When Blizzard, known for making some of the best video games, announces a new title or a follow-up title in any of their franchises, you can bet your last bullet that it’s going to be a good one. Suffice to say that when Diablo 4 was announced, high expectations were set. And did they deliver? Hell Yes! And heck no!
To understand the dichotomy of our impression of the game, let’s take a look at the different aspects of the game. Starting off, with the story. Blizzard does an excellent job at the single-player campaign. The voice acting is on point. As you venture through the world, you come across countless people who’ve been displaced because of the invasion of evil forces. You’ll no doubt have seen the cinematic trailer a million times by now as I have, so you know that Lilith, one of the lesser evils and daughter of Mephisto, has been broken out from ‘The Void’. It’s been said that being imprisoned in ‘The Void’ is a feat worse than death, so you can understand when Lilith feels the need to vent her frustration. Seems like a classic trope for setting up an antagonist. But you gotta remember, this is Blizzard. Their story writers will make you want to side with the Prime Evils or even the lesser evils over your own mother-in-law. However, a lesser evil isn’t exactly well-placed to take over the world when much stronger villains such as the Prime Evils exist. If you’ve played Diablo 3, then you’ll remember that you’ve pretty much kicked all of their rear ends. So the timing couldn’t get any better for Lilith. None of the Prime Evils are around to stop her and the Archangels from heaven rarely bother about the inhabitants of Sanctuary. This gives her a clear path to success, and the only thing that can stop her is … The Wanderer. That’s you, in case you were wondering.
Let’s just say that when Diablo 4 launched, Blizzard had a pretty complete game. A lot of different elements that make a Diablo game have been carried forward into Diablo IV but they’ve dropped the ball in a lot of places as well. The Diablo games have been primarily about loot wherein you’d spend countless hours grinding difficult critters in the hopes of getting certain items. Then you’d spend time crafting and re-rolling the affixes of the items. Diablo IV messed up the item system by adding too many affixes which vary as per character class and build. And to make matters worse, they even broke individual affixes into sub-affixes. Now, players have to grind endlessly to get the right affixes and then spend more time re-rolling. And don’t even get us started on the cost of re-rolling. It scales at a ridiculous level. And guess what? You don’t just get item drops for your character class. Yes, you might get items that are meant for other character classes which are completely useless for you. Ideally, if one’s inventory is bound to get filled up by garbage, you’d appreciate getting a few quality-of-life improvements to help sort items, right? Well, keep dreaming.
Coming to the other aspects of the game. We’ve got a paragon system to keep things interesting after level 50 which is where the main campaign gets over. The way you pick paragon boards and slot in points is the only way to keep your powers scaling with the world. Speaking of which, the world design is just brilliant. The map of Sanctuary is broken down into different parts that you’ll be exploring through the course of the campaign and the devs have done a great job at distinguishing the NPCs, dialogues, accents and overall atmosphere. If only the zoom levels were a little wider, then you could have seen the beautiful world in all its glory.
While the item system was the biggest and only pain point for the game back when it launched, the Blizzard devs decided to play with fire. They introduced patch 1.1.0 which completely messed things up. The levelling pace was slowed down drastically and now players had to unnecessarily grind through levels 70-100. And because the devs stretched out the end-game, players very soon realised that there was no end-game. Unlike Diablo III or Diablo Immortal, the endgame in Diablo 4 is just an overwhelming feeling of emptiness. All the content that was in place for levels 70-100 fell short and Blizzard had nothing prepared to cover up. There are no random events, no weekly events nothing new.
There are Seasons as we had in Diablo III and Immortal wherein new items, bosses and short campaigns are released but that too gets boring pretty soon. One great thing they’ve done with the Seasons is that a new mechanic has been introduced in the form of ‘Malignant Hearts’ which does make the item system a bit more diverse. This means there’s a lot more work needed to balance character classes and builds but Blizzard chose the easy way out and drastically nerfed popular classes so that players would be forced to switch builds or character classes mid-campaign or mid-season. It seems that in the attempt to make the game more of a live service, the devs have managed to completely alienate their user base. The devs did try to reverse some of the changes that were made in patch 1.1.0 but it seems the damage has already been done.
Diablo has always been a single-player game. The closest that a Diablo game has come to becoming a decent multiplayer game is Diablo Immortal. And here’s a fun fact, it’s not even made by Blizzard. There are no leaderboards for different gameplay modes. There’s no party finder. And the painful-to-kill world bosses die in under 1-2 minutes. So there isn’t a lot of benefit in partying up. If you wanted a bit more experience, then you could party up but it’s not like there’s content designed for parties aside from the world boss.
Diablo 4 (IV) is a cautionary tale for Blizzard. It’s true that the “Blizzard” that was known for making some of the best video games to date is no longer the same but Diablo IV is genuinely a good single-player game. If you’ve been a fan of the Diablo games for the insanely well-written story, then yes, you should probably buy this game. But if you plan on playing this with your friends, might I suggest “Baldur’s Gate 3” instead? I can’t help but draw parallels between the Archangel Inarius’s fall from grace within the Diablo IV world and how the games have managed to mess up a well-made game just as badly.
