A couple of weeks ago, the nightmare corporate gaming machine that is Activision/Blizzard/Microsoft released a breathless promo video touting the many “improvements” coming to Diablo IV this month.
I thought it was a PR disaster. Rather than articulate fun reasons to get excited about the game again, the video instead featured several dudes talking about menus, statistics, and affixes. It was a total whiff compared to the slick story-driven marketing of Diablo IV’s past seasons, in my eyes, and I couldn’t see why I should start to care again.
Well, I just spent the morning playing with the new systems, and I have a begrudging admission to make: Loot Reborn is quite good — but not for any of the reasons they laid out in their video.
Here’s where the new Diablo patch goes very right, and where it very nearly crashed down again and got uninstalled off my PS5 once more.
Fixed Difficulty Curve
This is a big one. Since launch, something has felt off about the experience of playing Diablo IV at a deep, fundamental level. Rather than the ever-increasing power explosion of earlier titles, D4 often felt like a chore…a sort of push-pull against its monsters. They’d get tougher and your character would get different, forcing you to…
