Jeremy Kings

I had initially intended for my next post to be about LEVIATHAN, the underwater scrolling shooter / monster hunting game that I’m currently working on. However, I’m currently in the middle of a month-long interview prep process and not quite in the right mindset to be thinking about game dev right now… or at least, not my own projects.

Diablo IV, the latest installment in Blizzard Entertainment’s series of dark demon-slaying loot-fest progression-based games, was officially released this past week. As a ride-or-die fan of the series, I was compelled to pick it up for a slightly higher price to get access to the game a couple days early, as well as access to a few even earlier beta weekends. As a gamer who is now in their mid-thirties, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that preordering games (or purchasing them while they’re in early access) is inevitably going to turn out badly in some cases, and may send the wrong message about what’s important in game dev to the demonic lords of business and shareholders who pull the strings for these AAA publishers and developers. However, considering the countless number of hours I put into Diablo III, the previous entry in the series, both on PC and on my Switch, I was fairly certain that this was going to be a sound decision.

After burning through the main story of the game over the course of a few days, I’m still mostly happy with my purchase, but I have some reservations, which we’ll get to in a bit. The reason I’m calling this post my “initial review” rather than just simply a “review,” is that I haven’t really touched the end-game yet. I decided not to wait until then to write this because (1) from what I understand, there is notably an actual end-game this time, which Diablo III did not have at launch, and (2) I’m reasonably certain the dev team will be able to tune the end game into something that’s going to devour my free-time in the best way possible given some time.

In summary, this post will be dealing with everything I can assess that’s not related to the end-game. I’ll mostly be focusing on things that aren’t likely to change, but I do want to touch on class balance a bit, too. Here’s a table of contents in case you don’t intend to read this in one sitting:

1. Part I: Presentation / Atmosphere
2. Part II: Gameplay
3. Part III: Open World
4. Part IV: Story (SPOILERS)
5. Part V: Conclusion

Part I: Presentation / Atmosphere

To begin, we’ll start with what is likely the strongest aspect of the game. From the outset, the world that’s presented to the player in Diablo IV is bleak and tragic in a way that I can’t help but love. Its color palettes are muted, but not to the point of everything seeming bland and monotone (something that a lot of “gritty” games seem to struggle with) and its characters actively struggle against a hostile world that wants nothing more than to grind them into a blood and dust. Speaking of which, there’s a lot of blood in this game. Like, a LOT, a lot. It’s not downright silly in its excess in the way that some first-person shooters tend to be, but you probably shouldn’t play it if virtual blood and viscera bother you.

The art direction is on point here, as is the sound design, something that I’ve come to expect from Blizzard. The soundtrack, which is now available on YouTube, Spotify and a few other platforms, is also great, particularly the tracks reserved for the wintery first act of the game. I have to give serious props to Leo Kaliski and Ted Reedy, the folks who are credited with writing the majority of the music. More so than with Diablo III’s score, it feels like Diablo IV is trying to carve out its own musical identity, which I love. While Matt Uelmen’s scores to the first two games of the series are iconic, with his departure from Blizzard back in 2007, it’s unlikely that he’ll be doing any full scores for Blizzard any time soon.

Given that, it’s great to see that the sound team isn’t simply trying to imitate his work, especially for a game that’s trying to win over people that were not happy with the overall direction of Diablo III. While it might be satisfying in a superficial way to hear Uelmen-esque guitars and percussion all over the place, it would be a hollow, fading satisfaction knowing that Uelmen had no actual part in it. While Diablo III had a degree of bombast in some of its writing perhaps more suited to the epic fantasy of Warcraft, Diablo IV brings things back a notch or two, reserving the epic choirs and brass for only a few specific moments.

Before we continue I should state that, for the record, I was never on the “Diablo III is a disgrace to the franchise” bandwagon. I never really understood the complaints about the more varied color palettes… though I also probably wouldn’t have made Whimsyshire either. At any rate, while Diablo III is not without its issues, of which there were many particularly at launch, I was a fan of the game from the jump when it released nearly a decade ago in 2014. While I’m not a particularly religious or spiritual person, I know that faith requires effort, and I’ve been here for Diablo through the thick of it.

At any rate, while there are certainly criticisms that can be made, especially once we get into the story sections of the game (we’ll be saving that for last), overall the developers knocked it out of the park when it comes to the overall vibe of the game. Some of the mystery is lost by virtue of the game’s transition to open world, but on a micro scale, the world of Sanctuary is just as dark and deadly as it ever was.

Part II: Gameplay

Next, let’s talk gameplay. I’m of the opinion that, as far as game feel and general enjoyment goes, Diablo III set a high bar for the series. I don’t particularly like Diablo III’s heavy reliance on set items for end-game builds, and there are definitely certain skills or classes that just didn’t connect with me (Barbarian and Witch Doctor, most notably), but the moment-to-moment gameplay of Diablo III kept me playing for hours on end on multiple systems. I thought I was done with Diablo III by the time it came out on the Switch but, in retrospect, I don’t know that I’ve ever been more wrong in my life, which is saying something.

The official remaster of Diablo II on the other hand, while good, didn’t capture my attention for nearly as long. So, how does Diablo IV stack up against these earlier titles? Well, as is to be expected for a game in its infancy, it’s not as fine-tuned as its older brethren. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first.

Class Balance

It’s pretty clear from my time in the beta weekends and now at launch that the team doesn’t really have a handle on class balance yet… or rather, they don’t have a handle on what the general player-base wants with regards to class balance. To be fair, once a game gets out in the wild, the number of hours put into it by actual players will rapidly eclipse the amount of time that testers were able to play before launch, so builds that are more powerful than they should be will start to stick out like a sore thumb and get nerfed pretty quickly.

