One knows basically what to expect when starting a new game of Diablo: archetypal role-playing game class selections, gothic Christian aesthetics, and hordes of hellish monsters to vanquish. In this, Diablo 4 is perfectly competent. Unfortunately, however, the game suffers from a catastrophic lack of character. Having raised my sorcerer to level 100 and turned the endgame treadmill over a few times, I feel a disappointing indifference to the entire game.
I finally bought and played Diablo 4 during it’s much-lauded
overhaul Season 4, called “Loot Reborn.” I cannot therefore comment on the
apparently even less playable state it was in for the first three seasons. What
I can say, though, is that by season 4 some extremely-online game designers have
certainly gotten ahold of the game. In its current incarnation, Diablo 4 has
been woven out of too many baroque, interconnected, and exhaustingly “gamey”
systems. From the paragon boards to masterworking items, Diablo 4 hasn’t done
enough with its world and fiction to justify these intricate, fiddly systems.
This isn’t to say that intricate and interlocking systems are necessarily a bad thing, but Diablo 4 has done a poor job of integrating these systems into a fantasy experience that we might care about. The paragon board, for instance, can be assembled and rotated into myriad combinations, with hundreds or thousands of ways to spend the paragon points. Then one will choose glyphs—which need to be levelled up themselves in order to be effective—and slot those into specific places in the board. I had no idea there would be several different boards, much less that they would be connected together when I first started allocating points. I also found it preposterous that I would spend precious points on dexterity while playing as a sorcerer, for instance.
The paragon system feels like an invention specifically for
the Icy Veins and WoWhead era of gaming. To truly read and interpret all the
various distributions of boards, points, and glyphs would require an absurd dedication
to the game. Instead, a player can simply log onto the preferred theorycrafting
website and copy a build from there. Diablo 4 has repeatedly, even deliberately broken that “fourth wall” of gaming that suggests a fantasy world
that is enacted by the computerized systems spelled out in attributes,
experience points, skills, and all the other red meat of RPG play. Speaking
directly to the player with the season name “Loot Reborn” seems another rather
telling warning.
The entire experience of Diablo 4 feels like a game, and not
a fantasy adventure. From the opening screens where the game desperately claws your
attention from the new campaign and character options towards the always glittering
“Shop” options, through to the season rewards that I always must scroll past
because I have not paid for the upgraded Season Pass—I am constantly being marketed
to by a game I have already purchased.
In fact, the realm of Sanctuary feels more like a casino floor than a landscape torn between angels and demons. The presence of other player-characters solidifies this feeling, as we all trudge back and forth between the different flavors of roulette wheel: the Artificer’s Pit, Helltides, World Bosses, and the Tree of Whispers to name a few. There is something about the collective fixation on the various loot farming spots and the subsequent salvaging operations at the blacksmith that is eerily similar to rows of zombie-retirees feeding their savings into slot machines in Fort Lauderdale. One must ask, from time to time, whether we heroes are particularly effective if so many of us cannot stop the hordes of monsters that besiege Sanctuary on the hour, every hour.
Somehow, Diablo 4 simply takes itself so seriously that one cannot help but feel ridiculous. By contrast, Diablo 3 had a slight wry distance from its own aesthetic, while also maintaining a simpler set of mechanics. The game asked less of the player’s suspended disbelief and gave more in return. I still recall the snark of my wizard who could fire starship phasers out of his fists. My stolid Diablo 4 sorcerer Kaseem would never quip about being so good he even impresses himself. The ridiculousness of Diablo 3 was quietly intentional.
Diablo 3 and 4 contain a similar super-power collection mechanic, whereby magical equipment of great power is sacrificed in order to extract their specific essence. The player can then imbue that power onto a different, more convenient item. To gain this mystical ability in Diablo 3, players must not only acquire the long-lost Horadric Cube, but must also first defeat, then negotiate with the reproachful and cynical ghost-wizard, Zoltun Kulle. The process itself is a ritual, requiring various reagents and an admonishment from Kulle including lines such as: “You have access to a wondrous artifact of old, and that's what you want to do with it?”
In Diablo 4 this function is delegated to any given
blacksmith in Sanctuary, who presumably hammers the magic out of the item and
into the player-character’s Codex.
Diablo 3 exudes a certain joie de vivre—the characters
are more amusing, the outfits more outlandish, and the gameplay rolls along at
a high pace. By contrast, Diablo 4 is self-serious, desultory, and tedious. While
it does capture a certain sense of exhilaration when my sorcerer explodes into
a three-pronged flame-thrower that incinerates entire screens’ worth of
enemies, my D3 sorcerer could do pretty much the same thing. And he did it while
wearing a garish outfit of bright red and gold and popping off
self-congratulatory comparisons to his former colleagues.
Even when copying inexplicably precisely from Diablo 3’s
homework, the newer game misses the point. The Artificer’s Pit—a procedurally-generated
ladder of increasingly difficult and self-contained dungeons—is functionally
identical to the Greater Nephalem Rifts in Diablo 3, excepting three details:
First, the aesthetic of Diablo 3 leant itself far better to the wide range of
often rather incongruent environments and combinations of enemies that were
randomly thrown together in each new Rift. In Diablo 4 we explore the same dull
brown dungeons and swampy forests every time. Secondly, the Rifts appeared to
be essentially infinite—if the player happens to take a very fast route from
the opening portal to the exit portal, there was always another level to the
rift. The sense of this reality-bending alternate dimension contained in the Rift
was all-consuming. By contrast, the Pit appears to have only two levels – I have
yet to find a third portal to go deeper into the Pit. Third and finally, the Dibalo
3 Rifts opened and closed with the invitation and congratulations of Orek, the
nephalem shade. Why Blizzard decided to keep the random obelisk sitting in the
middle of town as the location from which to summon the Pit, but not the fun of
a character like Orek is a mystery. Who, by the way, is the Artificer?
Diablo 4 was inevitable. The venerable Diablo series will continue, but will it ever reach the high watermark that Diablo 3 represented? The transformation from Diablo 2 (and its expansion Hellfire) from the highly PC-centric click fest into a refined, couch-and-controller-oriented magical beat ‘em up of later Diablo 3 seasons cannot be overstated. There was something deeply compelling about that game, and Diablo 4 seems to miss virtually all of it.
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