Last week, I was all primed and ready to give the nightmare corporate machine that is Microsoft and Activision Blizzard more money for more of their recent Diablo game. They’re just hours away from launching a new expansion for Diablo IV that includes the next chapter of the story as well as a radical overhaul of the gameplay and difficulty systems into something more like Diablo III.
But then the reviews hit. The expansion is only six hours long, and while the new systems do seem like they’re good and fun — couldn’t I just go back and play the older Diablo games if I yearn for that style of design rather than the still-troubled new title? Do I really want to keep pouring money into a full-priced game that’s also designed to extract tons of extra funds out of my wallet in a predatory manner?
Thank goodness Throne and Liberty came along at just the right moment to nudge me away from all this. It’s the newest game from NCSoft, makers of Guild Wars, and Amazon, makers of late stage capitalism. Like Diablo, it’s packed full of different ways to spend money on various fantasy items, but unlike Diablo it has a starting price of “free” and its also removed from any sort of legacy baggage of having to carry on a long-running…
