let everyone know that its not coming to this game. Atleast, we get the season that pretty much goes side by side with the class we are not getting and a battle pass for us to buy! Never would of imagined that a game where you fight the hordes of hell would be so boring. I'm tired boss, tired of these companies sucking the life out of these series and giving us a lifeless shell of what's left.

“Were there souls at all? Was there really a naked, invisible little version of himself hiding under his skin, so valuable to Heaven and Hell that each would send emissaries down to fight for it?” - Between Two Fires

Why preserve Sanctuary? Or care at all about the souls that inhabit it? The question plagues Diablo IV's two demigods/demons, Inarius and Lilith, while your goody two-shoes player-character gets caught up in their bullshit. The place is a dump: goatmen descend on anybody who strays more than 20 feet from a village; everyone has to choose between two or three cults; missing family members abound.

Inarius, in full divorced dad mode, wants to scrap his creation and jet off to Heaven to start over. Lilith has better and more interesting ideas for renovating the place. I found myself wishing for her to succeed (or, just once, to squash me like a little bug? Isn't that what the perverts at Blizzard designed her to do?)

By design, Lilith and my rogue had to be at odds: Diablo never provides much player agency outside of clicking enemies and adding numbers together. At least the clicking and adding is fun and re-playable, and the world design (not to mention cutscenes, voice acting, music) is high-budget maximalism: this is the first Diablo game where I failed to bounce off to more productive pursuits. I kept clicking. Or, eventually, kept enjoying a pretty nifty controller layout that sometimes tricked me into thinking I was playing an action game.

But do you actually have a soul when you play this game? Does Blizzard care what happens to your soul when you spend $100 on horse armor? Of course they don't. Your soul isn't what's valuable; it's your time. The live service stench of it all, like a bloated corpse just off screen, is best ignored...pinch your nose and enjoy and finish the campaign just before it, and you, explode into rotten gas.

I’m addicted to everything about this game.
The MMORPG-like setting, the world, the dungeons, the World Tier system, the bosses, the campaign, the side missions, the grind you put into your characters build, the satisfaction that comes with each progression, the trial and error, the rewarding feeling of finishing challenges and so much more. It’s just so damn good.

The online experience is the big winner here though! These past three weeks have been an absolute blast online rather it’s been playing by myself in a realm, with friends/family or random players online in my realm. The community has been great so far and also extremely helpful which has been nice considering this is my first Diablo game.

I don’t see myself putting the controller down on this anytime soon. I’m so invested in my character and I’m very much looking forward to the next 5 years of content to come!

When I say I enjoyed the time I spent in Diablo IV, all I'm really saying is that I enjoyed my girlfriend's company in a goal-oriented digital space. I would have had a tangibly equivalent experience with any of a dozen other polished online multiplayer content hoses. Which isn't a complaint—this game is fine, and I didn't need it to be anything more than that.

From the first moments of actually playing the game, though, it becomes clear that it's buckling under its own massive size. It is bound and determined to be a lifestyle service game, and that colors everything about its design. While the few bespoke pieces can be compelling—the character progression gives a lot of room for experimenting with cool builds—the vast majority is clearly just a content treadmill. The loot curve is precision engineered to give you a better drop for one of your slots every X minutes on average, which means no individual item can ever define your play. There is simply too much writing for any of it to be particularly compelling. The dungeons have to be procedural, which leads to them quickly feeling like repetitive sequences of rooms with guys in them.

The real sin of Diablo IV then is just that it's boring. By shoving so much stuff into it, the whole becomes dilute and flavorless. You can still lose hours to it, to be sure, but unless you're spending them in the company of good friends you'll get very little of value in return.

I've been playing the game since it came out on June 6, and it was really fun at first.
Now more than a month later I don't have that much interest in the game anymore.
I'm at level 57 with my rogue and the endgame is just no fun, it just feels like an endless life task until you reach level 100.
And Season 1 didn't really convince me either.
I will probably play it less often now and rather start something else.

The story of the game I also found rather mediocre, but the story is not usually in the foreground in Diablo games anyway.
Nevertheless, I liked the story in the third part more and also the cutscenes were much more epic there.

A cool entry to get me into the series for the first time. It's strange to join such an established genre where everyone already seems to know the swing of of things, but it's fun to explore and discover all the trappings of a franchise I've mostly ignored.

I played this like I would any other offline single player campaign game: doing a solid helping of side content, but not all, and playing the campaign at my own pace. By the end of it here, I feel like I've still barely scratched the surface. I don't think I'll end up hitting the real endgame and maxing out a character, but I'll check back to do some more in the world and maybe see how some other classes work.

The campaign itself was also pretty captivating. I really respect how it kept a consistent, mature tone, and the characters and their performances were overall great. Looking forward to seeing where this goes in expansions, and it will probably spur me to go check out some of the previous campaigns now that I have some idea of what's going on with the game itself. I'm glad I played and I enjoyed my time here, regardless of how much more I end up playing.

Hail, Daughter of Hatred.
Creator of Sanctuary.
Our Blessed Mother.

Lilith.