I was a late-bloomer when it came to Diablo IV. I waited for Microsoft to buy Blizzard-Activision and put the game on Game Pass before I ever played it, aside from maybe a beta weekend or something. And when I did it was….fine, I guess?  But it didn’t really hook me like I hoped it would.

I keep going back every new season and I even pre-ordered the new expansion, Vessel of Hatred. Last night I finished running through that storyline, which I actually enjoyed more than the base game campaign (which left so light an impression on me that I couldn’t really tell you what happened except we killed Lillith) and now the game opens up and… I think I’m done.

But I still keep THINKING I should like this more, and most of that is probably based on very fond memories of many long hours playing Diablo and Diablo 2.  Still it has taken me a long time to kind of untangle my thoughts and decide why I don’t vibe with it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

The lesser reason is that the moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t very interesting. It feels like a ton of sizzle with not a lot of steak. Yeah at first it’s fun to just wreck huge clumps of baddies but, at least when playing solo so you’re not having to coordinate with anyone, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of thought or skill in it. Heck a lot of the time you can’t even SEE your character in all the chaos. Yes, there’s thought and skill that goes into putting together your build, for sure, but once you get that where you like it, you just kind of go through the same rotation over and over, with the only real decision on when to fire off an evade or an ultimate.

That’s pretty true of a lot of MMOs but honestly a lot of MMOs have pretty boring combat when playing solo which is why I generally don’t stick with them for very long, either. Maybe I just have never gotten to the ‘good parts’ of Diablo IV to get to the really interesting boss fights and stuff and I kind of feel like I should at least try to get there, but then there’s the Big Reason to discuss.

The Big Reason I have an issue with D4 is the Season system. A season starts, you roll a new character, and you play that character until the season ends. Then your character (and I always get very attached to my RP characters) goes to the Eternal Realm to languish. Another season starts, tempting you with all kind of shiny goodies to earn, but you need a new character for the new season so you’re starting all over again. As a CASUAL player this drives me nuts because I never feel like I make any progress.

Basically playing Diablo IV feels to me like playing the Beta of a new MMO where characters are wiped after every beta phase, and the game is NEVER going to launch. If I was a dedicated player and wound up finishing each season and maybe maxing out a few characters, this might not feel so bad, but I never get that far. I just don’t play enough (so to be clear, this is a ME problem, not an issue with the game). The only reason I’ve finished the Vessel of Hatred campaign is because I’ve been sick as a dog and laying on the couch needing something mindless to play and D4 was perfect for that.

I guess I just wish there was a way to carry over your characters, or some perks or benefits, from season to season. Or some kind of track in the Eternal Realms that made it seem worthwhile to play there. SOMETHING persistent to hang on to. But as it is, playing Diablo IV for me is like starting a bunch of projects and then having them taken away from me before I can ever finish any of them, and that is super unsatisfying.

 

Yesterday I complained about how a quest reward gave me new gear that was so good it broke my character. I went from having to think about what I was doing and drink health potions to just mowing through enemies without a second thought. I was worried this was the way it was going to be, and maybe even what the typical Diablo IV players enjoys.

Then this happened:

So yeah, I was wrong. My character isn’t broken, I’m just impatient. I mean he DOES still plow through random overworld enemies without much thought, but the more I explored the more I found myself in really big battles. So now I get it. Your character is mighty when it comes to 1 on 1 fights, but a lot of the time in Diablo IV the fights are not fair and it is you and a couple of others against hordes of baddies. Lots of fodder to whittle you down and some big bads in there that can ruin your day. Of course you also NEED that fodder to generate energy and even do some good life stealing. Sometimes these fights feel harder WITHOUT all the trash mobs running around.

But look at all that stuff laying around and that’s after I picked up a ton. There’s a LOT of loot in this game and I’m still getting huge jumps. By the end of my session last night I had blue gear better than the gold and orange gear I’d collected the night before, though this example is blue to blue. But a jump from 157 armor to 477 armor is huge.

If you are sensing a change of tone, well that’s very perceptive of you. I played about two hours last night and really had quite a good time. I also went from level 13 or 14 to level 27. In one long drawn out fight I think I gained 5 or 6 levels. So if you’ve heard they accelerated leveling, you heard right. (I assume… I’ve never actually did this before.) It won’t be long before my Druid is higher level than my campaign character.