However, there’s some underlying design philosophies at work here that aren’t completely sound, as evidenced by the response given in this article to players complaining (during beta) that certain classes feel underpowered compared to others:

“There is a lot of balance there, but the trick around balance is that it’s a balance over time—not a balance of the moment. Not all classes at level five should have the same power. Due to the enchantment specialization, Sorcerers will have the most skills of any class because [with] Barbarians having four weapons, they will have the most legendary slots of any class. When you take that across all of them, there will be different points in time [where] a Barbarian is in some ways a little underpowered compared to some of the other classes in, say, the first 10 to 20 levels.”

Rod Fergusson, General Manager

On a surface level, this seems like a reasonable rebuttal to complaints about certain classes being underpowered. However, for anyone who has actually played the game and experienced a distinct difference in power compared with other characters at a similar level (especially when it’s your own alt characters), this quote reads a little too much like someone trying to recommend a TV show that “really gets going by the middle of the third season.” At least with a TV show you can just start at the third season if you want to, but even that feels unsatisfying, and in any case Diablo is an online-only game where there’s basically no way to just skip to level 30 or 50.

As someone who chose Druid as their first class for the game’s official release, I can confirm that the class balance problem is very real even after a few patches. While there do appear to be one or two powerful builds at the moment that can make the Druid shine, everything I’ve been interested in trying (Werewolf and Storm magic, mainly) is either severely lacking in single-target DPS, survivability, or both. I did find a build combining Storm and Earth magic that is mostly viable, but my underwhelming single-target DPS still prevents my level 49 Druid from being able to really shine even on World Tier 1, to say nothing of World Tier 2. I don’t even want to think about World Tier 3 right now, which I’ll gain access to after reaching level 50 and completing the first Capstone Dungeon.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen plenty of videos of other classes (Rogues, in particular) doing just fine on World Tier 2 while not even really trying for a cookie cutter build, which is demoralizing, to say the least. These are all solvable problems given enough time, so I’m not as concerned about class balance as I am about other things, but it does mean I’ll probably have to put down my Druid and play other classes for a while if it turns out (as I suspect it will) that the end-game is not kind to him right now. It’s also entirely possible that Rogues in particular are just stupidly powerful right now, but the point is: here there be balance issues.

Skills and Progression

While progression and class balance and intertwined in many ways, in this section I’m going to be looking at skills and progression without doing too much comparison between classes where possible. Diablo II and Diablo III have very different philosophies when it comes to progression and player choice, which is very obvious if you look at the way governing statistics and “skills,” i.e. the various actions and passive abilities for a class, are unlocked and strengthened as the player’s character levels up.

Stats

In Diablo II, at each level up you’re given 5 stat points to assign as you wish to the game’s four main stats: Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Energy. It’s a neat idea in theory, but it has the same problems that a lot of tabletop roleplaying games with similar progression mechanics have, namely that there’s an ideal stat distribution for most builds of a given class. Calling stat distribution a “false choice” would be generous, as in reality there are many wrong choices and only a few correct ones. Diablo III does away with this, which some people didn’t like, but I personally didn’t bat an eye at it for the reasons stated above. Diablo IV follows in Diablo III’s footsteps in this regard, but also has stats that are less binary in their usefulness… which now that I’m writing about it strikes me as a bit odd. If all stats are equally useful to most classes, why not let the player choose them more directly? At any rate, stats are arguably the less interesting half of the progression equation, so let’s move on.

“Skills” in the Diablo series are also obtained through leveling up. In Diablo II, you gain 1 skill point to assign to a new skill or to improve a skill you already have. Each class has three skill trees corresponding to different themes or aspects of the class. Stronger builds generally specialize in one tree over others, but the player is free to allocate their points however they wish. This is another avenue where you could easily make your character useless if you really wanted to (especially since spellcasters’ damage comes entirely from skills in Diablo II), but since skills generally get more interesting and more powerful in obvious ways the further you get into a given tree, most people are unlikely to accidentally stumble into a terrible build.

Skills: Diablo II and Diablo III

In Diablo III, by contrast, progression is streamlined to the point of offering very little choice at level up. Skills are granted automatically at set milestones, and initially can only be directly improved through “skill runes,” which are also unlocked at specific levels. Skill runes are effectively just variations on existing skills, changing the flavor or element of a skill along with any number of other mechanical benefits. Though there are a limited number of runes for each skill (five, if memory serves), being able to change which skills you’re using and which runes they have on the fly makes for a game where experimentation is easy and encouraged, something that’s much more difficult in Diablo II.

In practice, there were still some skills and runes I rarely ended up using for most classes, which may be unavoidable in these types of games, but at least I was able to figure out what didn’t work for me and recover from it relatively quickly and painlessly. While initially I missed the ability to strengthen my favorite skills more directly, I got used to it after a while… though I suspect this progression philosophy may be responsible at least in part for the game’s strong reliance on item sets to create viable builds.

Skills: Diablo IV

So, where does Diablo IV land in terms of skill progression? Well… somewhere in the middle, arguably with mixed results. First off, here’s a screenshot of the Druid’s skill tree:

Skill points are back! Instead of runes, we get modifiers for skills that we can put points into (just one point to unlock, currently) separately from the base skills once we have the base skill. Mechanically, these are typically useful and provide build variety, but overall they’re not as flashy or interesting as Diablo III’s skill runes. Unlike in Diablo II where you could put up to twenty (20) points into a skill, you’re limited to just five skill points per skill before any increases from equipped items in Diablo IV.

The current maximum seems low, but there’s also the question of whether putting points into active skills is even interesting in the first place. On the one hand, some skills that I’d like to use that I don’t feel are strong enough I could potentially make viable just by jamming points into them. On the other hand, if a skill isn’t strong enough, one could argue it should have been tuned stronger in the first place.

At any rate, the way skills further down the tree unlock is based purely on the number of points in the tree rather than based on your character’s level. Because each section of the tree is based on the purpose a skill has rather than its flavor or base power level, there aren’t really any situations where you have to put points into a skill you’ll never use to get a skill you want, a problem that Diablo II had in spades.

However, because progression is based on points spent in the tree and points spent lower in the tree unlock skills further down, changing your skills without resetting the entire tree can be a real pain. If you enjoy playing inventory Tetris in older action RPGs, skill tree Jenga may be right up your alley, but I personally don’t care for it.

