Diablo IV Is Weird

You can’t please everyone

Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author.

I’ve played — let’s call it a “ridiculous” amount of Diablo III over the last ten plus years across every platform it was released on. I’ve clocked in well over 1,000 hours in that game, and I’ve picked that number without checking on the real number that I know is actually much higher so I can obfuscate the absurdity.

Diablo IV is therefore one of my most anticipated games of the year. Or at least, it was until I played a bunch of this past weekend’s pre-order beta. I’m still going to play through the whole thing when it launches, but man…what a weird game.

It truly feels like a game that spent almost a decade in development and got stuck in an identity crisis as a result. It draws in stuff from III as well as the earlier titles, seemingly at random, bashing it all together with lessons learned from modern indie RPG hits and other big franchises like Dark Souls.

Diablo III was a huge hit on the back of its accessibility and precisely tuned action gameplay. You can pick it up and learn it in a few minutes and keep playing basically forever thanks to a combination of fun random generation, tons of additional difficulty levels to work through, and new gear drops and builds to try out. Last year’s Diablo Immortal was a super safe follow-up, bringing that same sort of action and gentle difficulty…