And there’s a ton to do. Look at all the icons on this map. Just don’t ask me what any of them mean. I just know they’re all stuff to do. Tonight I have to go figure out what quest I was supposed to do at Level 15 to unlock some kind of signature skill for the druid. One I only learned about after going to google to find out what all these Druidic Offerings I was picking up were for. So I will ding the game a little bit for having a somewhat steep meta learning curve. Run around fighting stuff is plenty straightforward but there seem to be a lot of systems that you have to kind of discover on your own. That or they taught me this stuff during the campaign and I immediately forgot it because it wasn’t needed.

So is this it? Have I decided Diablo IV is a Game For Me? Wellllll…. not quite. I am definitely having fun but it has only been 2 days. And since it’s a new season the servers are really populated and there’s people everywhere which makes things chaotically fun. What will it feel like a week from now? A month? Will it still be fun or will I have hit level 100 and be bored with the grind? Hard to say. And it’s a game like Borderlands in that there is SO much loot it starts to feel a bit like a chore sorting through it all, and that may wear me down over time. (In particular I wish I could just destroy stuff I’m carrying rather than having to drop it on the ground and then be careful not to click on it and pick it back up.)

I am now 100% sure that the campaign does not do the game justice AT ALL. I had WAY more fun in those 2 hours last night than I had in the weeks it took me to plod through the campaign. So that’s good. But on the flip side, it is still a very grim world and it may be that over time that just wears me down. Put it this way: As a Game Pass game that I didn’t pay for (OK I paid for Game Pass itself but I mostly spent Microsoft Rewards points on that) it is definitely a winner so far.

Though… Guild Wars 2 also misses me and I don’t want to lose track of that!

*Sorry the screenshots are all kind of dark. I play with HDR on and am using Game Bar to take shots and it doesn’t seem to adjust the color properly This used to be an issue on the Xbox Series X but Microsoft eventually fixed it and I’m hoping that do that here too. But it’s just so convenient to use that screenshot button on the controller rather than having to hit a key combo to use some other capture system. If anyone knows a good screen cap app that adjusts for HDR though, I’d love to hear about it.

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.

Diablo IV’s new season begins today and I’ve decided I’m going to try one more time to get into the game.

I was a late-bloomer when it comes to D4 since I stubbornly waited for Microsoft to jump through all the legal hoops to purchase Acti-Blizzard, and then waited some more for D4 to hit Game Pass. It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I don’t like spending any more money than I have to!

I first jumped in a couple seasons ago. Since I hadn’t played I figured I should do the campaign, but I drifted away before I finished and the season ended, relegating my character to the dust bin zone, or whatever it is called. Eternal Realm maybe? I found the campaign was super depressing and at the same time super dull. I think there was one fight in the whole thing that stumped me for a bit but otherwise I just button mashed my way through it until I lost interest.

Eventually, during last season, I finally went back and finished the campaign over on the Eternal Realm, and looking back I feel like I could have safely skipped it. I’ve already forgotten the story. Mephisto is in a rock, something happened to Lilith… maybe we killed her? There was some other dude, Elias or something, and he did something bad but it left such a light impression on me that I’ve forgotten it. I’m not really knocking the story itself so much as the pacing and the lack of any kind of tension since it was all so easy…I just wasn’t really paying attention. I’d happily read the novelization of the story if such a thing existed!

But now with a new season I can create a new character and just focus on leveling and raising world tiers and getting to the end game (my character that played the campaign got nowhere near level cap) and seeing what that is about. Maybe I’ll see other players on the map! Maybe I’ll stumble into content that kicks my butt and I’ll have to think about builds and how to be better. Maybe I’ll find and craft/improve some cool loot! It could happen!

My biggest issue, though, is the whole setup where you roll a new character, then when the season ends you send them to the Eternal Realm, but at the same time you do a new season starts so you start another new character for that season. I kind of wish there was a reason to go back and play all these characters that have been set aside. I mean nothing is preventing you from doing that but to do so means to give up the goodies you get from playing a Seasonal character. So it seems to me you’re basically starting from scratch every season and effectively throwing that character away at the end of the season. It is QUITE possible I’m missing something as I’ve never ‘completed’ a season but that’s how it feels to me heading into it.

Maybe I’ll learn better this season.

Is anyone else jumping in?