Speaking of questionable usability decisions, while Diablo II’s skill trees took up only half the screen, allowing you to view your inventory or stats at the same time without issue, this is what the Diablo IV skill trees look like when viewed similarly:

If your first reaction to this is “that item doesn’t fit its container,” you’re right. It doesn’t fit, but this is for some reason the default way to view the skill tree. Panning around the skill tree in that relatively small panel is, for lack of a better word, not great. This is such an obvious issue that I’d be shocked if the team wasn’t already aware of it, but it’s still something that grinds my gears, so I’d be remiss not to mention it.

Overall, the current skill system is decent. It provides more flexibility than the one in Diablo II, and allows a bit more customization than the one in Diablo III. That said, I’m not convinced that you should even be able to put points into active skills, especially with how incremental the changes are with each additional point, and how few points you can allocate per skill.

Passive skills are in a much better state, in general. Each class also has their own set of custom skills outside of the normal skill tree, such as the Druid’s spirit totems. These are also passive, but can alter things a bit more dramatically and don’t require skill points to unlock, instead unlocking at specific levels, sometimes requiring the completion of a specific side quest or dungeon as well. I haven’t unlocked the Paragon system yet, so we’ll have to see how that stacks up later.

Combat and Game Feel

With regards to “game feel,” or how pleasant it is to experience the game on a moment-to-moment basis, Diablo IV takes after Diablo III, which is largely a good thing. Attacks feel like they have weight to them, a large part of which is due to the stellar animation and sound work, and it just feels good to go around attacking monsters. It’s not quite on the same level as Diablo III, though; the Werewolf animations for the Druid in particular feel a bit floaty compared to the Barbarian’s attacks, for example. Whether that’s something that can be easily fixed post-launch is outside the scope of my current knowledge.

I’m happy to say that the game feels great on both keyboard-and-mouse and controllers. Playing Diablo III with a controller was a lot of fun, more so than I thought it would be, and that extends to Diablo IV as well. That said, the UI for gamepads isn’t quite as controller-friendly as it was for the console versions of Diablo III. I thought this might have just been an issue for the PC version of Diablo IV, but a quick trip to Reddit (followed swiftly by a quick exit) shows that console players are subject to the same interface, much to their dismay.

Combat is fun, overall. While there have certainly been times when an overwhelming amount of area-of-effect attacks and crowd-control effects have frustrated me (and there are a couple story bosses that were an absolute pain), for the most part I have all the tools I need to deal with these things. Constant movement, well-timed use of defensive skills, dodging, and potions, as well as attention to enemy formations and attack patterns, are all necessary to be successful. Potions are limited use and drop randomly from enemies and at specific thresholds for bosses, again striking a balance between systems from Diablo II and Diablo III. The potion/health orb system in Diablo III was fine, but Diablo IV’s system is move active while avoiding the unnecessary potion management game of Diablo II, which I appreciate.

Regarding the numerous bosses in the game, some of them have been frustrating, but now that I’ve played the game a fair bit, I don’t think they’re unreasonable. That said, as someone playing a class that struggles with achieving high single-target DPS, the boss fights do tend to take longer than I’d like.

Itemization

One of the big questions for an action RPG like Diablo IV is naturally going to be whether there’s enough variety in items and how they affect the way you play. Because I haven’t reached endgame, I’m going to avoid making any sweeping judgments in this section and just provide my initial impressions of what’s new in the pre-endgame content as far as itemization goes.

The biggest addition to Diablo IV items so far are “Aspects.” Aspects represent unique abilities found on legendary items. I say “represent” because these abilities aren’t necessarily tied to those items. Firstly, you can transfer an aspect from one item to another, which means rare items that are statistically better than your old legendaries can suddenly become much more viable. Secondly, you can also acquire an aspect by beating a dungeon, adding it to a permanent library of aspects that can be “imprinted” onto any rare item.

So far, this system is super neat! I’m greatly enjoying the ability to transfer item abilities around, and dungeons providing different aspects gives a reason to explore dungeons you haven’t beaten yet, and reasons to choose specific dungeons over others. Other highlights include the ability to upgrade your existing gear at the blacksmith, which provides more ways to ensure progress when RNG hasn’t favored you, and craftable elixirs that can temporarily enhance statistics that you might rely on for your build, or make up for a lack of certain resistances.

Part III: Open World

The “open world” aspects of Diablo IV is a relatively new direction for the series and it affects a lot of other things, so it’s worth addressing on its own. Let’s get one thing straight off the bat: Diablo IV is not an MMO. It may have some superficial similarities with games in that genre, and it does require an internet connection to play (more on that later), but ultimately it’s just another action RPG. Aside from some world bosses and other events, there’s no other content that requires multiple people to complete. My journey from level 1 to level 49 so far has primarily been solo, and the only thing that has bothered me about having other people in the game is having no way to turn off the display of their names. I’m sure you think you’re incredibly funny, but I really don’t need to know that you named your character “DruidMcDruidFace” or something equally stupid and ten times as rude.

Furthermore, the amount of people you run into as you adventure around in the world at large will be pretty limited even if there are a ton of people online. In essence, whereas MMOs only limit the number of people per area in dungeons and the like, every area in Diablo IV is instanced. Where a “realm” in an MMO is the defining factor in what people you run into, in Diablo IV, it depends on things like who you’re grouped with directly, who’s in your clan (presumably, as I haven’t touched clans as of yet), and whether you’re in towns or big world event areas that are naturally conducive to larger groups of people.

Diablo III… II

Given where Diablo III ended up with its end-game (once it had one), Diablo IV is a natural evolution. People may not like it, but I don’t think there’s anything about Diablo IV’s gameplay or its online-ness that’s particularly surprising. I’m not sure how successful they’ll ultimately be in trying to cater to folks who thought Diablo III wasn’t Diablo enough while simultaneously making something that’s clearly an evolution of the same style of play, but if you liked Diablo III’s gameplay, you’ll likely feel right at home in Diablo IV’s open world.

