There is some effort made to try to add some grittiness and dour vibes back into Diablo with this entry after Diablo III’s more fantastical Heaven/Hell conflict backdrop. It certainly ends up being quite bleak and bloody. The campaign itself is fine, the plot makes very little sense toward the end and the characters have odd motivations. It almost seems like the player character is not good? Most of your actions seem to directly benefit the final enemy, which could work as a narrative, except I know as the player I’m doing something idiotic and then when it’s revealed that it hurt me later, it’s presented as if it’s a surprise.

The always online connection has some issues, but was mostly fine. Really sucked not being able to pause though, or have the option to play offline, both of which impacted how I played the game negatively. Ultimately as fun as the core gameplay could be, the game is severely lacking in the core elements that make Diablo addictive:

- legendary items are now aspects, which you randomly use to upgrade other items, and it’s less satisfying than getting the legendary drop
- unique items basically never drop, so there’s nothing to chase
- somehow they didn’t put set items in again, which used to help with the loot chase
- the game is designed for grind in a really strong way that’s also tedious

The best summary of what makes Diablo II and III better in my view is replay value. The games are relatively quick to get through and you have heavy encouragement to replay with new characters and new builds - they’re almost like 2D Metroids in that respect. Diablo IV takes so long to play one run of that I have very little desire to run to the end and explore Estuar on additional characters. There’s no adventure mode equivalent that’s compelling either, where I can power level my alt characters quickly, and that also damages the game’s replay value.

Because of the lengthy campaign and grindy structure, the way you build your character is also tiresome. Paragon levels after hitting level 50 effectively make you play a second board game on the side to min/max your optimal build, but the paragon boards are too complicated for the average person in my view and I sort of checked out of it instead of engaging with it. There’s so many attributes with specific concepts and battle mechanics (Close Combat, Vulnerable, etc.) that picking Skills also seems to require a four-year degree in Diablonomics, and I ended up just falling back to whatever a build guide told me to do.

Would like for them to address the tedious grind and the overcomplicated skills, but unlikely that will be solvable in this game’s lifetime.