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…