The idea that I won’t be able to play Diablo IV some day is irksome, especially given how little of the content really requires other players, and unless some apocalyptic event wipes out the board members and executives at Blizzard, I doubt we’ll be seeing an offline version of Diablo IV anytime soon. This also brings us, inevitably, to the cash shop and battle passes. There’s nothing I can say about microtransactions in games that hasn’t been said before by people way more invested in them than I am so I’ll just say this: if you don’t like it, don’t buy anything; I probably won’t either. I doubt the cash shop will cause quite as much of a fuss as Diablo III’s doomed auction house, but only time will tell.

Diablo IV also brings the introduction of mounts to the series which, much like always-online, are pretty clearly a table stakes feature and not actually necessary to the core experience of the game. It’s just what RPG games do these days. While there are certainly some large areas in Diablo IV, once you have all the waypoints for a given area, traveling from once place to the other isn’t really that much of a chore, even on less mobile characters / builds. Horses expedite the process, but if they were gone I wouldn’t miss them particularly much. The one instance in which I’ve found them more than just passingly useful is when I need to get to a world event area and don’t have much time left, but that’s about it.

Issues of Scale

One thing I’ve noticed the more I’ve played the game is, despite how many areas there are in the game and how large they are, the world feels quite small when viewed from a distance. This is never something I’ve felt in a Diablo game. Here’s an uncovered version of the map, minus any identifying labels to avoid potential spoilers:

There are five major areas in the continent of Estuar as presented in Diablo IV, which you can see above. There are also a decent number of sub-areas that can only be accessed when playing through the main story (which is optional for subsequent characters once you’ve beaten it), and of course a multitude of dungeons. All of this is to say that Diablo IV isn’t actually smaller than the previous games. If anything, it has more content, but I still can’t escape the feeling that the world has shrunk.

In Diablo II and Diablo III, cities were small, but because you could only exit them from certain directions, you could imagine that perhaps this was only a portion of that city. When you don’t have a world map, or at the very least can’t see the world as it is from a bird’s eye view, issues of scale can be glossed over fairly easily. Not so in Diablo IV, where the whole of a city has to fit on the explorable map.

The seamless overworld of Diablo IV, while technically impressive, shares a number of unflattering similarities to MMOs, where zones that are internally consistent are often bordered by zones with wildly differing climates, wildlife, and architecture, with little to no transition between the two. The biggest issue for Diablo IV is not so much the contents of these areas, though, as much as it is their relative size. It’s not egregious and I recognize that there’s only so much content you can make, but it’s more noticeable in a game that’s at least attempting to be more grounded than Blizzard’s other franchises are wont to be.

It does help that the biomes in the game aren’t as different as in, say, any given World of Warcraft expansion, but the problem is still there and traveling on horseback only exacerbates it. Now I’m not convinced that Sanctuary’s geography makes sense, whereas before I didn’t even think to care about it. The problem is only made worse by the game’s overhead perspective; while suited to this style of gameplay, many of the environments in the game would likely be more impressive and awe-inspiring from a first-person perspective or even an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective.

Part IV: Story (SPOILERS)

Let me start off by saying that, with a few weird exceptions, no one sets out to make a bad product. You wouldn’t know it, seeing the drama and vitriol with which people react to the latest entries in their beloved franchises, but I have to believe this because the alternative involves becoming so cynical that I no longer enjoy the mediums that I love, and then what’s the point anymore? The reality of trying to bring an idea from conception to something that people can consume is a nuanced, turbulent process that rarely results in exactly what the creator or the audience wants, and the reasons for this are as varied as people’s opinions on said product. Time and money are obvious limiters, as well as good leadership when it comes to team endeavors, and those are probably at the root of most issues. Those point is, however, that most creators understand well the flaws of their own creations when they’re released out into the world.

That said, it’s time to dissect Diablo IV’s story and leave a trail of its guts all over the floor. I never thought I’d be the one doing this seeing as, to be perfectly honest, I don’t typically care that much about plot. By my own admission, the self-made D&D campaign I’m running probably has enough plot-holes to sink several ships. That said, Diablo IV’s story is so clearly the product of many disparate hands and ideas that I can’t help but wonder what the hell happened along the way and what their original plan was. If you don’t want spoilers, you should stop reading here. You’ve been warned.

Prologue: The Mother

Overall, the prologue provides a strong start to the game. We bear witness to the summoning of Lilith in a cutscene that remains one of my favorites ever since the game’s reveal, and not long after our character is drugged and nearly killed by villagers poisoned by her influence. This is followed up shortly by another stellar (albeit in-game) cutscene further strengthening the idea of Lilith and her summoner (as of yet unnamed) as clear forces of evil in Sanctuary. We don’t actually meet Lilith directly, but the violent villagers we met earlier tainted us with her blood when they tried to kill us ritualistically, and this gives us a way of seeing what she’s been up to. It’s a bit of a contrivance, but easy enough to go along with for now, and is genuinely something I might steal for future D&D campaigns. Lilith is also just generally an intriguing character if you’re familiar with Diablo lore, so there’s a lot to motivate us to go forward at this point.

Lorath Nahr

Actually, where are we going exactly? A random priest who rescues us from the villagers tells us he’s buggering off to the Cathedral, but we should seek out an old man who lives in the woods and knows about these sorts of things. As I write this, I’m realizing that just based on that description it seems like the priest is trying to get rid of us, but as it turns out the old man in the woods is in fact a Horadric scholar named Lorath Nahr, voiced expertly by Ralph Ineson.

In case you’d forgotten (and honestly, I wouldn’t blame you; I did, too), Lorath was the over-eager NPC standing next to Tyrael all the time in Diablo III’s Adventure Mode following the conclusion of Reaper of Souls. He was a young member of the new Horadrim with a modest collection of largely forgettable lines and a voice not nearly as memorable as Ineson’s (apologies to Lorath’s previous voice actor). Now, he’s a grizzled veteran of what little remains of the new order and, while even he would admit he’s no Deckard Cain, he fulfills a similar role as keeper of lore in this story and on Diablo’s YouTube channel.

