I don’t even remember why I bought the lastest expansion for Diablo IV. I know it wasn’t a thoughtful decision. Let me see if I can piece it together:

I’d just subscribed to GeForce Now and wanted to test it with something that has a ton going on on-screen at once. I “own” Diablo IV via Game Pass so I chose that. Started a new character, a Warlock, and went with the flow and made it a seasonal character. Started the campaign fresh since it’s been quite a while since I played. And I enjoyed it, as I always do when I first pick up a Diablo game. Smooshing hordes of baddies and hoovering up loot is fun for me.

Then I realized the Warlock was a ‘free trial’ of the character and you needed the Lord of Hate expansion to continue playing so I figured ‘What the heck’ and traded in some Microsoft Rewards points for $50 in Xbox Store credit and bought it on the Xbox.

That was a while ago. A month? Six weeks? Someting like that. Today I finished Lord of Hatred, finally.

This post is not a diss on Diablo IV. I know plenty of folks love it. It’s just another one of those “Good game, not for me” situations. Here’re my biggest reasons.

1) Although Xbox Game Pass gives us Diablo IV on both PC (via the Xbox app) and the console, expansion purchases do not extend between platforms. Since I’d purchased the expansion on Xbox, I could only play my Warlock on the Xbox, unless I wanted to re-buy the expansion on PC. This is strange since Microsoft tends to really push “Play Anywhere!” in its marketing. Buy a game, play it on Xbox, PC, or in the Cloud. That policy apparently doesn’t extend to Diablo IV expansions.

2) The game is terrible about saving quest progress, at least on the Xbox. Diablo IV is an always-online game and there is no manual safe option. Many, MANY times I lost quest progress because the game hadn’t saved inspite of a message literally saying “Quest Progress Saved” on the screen. To be clear when this happened I didn’t lose exp and gear I had earned in the quest I now had to replay. The game does fine at saving that. It’s just the progress through the campaign it kept losing. This is a big deal for me because I tend to play games in short sessions. Often 15-30 minutes. If you’re someone who sits down for long gaming sessions this probably isn’t going to be that big of an issue. And of course if you’re skipping the campaign it doesn’t matter at all.

But those are reasons enough for me to give any future expansions a pass. I also don’t really like the season pass characters since Diablo IV is far from my ‘main game’ and I don’t like the time pressure that comes with a set deadline before things reset.

I did enjoy the story well enough, that’s true. But for me the gameplay got stale pretty fast, too. The ‘build’ (if you can call it that) I used was basically “throw down a couple of DOTs then spam the fire button.”

What I SHOULD have done is push up the difficulty level (I was playing on Expert which is really low on the difficulty tiers) to challenge myself and make me have to futz with my build or figure out how to upgrade my gear. But I didn’t want to do anything to slow me down because…. seasonal character! I’ve got a deadline to make!

I feel like developing a build and rotation is where the real ‘skill’ fo Diablo IV is. But I’m not an expert.

And speaking of expertise. I am baffled by the various ways to improve gear. Slotting gems I get. Temporing I get. The rest, who knows. There’s little hints that come up during loading screens but the load times are so short on the Xbox that I never could read them before they vanished. For most of the game I just kept replacing gear with better gear, until I hit Gear Level 850. I guess there is higher level gear but I never figured out how to get it. So then it was getting better quality Level 850 gear. Once I had everything Legendary I just ignored gear and scrapped everything. In fact gear went from a source of fun to another gaming chore since I still picked everything up. I just scrapped it all at the Blacksmith whenever my inventory got full. Except these little charm things that you slot into the page of your character sheet. No idea what to do with extras of those so I just deleted the lower quality ones. And runes. WTF are Runes for? Never figured that out.

Before I completely give up on Diablo IV I might create a character on the Eternal Realm and see how it feels to play over there without the time pressure but… I also feel like I have a ton of games waiting to be played that I really WANT to play. Now that I finished the Lord of Hatred campaign I feel like I got my money’s worth out of the expansion and maybe it’s time to move on to another game.