As you fling godlike powers at buckets of demons and the occasional treasure goblin, the previous games, whether by the technical limitations of the time or differing creative directions, found a way to make the eternal conflict between heaven and hell worth caring about-largely by injecting surrealist art into otherwise mundane environments and having characters like Deckard Cain provide a hit of gravitas.
Diablo has always had to balance its dark fantasy world with your character's ridiculous presence in it. I couldn't walk to a town without stepping (and inexplicably exploding) the half-eaten remains of a horse or passing by bodies impaled onto wooden spikes.ĭiablo 4's tonal and aesthetic "return to darkness"-a tagline that promises Diablo 3's biggest haters that this one is for big strong adults who liked Diablo 2-is so afraid of levity and color that it misses what made Diablo 2 and 3 so evocative. Most of Diablo 4's campaign drenches you in human misery through side quests and dungeons that are grotesque to the point of absurdity. What's left of the human population survive in ramshackled settlements and dusty cathedrals. It's not sacrilege for a series that has always thrived on this type of play to expand on infinite repetition, but by reconfiguring its entire structure around what used to be relegated to the endgame, Diablo 4 sacrifices a significant part of its appeal for me.ĭiablo 4's RPG structure is far too transparent for any of it to feel elegantly rooted in the fiction.Īfter the events of Reaper of Souls, Sanctuary has become a bit of a Diablo 4: Apocalypse Reloaded situation. The tormented world of Sanctuary is now a platform for Diablo's endless grind, a playground for legendary heroes to earn a few tiers on their battle pass. Diablo 3 was a live service game before "live service" was a term anyone knew Diablo 4 embraces live service from the start. It may still be an isometric hack-and-slasher but all of its familiar systems exist in a significantly different context.
Even though I started with WoW and then discovered the series backwards, I can't deny that some of Warcraft's original identity was lost in the process.ĭiablo 4 feels like an echo of that same point in history.
The more I play Diablo 4, the more I'm reminded of Warcraft's transition from a real-time strategy series to an MMO, a genre shift that capitalized on people's desire to embed themselves directly into the fabric of Blizzard's fantasy world and live in it.
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