As threatened, I jumped into the new Diablo IV season last night and the results were somewhat mixed. I didn’t get a ton of time since before D4 I had to do the daily and weekly tasks for Fallout 76, plus there’s an event running that had a few extra tasks needing to be done this week. That’s all done so now it’s just F076 Dailies until next week.

Back to D4. I choose a Druid totally randomly and that is thing one with Diablo IV for me. When it is time to create a character none of the classes really excite me. I can’t really put my finger on why. Whether it is the look or the archetypes or what. So I literally picked a random number between 1 & 5 and it came up 5 so Druid it is! Druids are big burly people. As I am an old fat man IRL I wasn’t super hyped to play as such a large individual in-game but once I tweaked his look a little he started to grow on me.

I was a little confused when I first logged in. You get a starter quest that talks about Mother’s Blessings which seem to be a staple of this season. Then you’re sent out to collect some. I looked at the map expecting some kind of marker or something but there was nothing. It turns out you get these things from killing the non-fodder enemies. The ones where it announces in chat that you are fighting them. So you just have to go look for them.

So off I went exploring, which was pretty entertaining, and while I was doing it I actually saw other players out there doing the same thing! When I played on the Eternal Realm it was so rare to see another player that it tended to startle me because I’d forget I was playing a MP game!

The map, when you start a Seasonal Character and skip the campaign, is a mish-mash of explored and unexplored areas and I couldn’t see any kind of pattern. Maybe the major “towns” are explored? But there was plenty of fog of war to wander around in, and while doing so I found a dungeon. While playing the campaign I skipped all dungeons so as not to get over-leveled since the game was already so easy. And as I started out on this Seasonal Character I had to actually gulp health potions. I nearly died a time or two! Exciting!

The dungeon I found had 3 sections, the first two of which had certain mobs I needed to kill in order to open the next section. While I was working through this I was gathering those Mother’s Blessings I needed, and at one point my inventory was full so I had to Town Portal back to sell/scrap junk. While there I turned in two “tiers” worth of Mother’s Blessings The first one gave me some OK gear. The second one broke my character. I went from an attack rating of about 150 to an attack rating of 580 and when I went back into that dungeon I just plowed through everything without thinking about it. I mean I guess this is on me… I could just choose NOT to use the new gear I was given. But who has that kind of willpower? Instead I’ll equip it and then complain the game is once again too easy.

Meanwhile I was building my character, just groping along. Just to be contrary I resisted buying new skills until I’d fully upgraded earlier skills. On my Eternal Realm character I was all over the place but this time I chose one skill per skill tier and maxed it. By the end of the night I’d gotten to tier 3 (level 13 or 14) which is when I picked a couple of wolf friends as a skill. THAT was fun. I love me some canines and it made me like the character a lot more. But it was getting late so I barely had time to give some belly rubs before it was time to quit.

So yeah, overall a mixed bag. I just want to be somewhat challenged. I can’t go to the next World Tier until I beat some dungeon that I haven’t found yet. But generally speaking I enjoyed the open world and roaming around exploring way more than following along with the campaign.

Oh! Also while I started on the Xbox I eventually moved to the PC just to see how that felt. I’m playing the Xbox version on PC too. My characters were all there and the PC version supports a controller, which is great (in the way-back times I had to quit playing Diablo 2 because it was wrecking my wrists from all that mousing…using a controller to “drive” your character is much more comfortable for me). Playing on high/ultra settings on the widescreen monitor with HDR on was pretty sweet and I noticed details that I had missed playing on the Xbox from across the room. It’s REALLY nice to be able to “Play Anywhere” as Microsoft likes to say.

So tonight I’ll be diving back in and seeing how this plays out. I’m not 100% convinced Diablo IV is for me, but neither am I convinced it ISN’T for me. But I AM convinced that the campaign makes a bad first impression.