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Diablo IV Tries A Radical New Concept: Fun
The Season of Blood has come to Diablo IV, and already it has had some significant problems.
Last week’s launch was suddenly delayed mere minutes before it was supposed to arrive, which made all the streamers and gaming influencers who were poised to give their first impressions instead post many “SEASON TWO DELAYED!” videos. Once the new content went live later in the day, cross platform multiplayer had been totally disabled, and a crusty online feel pervaded the first several hours of play.
Although the multiplayer issue is now sorted out, player trading has been disabled due to a newly discovered item duping exploit that Blizzard is hoping to fix soon. A very similar thing happened in the early days of the first season.
Underneath all of this weirdly unexpected launch mess (the game has been live for half a year and they had months of promo prepping for this season), there’s something new I didn’t expect: the game is now kind of fun to actually play!
I’ve catalogued Diablo IV’s woes extensively, and before the launch of this season I even declared it near-dead. I don’t think that this new update will save the game, but it has now finally taken a single solid step closer to being what I thought it would be all along given its development pedigree and lengthy production cycle.
Ding Dong The Grind is Dead
The biggest issue that Season of Blood fixes is the nightmare grind that used to be the hallmark of this new Diablo, which made everything past the first half of the skill tree a true slog. Blizzard has now increased the XP earn rate by a comical forty percent, finally bringing the game’s level-up rate in line with the feel of earlier Diablo’s — and plainly showing just how much extra bloat was built into this new version.
Progression actually comes at a good clip now, and leveling up characters is suddenly fun. I might finally finish getting a hardcore character all the way to the level cap, a true Diablo tradition I’ve done many times in the past but never bothered to do here.
The XP gain is augmented by more enemies in the world to fight, too, even on the…