Having met Lorath, we’re spirited along to Kyovashad, the main city of the Fractured Peaks region, major religious center, and site of one of my favorite tracks in the game. Lorath gives us some more lore, has us run some errands for him, then departs for the Dry Steppes, a region we’ll visit later in Act III.

Act I: The Father

Once Lorath is gone, we’re formally introduced to the Cathedral of Light, a religion that worships the angel Inarius, Lilith’s former lover, co-creator of Sanctuary. Also, apparently Inarius is literally in Sanctuary, which is pretty wild. The leader of the religion in Kyovashad is Reverend Mother Prava who seems alright at this point, aside from the fact that she’s the leader of a religion. She seems unconcerned about Lilith and tells us to go check in with Vigo, one of her Knights Penitent who’s investigating reports of a demon woman near some backwater town to the southeast.

Vigo and Neyrelle

Anyway, we go to meet Vigo and before we can speak to him, a random girl named Neyrelle shows up wanting to know where her mother is and anyone who played Diablo III will immediately start having flashbacks. Despite some dialogue foreshadowing her appearance, it’s an awkward introduction (she literally appears out of nowhere), and the first of a few cutscenes that seem very forced once you’ve watched them a couple times. Anyway, apparently her mother went into the mine with Lilith, and Vigo let them both through, so now we all get to go into the mine together.

Turns out the mine leads into a gnarly-looking ancient ruin, and all the guards that Vigo sent in with/after Lilith and Neyrelle’s mother are dead… which is all par for the course for a Diablo game. Vigo gets spooked and leaves, but Neyrelle wants to go after her mother, so we go with her. Unsurprisingly, Lilith has corrupted Neyrelle’s mother, so there’s a boss fight with a tragic ending. In order to pursue Lilith, we now need two things: (1) magic spells to cross a spooky black lake in the ruin and (2) Inarius’s blessing.

Inarius and the Bloodied Wolf

Inarius, as it turns out, is a major dingus whose defining features seem to be feeling sorry for himself and looking down on humanity. He dismisses us without blessing us, even after we went on a pilgrimage to meet him. I know some people were excited to meet Inarius in this game, but for me this was exactly what I expected given how unlikeable most of the angels are shown to be in Diablo III. Reverend Mother Prava says this is normal behavior, and decides to give us a blessing in his stead. One begins to wonder why he has a religion in the first place with this attitude, but I digress. During this sequence of quests, we also chat with Vigo about his guilt about letting Lilith into the mine. They bribed him, which he also feels guilty about and he is sure he’ll be punished for it.

Either before or after dealing with Inarius (there’s some leeway with which order we can do things in here), we join Neyrelle at a hidden Horadric vault… or we try to, at least. We get stuck in an illusion first, and are saved by a demonic-looking wolf that appeared briefly to save us from dying in the cold back at the beginning of the Prologue. The wolf takes us to a hideous looking vision of Tristram and warns us against trusting the Horadrim (suspicious), as they always fail (true enough).

It’s pretty obvious that the Bloodied Wolf is some kind of evil entity, though at this time it wasn’t entirely clear to me which one, and it didn’t interest me enough for me to want to make any guesses.

The Vault and the Black Lake

Back in the illusion, we find Neyrelle and leave, bringing us both to the Horadric vault where we find an arcane tome that contains necromantic spells. Not something that one could use to cross a lake, but Neyrelle, who apparently has inherited her mother’s magical talent, decides to use it to resurrect her mother and ask her to help us cross the lake. We both head back to the spooky underground ruin, perform the ritual and we go on alone to confront Lilith.

Turns out Lilith has a surprise for us. It’s just a generic boss demon, which in retrospect makes it a bit anticlimactic from a thematic perspective, but the fight itself is appropriately difficult and then a huge armored knight from the Cathedral shows up to help fight the demon, protecting us with holy light against the demon’s most powerful attacks. After slaying the demon, the knight collapses. We open up the immense suit of armor and find Vigo inside. He dies shortly afterward, but it feels earned after that epic battle, a tragic end to a guilt-ridden guy who was just trying to make his way in the world.

Rathma, the First Necromancer

After saying our final goodbye to Vigo, we traipse after Lilith, who is of course long gone by now. We do learn, however, through a series of prior Lilith-visions and one final cutscene, that Inarius slew Rathma, first of the necromancers and son of Inarius and Lilith, because he refused to give Inarius his key to Hell. This understandably made Lilith very unhappy when she found out. This revelation serves as the conclusion to Act I.

While there are a few minor oddities, such as Neyrelle’s introduction, Act I does a good job of foreshadowing the Cathedral and Inarius as a future antagonist. We’ll be spending much less time on Act II, as there doesn’t require much setup to understand what’s going on there.

Act II: The Horadrim

During the prologue, another Horadrim (besides Lorath) has his name dropped, and it’s mentioned that he’s stationed somewhere in Scosglen, a forested region to the northwest of the Fractured Peaks. After traveling to a keep in Scosglen, we meet Donan and his son Yorin, who is apparently a young member of the Knights Penitent and wants to go out on his own despite his father’s wishes.

We find out that Lilith visited Donan, who denounced her and turned her away. Donan and two legendary druids supposedly killed a powerful demon, Astaroth, years ago and Lilith wants to know where he is. Turns out Donan and his druid buddies didn’t actual kill Astaroth, and instead trapped him in a soulstone which was buried deep beneath the keep we arrived at in the beginning of this act.

After dealing with the druids and failing to prevent the birth of a demonic cerberus created from one of the druid’s blood and anger, we rush to find the soulstone, which Lilith has already found after easily manipulating the druids into telling her how to find it. Also, Donan’s son Yorin is nowhere to be found. Seeing a pattern here?

