Warning: here be spoilers.
I finally finished Diablo IV the other week. I finished the game with my own definition of “finished”, which to me means to complete the campaign. I did the same thing with Diablo III. I know some people believe that “finished with the game” involves getting to level 100 with every character and doing all kinds of other crazy things. I can respect that. That also was closer to my definition of “finished with the game” for Diablo II.
I consider Diablo II to be one of the better games I have played in my life. It is a magical product, and it got many things right. I have replayed it recently, and it largely holds up to how I remember it. Ultima IV also does this. It is another game I am willing to replay from time to time to respect its majesty.
Diablo III was unfortunate when it launched. I played it. I understand what they did with it. I did not love it and moved on to other games. That is the entirety of my thought process about Diablo III. I did not love the story in Diablo III. I apologize if this is spoilers, but the ending is functionally equivalent to “Cabin Boy”. I heard from many people that Diablo III eventually became a fun game and I cannot say how long that took, but to me, that kind of transformation in a game must happen before you launch it.
That brings us to Diablo IV.
Diablo IV is a very beautiful game.
Diablo IV is also a very stupid game.
I have caught flack from one individual for giving this game a 6.5 out of 10. Many other people feel I am being far too kind. Aesthetics carries this game very far, honestly. I can respect the craftsmanship that went into making this such a beautiful experience.
I want to say that I have a large number of questions about the mechanics in the game, and the deep truth is I only have one.
Did anyone with any decision-making power play this fucking game?
Where do I start with my critiques?
I think that the auto-leveling of the world is the first one. Diablo IV leveling is a tedious chore. It is like mowing five acres of unkempt lawn while eating a bowl of oatmeal at the same time. God help you if you picked a class that you thought might be fun vs just listening to all the people on the internet and loading up on a broken OP character. Your gear becomes ineffective at an incredible pace given how infrequent replacement items are. Eventually, you will get one or two epics that have some great aspects on them that you need to maintain to overcompensate for the continued state of decay on your build. You can strip the aspect off of your items and reapply it to a higher-level item. This is a one-time fix. You cannot reapply that affix to a different item, which is not something that is well communicated upfront.
In other games, if you ever fell off of the power curve, you could go back to old areas and upgrade your character. Most every game I have played has had this as an option. In the best games, you will achieve a state of flow while this happens. Because everything is constantly leveling up, you are afforded no such luxury in Diablo IV. A bad character build will continually remain bad and will eventually bring you into a spot where you will be powerless to progress.
There are a few higher-level zones where you can fight some bosses and clear out a part of the map. I encountered the first one of these at level 19. After dying repeatedly, I discovered that I should push my character to level 20 and go purchase a potion upgrade. The four levels before a potion upgrade (levels 20, 30, and 45 respectively) are terrible. They are made worse because you know there is an arbitrary upgrade to your potions coming because number.
The other rage-inducing random decision for character progression is tying your potion count to how much extra side questing you have done. Before going into the game’s final act, I ran around the world picking up side quests and waypoints that were totally unnecessary to get to an arbitrary magical unlock threshold to increase my potions.
What the hell is a Murmuring Obol anyway? I was running around at maxed-out Obols for more than half of the game because I did not realize that this is a special currency for gambling, vs gold. I am not sure why it needed a special currency for gambling, or why it had such an insanely low cap of 500, which forces you to go and spend currency when you might want to bank it up to desperately try to replace really outdated items.
Dungeons are the next thing to talk about. I cannot complain too much about dungeons. I decided to stop doing them because I accidentally wasted a lot of time in them, mistaking the first few for the one-floor cellars that populate the terrain. The complaints that I perceived, and were largely validated by talking to friends, is that all of them share the same repetitive structure and mechanics.
This is also the problem with the boss fights.
I vaguely remember the boss fights in Diablo III, I had no real issues with them. I greatly remember the bosses from Diablo II as being interesting, varied, and challenging.
Diablo IV bosses are just boring. They mostly have the same mechanics, and if you are playing as a Barbarian, you spend a lot of time just running around dodging red shit on the ground while waiting for your cooldowns on your powers to expire.
Another challenge for the boss fights is that the boss arenas are tiny. It is made worse by the fact that the final boss fight area (SPOLIER ALURT) shrinks over time. Someone thought this would be a good idea.
Clearly, there are a lot of mechanical deficiencies in the game. They are buffing some of the classes and making some adjustments to “end game” because they know they have some problems. There are also clipping issues with horses and terrain that are being addressed. I heard that some people got stuck at level 50 before finishing the game (I finished at level 49), and that you needed to do some crazy hard-mode things to keep progressing in levels. Much like so many other things, that feels so arbitrary.
I am glad this game will eventually be fun for the people who decide to stick around, in much the same way Diablo III became fun for people who stuck around.
For me? I don’t know. This might be the last Diablo product that I pay for. I am not planning on sticking around to see it.
I got sucked into Diablo II hard because it was fun from the beginning. The story was captivating, and the whole thing just worked. There is a certain gestalt in an amazing product that you can feel. In hindsight, the one criticism I could level at it is that the game could be called “ZOMG SO MANY POTIONS”, because you do need to get your drank on to win the game. Back when it came out, I had to step out of the boss fight and go farm for gold and drops to rebuild my potion stash to get the boss down. It was a little unfortunate, and somehow it was still immensely fun.
The real criticism I have for Diablo IV I saved for the end. It is a fucking. Stupid. Story.
There are going to be some more spoilers here. If you are concerned about such things, you should probably stop reading.
The game starts with your character rescuing a bunch of villagers. After you rescue them, you have a party where they give you a drink that is drugged and you black out. After breaking free, you go find someone named Lorath… The very first thing you do is accept food and drink from them? Did we just forget what happened ten minutes ago?
Hard pass.
Setting aside the amount of drinking that you and the NPCs do, I could not identify with most of the decision-making in the game up to the end. Watching the final scene, I was reminded of all things from an episode of The Simpsons. This is not where I wanted to be at the end of the game. Of course, very few games stuck the landing as hard as Diablo II did. If you did not go through the OG game before, it is well worth your dollars to play it through now.
Another criticism for me is the mechanics of the story. Yes, you heard that right. They added a mechanism to the map to watch cutscenes that moved the story forward. You constantly found these piles of clearly marked blood petals that would let you move the story forward. The idea to tie these visions to the mechanics of the game felt alien to me. I could literally feel the shattering of the fourth wall every time I saw them on the screen.
Speaking of shattering the fourth wall, this brings me to my final criticism of the game.
The always online connectedness of the thing. I had one game-breaking crash in the wee hours of the night when I committed to finishing the game. It was in a dream-sequence quest that I had to restart from the beginning. This was an awful experience, and unfortunately, it felt par for the course.
That does not compare at all with the disruption of seeing a tricked-out character named b0ngBrUhl33t666 go tearing across the map while you are deep in the throes of battling for the citizens of Sanctuary.
So there you have it. At the end of the game, I felt like I bet on the wrong horse—or wolf. For more than half of the game, I actually felt that a team-up with Lillith might not be so bad. When asking myself what that ending would look like, I remembered some sage-like wisdom from Logan V. What is curious to me is that more than half of the people I talked to about this game also felt the same way.
Thank you for reading along. I really hope this game becomes the game that everyone who worked on it wanted it to be. I do. Right now, it is not a game I feel good about paying for.
See you next week!