We find out through our Lilith-vision that she has Yorin and is planning on making him a vessel for Astaroth in exchange for passage to her father Mephisto’s domain in Hell. Donan’s convinced his boy can resist, but this obviously isn’t that sort of story. The act concludes with a vicious battle against Astaroth and his pet cerberus. Removing the soulstone from Astaroth’s corpse reveals Yorin’s body, but it’s too late to save him. Donan is shown to be a very human character with actual depth throughout the act, so naturally he dies later on (spoilers).

Act III: The Apprentice

By this point in the game, after two decent acts I was feeling fairly confident about the game’s story. Turns out I was being overly optimistic. I also didn’t realize there would be six acts (assuming there would only be four, as with the previous games before their expansions). By the end of Act III, things were starting to unravel.

The act starts out decently, with the reveal that Lilith’s pale companion from the prologue is Elias, Lorath’s former apprentice. It takes a good long while before we actually meet Elias, instead trailing in his footsteps much like we did for Lilith in the previous acts. Speaking of Lilith, apart from a couple less impressive in-engine cutscenes, she doesn’t really make her influence known in this act, or in the next two for that matter, which is a bit odd in a game centered around her.

Anyway, our search for Elias eventually leads us (the player character and Lorath) to a large city in the Dry Steppes that has been ransacked and taken hostage by a small army of cannibals.

Our goal is the city’s palace, which is apparently inaccessible for cannibal reasons, or something. With that in mind, we wade through a presumably smaller bunch of cannibals to rescue a person we’ve never heard of who supposedly knows a secret way into the palace. Why this person wasn’t eaten alive is never really explained, and she doesn’t seem to be particularly important aside from the knowledge she has. We rescue her, escape the city through a disused section of the prison, and then the person who told us she was there (also someone we’d never met before this sequence) leaves with her. We never see either of them again. Yup.

In the palace, we learn Elias is trying to summon Andariel, a Lesser Evil previously seen in Diablo II. We leave the palace and enter an arena-like area that every other person I’ve watched play this game has commented on as being a perfect place for a boss fight. I didn’t think about it the first time I saw it, but now I can’t un-see it. I have theories, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

The summoning is to take place at the Temple of the Primes at Mount Civo, a volcano in the Dry Steppes. We travel there and get blessed by the Prime Evils at some shrines (don’t worry, we’re perfectly fine afterwards) so we can enter the temple. Within the temple, we fight through a slew of cultists and find Elias in the middle of his summoning ritual. We’re too late to stop the ritual, though, as expected, so we have to fight Andariel and it’s an epic finish to an otherwise unsteady act… is what I’d love to say, except that’s not what happens at all.

What Really Happened + Theories

Instead of fighting Andariel here, which would have made sense, Lorath interrupts the ritual by apparently rolling a natural 20 on his stealth check, allowing him to just walk up and stab Elias in the chest, then runs away with the woman who was to be Andariel’s host while we fight the cannibal king.

Sorry, did I not mention the cannibal king? We caught a glimpse of him upon entering the palace earlier in the act, shortly before entering the arena that’s clearly designed to host an epic fight of some sort. It’s fairly obvious in retrospect that cannibal man was supposed to be fought there and not at Mt. Civo… which by the way, isn’t even the end of the act. Getting exhausted yet? I certainly was by this point.

Act 3.5

The previous two acts were contained to one region of the continent, but now in the “middle” of Act III, we’re traveling to a new region, Khejistan. It’s also a desert, so there’s not as much of a change of scenery, but it still struck me as odd when first playing it. Why are we here? Well, we still need to track down Elias because… uh…. right, he hasn’t actually summoned Andariel yet, and the person who was going to be Andariel’s host, Taissa, apparently wants revenge on him. That’s understandable, but what’s less logical is why, when learning she’s hearing Andariel’s voice in her head, she isn’t immediately locked up somewhere. Instead, we leave her at a random shrine and then travel into the desert to look for Elias’s hidden retreat.

Meshif, the ship captain from Act II and Act III of Diablo II, is our guide through the desert. He has apparently gone quite mad in his old age (surprising he isn’t dead by now) and thinks Lorath is Deckard Cain. Meshif ends up dying unceremoniously at the end of the act, stabbed by a random cultist, presumably while we were exploring the hidden sanctum. Anyway, we find Elias in his sanctum and fight him a few times. Turns out he can’t be killed by normal means, which is unfortunate but not unexpected for a former Horadrim who now looks very much like a vampire. It’s a neat boss fight and a proper end to Act IV, though. Err, I mean Act III. This is still Act III. We also nab a magical plot device, err, ancient artifact called The Sightless Eye. Yes, that Sightless Eye. As far as I know, rogues don’t have any special dialogue to comment on this, which is a missed opportunity.

Act IV: Interlude

Act IV takes an hour to complete. Yes, you heard that right. It’s so short that Rhykker, a YouTuber well-known in the community who makes content almost exclusively about Diablo and similar games, a man who dressed up as Deckard Cain during his Diablo IV story gameplay livestream for the game’s launch, legitimately did not realize he had finished Act IV until probably an hour or so into Act V. Granted, it was also something like three in the morning at the time and he had been streaming for many hours prior, but it’s an understandable mistake, especially given the length of Act III before it.

Act IV really shouldn’t be called an act in its own right. It serves as a bridge from Acts I – III, which can be completed in any order, to an extent, into Act V – VI, which is a linear sequence. It would make more sense as the end of Act III, or rather if Act 3.5 was rolled into this act, but that would require Act I – III to be played linearly as well. This is a clear case of trying to make a linear story non-linear, and I really don’t understand what they were trying to gain by doing this.

In my mind, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, it would have made far more sense to let the player go where they want, but enforce a linear progression to the story. Most players won’t play the story more than once anyway if they don’t have to (and they don’t), so giving the option to choose an order only makes things more difficult for the writers.

Instead, we have this weird interlude where we assemble the characters we met in the previous acts and then suddenly fight Andariel. The Sightless Eye is also involved here, serving as a way for us to learn that Andariel wants to absorb Mephisto’s power (uh oh), and giving a way for Lilith/Elias to track us (also uh oh). The battle takes place just outside the shrine where we left Taissa, Andariel’s host, in the Kehjistan desert. Elias just… shows up and finishes the summoning, which he could only do because Taissa just walks out into the desert. Taissa doesn’t die when Elias summons Andariel because the writers need her for the next act. Why she couldn’t have just been introduced in Act V, I have no idea.

Act V: The Tree

I actually enjoyed Act V quite a bit. It’s clear that having all the key characters in one place made the writers’ jobs much easier, though we don’t see much of Lilith’s influence here, which is unfortunate. The act, which takes places in the swamps and jungles of Hawezar, revolves around two tasks: (1) finding out how to kill Elias by talking to swamp witches and (2) attuning the now damaged soulstone that previously held Astaroth so it can contain Lilith. As it turns out, the second tasks also involves talking to swamp witches, as Donan is understandably too distraught to do it by himself, and he and Lorath don’t exactly get along very well.

Taissa, the woman we rescued from Elias, who was nearly a host for Andariel, is also a swamp witch. She apparently infiltrated his cult because he took knowledge from the swamp without paying the price. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty sure they could have waited until this act to introduce Taissa in this act and it wouldn’t seem too out of place. Elias is a slippery fellow, so it’s not absurd to think that she wouldn’t have even known where to look for him until the heroes found her.

Anyway, after Taissa helps Donan go on a spiritual journey to find his inner strength, we repair the damaged soulstone, which will be great assuming no one jams it into their forehead. In the deep swamps, we go on another kind of journey with Lorath and Neyrelle (yes, she’s here, too) and follow a giant spirit snake to the Tree of Whispers. The Tree, or rather, the heads of people previously sacrificed to the tree for knowledge, tell us roughly where Elias went after he sought knowledge from it.

The Drowned

We go to the coast of Hawezar and, just as we’re about to find something, Neyrelle gets herself into trouble and gets poisoned by one of the Drowned, an enemy group commonly found in coastal regions. Lorath has to cut her arm off to save her, after which she collapses into a cold fever. The injury feels mostly earned here, though it’s always going to feel a bit weird for NPCs that are normally invulnerable when they’re fighting alongside us, not to mention all of the previous NPC deaths have happened at more dramatic moments, though, so there’s some tonal disconnect here.

At any rate, we leave Lorath to care for Neyrelle and jump into a coffin that takes us underwater to a sunken temple dedicated to Trag’Oul. I thought the spooky ruin from Act I was Rathma’s sanctum, but then they said similar things about this temple, so I’m slightly confused as to the purpose of these places. At any rate, we find Elias’s severed finger, which he placed there as part of his necromantic ritual to keep him alive. We take it and for some reason the temple starts collapsing, and somehow we also make it out alive despite drowning. Okay, maybe Act V doesn’t make as much sense as I thought, but it’s better than Act IV. Err, I mean, Act III.

Attuning the Stone

With the soulstone repaired and Elias’s finger destroyed (we, uh, chucked it into a campfire), we head to a suitably hate-filled Zakarum temple to attune the stone. Elias shows up to crash the party and we fight him with Taissa while Donan, Lorath, and Neyrelle (now apparently an expert Horadrim) keep attuning the stone.

After bringing Elias to near-death, he tries to flee but we catch up to him in the swamp. Lorath stops by long enough to get berated by his former apprentice, then Taissa kills Elias, allowing the Tree of Whispers to finally collect his head. Considering how long it took to finally pin down Elias, it was very satisfying to see his head hanging up there in the Tree with the rest of its victims.

Act VI: Hatred

Realizing we still have no idea where Lilith is (durr), Lorath makes a deal with the Tree to find out. Turns out she’s in Caldeum, a city in Kehjistan introduced in Diablo III, opening a hell portal beneath it. Some people have pointed out that one would think people would know if there was a portal to hell there, but seeing as the city was ruled by Belial and they didn’t know, somehow I don’t think they’re the most perceptive bunch.

Returning to Kehjistan, we find Inarius’s fanatical servants in the Church of Light rounding up “cultists” and doing all kinds of horrific things to them in His Holy Name. It’s gruesome, but not unexpected. Upon reaching Caldeum, their forces are unsurprisingly hesitant to work with us. There’s a brief confrontation with Inarius where he talks down to us, then steals our soulstone (jerk) and flies off. We finally convince Reverend Mother Prava to let us go with her to the portal, but at some point we get separated and she goes ahead with her Knights Penitent.

We eventually reach the portal, though not before fighting another Lesser Evil in the form of Duriel which, while a nice surprise, is not as good as his introduction in Diablo II. Given how much Andariel was built up, a bit more direct foreshadowing throughout the acts would have been nice; the most we get is some environmental clues in this act, and not that long before we actually fight him.

Welcome to Hell

Once in Mephisto’s realm, we fight through a swathe of demons and find that Prava’s forces, unsurprisingly, have been slaughtered. Somehow, Prava is still alive and was carrying our soulstone, because it’s a plot device and we need it back. Donan heals Prava enough for her to escape back to Sanctuary and become a problem for us in future installments. We fight lots of powerful demons after this, including the world-boss Ashava, which I was not expecting, then crawl our way up into a tower where we see signs of Lilith’s passage.

Through our character’s Lilith-vision, this is where we see the game’s only other pre-rendered cinematic, an extended version of the one show in more recent trailers, and it’s very good. Inarius confronts Lilith, tries to kill her and expects Heaven to take him back. When it doesn’t, Lilith tells him he’s delusional and then rips his wings off. There are some people who don’t or won’t like this because they were hoping Inarius would kick ass, but given that he was instead an ass himself, I found it very satisfying to watch.

At some point in the following sequences, Donan inspects some damned souls that are stuck in a wall and sustains an injury that will eventually kill him as a result. Remember how earlier I said he was too human of a character for him to live to the end? Yeah, this is how he dies. I understand that this is how real life works sometimes – people die for stupid reasons all the time – but in a narrative, even a bleak, one, it isn’t satisfying at all. I don’t know why they would choose this, even if he was supposed to die some other way and it didn’t work out. Why not just let the man live?

Voices and Choices

Anyway, we pull out our other plot device, the Sightless Eye, and use it to figure out where Lilith is. It backfires again, worse this time, and now we’re trapped in our own mind with her. Lilith, who we really haven’t seen much evidence of aside from her cultists and Elias since Act I and Act II, uses this opportunity try to convince us to side with her against the Prime Evils, and lead humanity against them. It’s not a bad argument, especially considering she hasn’t been front and center recently, but our player character just says (in essence), “Nuh uh.”

There’s not really an argument to be had that Lilith isn’t evil considering everything she has done up to this point, but the fact that all our character has to say in response is the intellectual equivalent of “I am rubber, you are glue” makes me wish the player character didn’t have voice lines in this game at all. They don’t do a very good job of reestablishing Lilith as an antagonist in this part of Act VI, which makes fighting her later on seem slightly forced, even though it’s the logical conclusion of the story they established at the beginning.

If she’s being manipulative, it should be more clear, and if she’s not, there has to be a line she openly wants to cross at this point to make it clear we have to stand. An “I agree with your motives, but not your methods” sort of thing. There’s also not enough of an established relationship between us and Lilith (apart from the blood that gives us Lilith-vision where convenient) to add enough weight to this non-decision. The game would be stronger without this sequence, or at least without most of the dialogue in it.

The Bloodied Wolf

At some point during the Lilith mind-battle sequence, we encounter the Bloodied Wolf. He shows up a few times before this, but I’ve avoided mentioning it because it doesn’t add that much to the story. The Bloodied Wolf is Mephisto, Lilith’s father, the Lord of Hatred. He’s still reforming after years of being defeated both directly and indirectly, and obviously doesn’t want Lilith stealing his power. However, the most he offers in efforts to convince us to take his side is that Lilith absorbing him will be “bad for Sanctuary.” Regardless of whether he’s lying or not, he doesn’t have an actual argument to back it up, further undermining Lilith as an antagonist at this stage in the game.

When we finally escape our own mind, Donan is pretty much dead, and Lorath and Neyrelle (yep, she’s still here) are distraught. Neyrelle manages to pull herself together and, after we cross a lake of fire with Mephisto’s help, she suggests, “Hey, maybe put Mephisto in the soulstone instead.” On its surface, this is actually a decent idea, and seems even better when our character stupidly spouts off something along the lines of “I don’t know how I feel about Mephisto.” On the other hand, given the Horadrim’s track record with keeping demons in soulstones, I’m not sure either option is actually better than just killing them and letting them take however many years it is to reform.

Anyway, we take her advice and she traps Mephisto’s essence in the stone, then makes like a tree and gets the hell out of there, leaving us to deal with Lilith who, thanks to Mephisto’s fuckery, for once is behind us instead of the other way around. Not particularly enjoying being denied her prize, she attacks us in the inevitable final boss fight of the story.

Neyrelle and the Soulstone

Eventually we escape Hell with Lorath, only to find that Neyrelle has taken off with the soulstone, leaving a letter behind telling us not to come after her. Traditionally, this hasn’t worked well for anyone, so I’m not sure what she’s planning on doing exactly, but presumably well find out in an upcoming expansion or DLC.

I’m sure there will be people that hate Neyrelle’s guts, but I didn’t mind Neyrelle too much. That said, I was really hoping she’d stick around to become the next Lorath instead of becoming another tragedy in the making. We could use some strong female characters in Diablo that aren’t evil or destined to be consumed by evil, and even Lilith got a bit shortchanged in the end. Taissa almost gets there, but is mostly set dressing until Act V, then disappears.

Final Thoughts

Diablo IV’s story had potential, but a lot of that potential was wrecked by strange plotting decisions and a weird lack of Lilith in the mid-to-late stages of the story. Donan’s death is unearned, and propping Neyrelle up as the next Horadrim and them shipping her off to another continent just feels bad, and not in a good way. Still, there were some very cool characters introduced that I will definitely remember, my personal favorites being Elias and Lorath, and Lilith is still rad even if she didn’t quite get the ending she deserved.

I don’t doubt that the game’s turbulent development process contributed significantly to the story’s ups and downs, and I’m sympathetic to that, but I can’t help but long for what might have been and wonder about the specific circumstances that made the game what it is today.

Part V: Conclusion

Whew! We made it. One thing I didn’t mention earlier is the state of the servers, mostly because I haven’t had any major issues with them. From what I can tell, they ironed out most of the issues during their beta weekends and server slam. I’m sure there have been some issues and I’ve certainly seen messages about doing maintenance, but personally I’ve had short queue times (if any) and only one or two disconnects. The only lag I’ve experienced has been when riding mounts. I’ve heard there’s some issues with clans, but I haven’t used them yet, so I don’t know what the current state of them is.

So… all that said, do I regret buying Diablo IV? No, probably not. Despite all the issues with the game’s story, I’m still enjoying my time with the game and I’m reasonably confident it will, much like Diablo III before it, gradually be shaped into one of my favorite games of all time. Is it that game right now? No, and if you haven’t picked it up yet, maybe wait a while. Or join me in hell, I’m fine either way.

DISCLAIMER

While I do want the Diablo IV dev team to succeed, I fully acknowledge that there’s been a lot of unsavory bullshit happening at Activision-Blizzard. From the very believable allegations of harassment, the underpaid workers, to a host of other issues, Blizzard has problems and I don’t doubt some of that applies to this team as well. From what I can tell, their CEO has only made worse through his clear lack of interest in solving or even acknowledging any of this. While I wish the best for the devs, I don’t support this kind of behavior and I certainly don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to support Blizzard or their products as a result of all of this nonsense.