The Diablo franchise holds a very special place in my heart as Diablo II was the very first game I ever played. I was born in 1995 and I got to experience Diablo II around the time I was around six or seven after visiting some relatives where my cousin was playing it on his PC. Shout out to my cousin Bradley for ignoring game age ratings, by the way.
Now I don’t need to praise Diablo II, which many consider to be an all-timer and the granddaddy of ARPGs, but now imagine that quality of game as the first game you ever played.
With no PC at home I played Diablo II (or watched my cousin play it) whenever I got to visit, but I remained a fan of the franchise until I saved up enough money to buy a PlayStation 3 many years later, using accumulated birthday money. It was there that I played Diablo III and arguably the better version of the game without the disastrous real money auction house.
It was also the better version, in my opinion, thanks to console controls. Here’s where purists come for my head, but Diablo III on the PS3 really made me appreciated the Diablo series more as the controller gave it an entirely new feel more akin to a third person action adventure, and less like the endless mouse clicking that the ARPG genre had become.
This stance was strengthened even more when the Diablo III: Eternal Collection launched on the Nintendo Switch. I had so much fun with this now portable console Diablo that I have replayed the campaign of Diablo III rather reliably every year or so.
Unfortunately, while I was still having fun with the Diablo franchise over the years, Blizzard has slowly decayed and is now mostly seen with animosity from the gaming community where once there was admiration. This poisoning of the company’s perception (for many awful reasons I don’t want to get into now) led to Diablo IV being less anticipated than it should have been before launch, and less talked about after launch.
That launch happened more than a year ago in June 2024 and now I am finally giving the game a try. Why now, of all times? Game Pass. With the addition of the title to PC Game Pass I can see what’s on offer here without giving any money directly to Blizzard and, if it’s not to my liking for whatever reason, I can uninstall with no hard feelings.
After jumping through the extra installation hoops of also needing Battle.net and logging into a Blizzard account, I was in. Diablo IV starts with a cutscene that is impeccably rendered and rivals blockbuster movies, but it goes on for a bit too long. Most of the opening hour of the game is cinematics, tutorial and dialogues which I simply can’t fathom for a series that can be explained as “click on the enemies”.
That aside, once I finally did have control of my picked Barbarian class – chosen as melee classes usually work best with a controller – I was in for a treat. Each and every attack in Diablo IV looks, sounds and feels like an event. It’s as if every enemy is made of walking dynamite and my sets off a an explosion with every swing. This is a real testament to the work of the game designers in tandem with the sound designers to make these attacks so impactful.
Another treat is the fact that my controller worked natively. Diablo III on PC doesn’t have native controller support last time I checked and I was worried that would be the same here. Thankfully, for the diehard controller Diablo players like me, the PC version works out of the box for us.
Continuing my early adventure to chase down Lilith and I was surprised at how relatively simple the upgrade tree is. Over the past few years Path of Exile has risen to the top of ARPGS and brought with it upgrade trees that look more like the wall sprawlings of a mad man instead of any kind of game mechanic.
That isn’t to say that Diablo IV is inherently simple or dumbed down, as there’s still lot of complexity to be found, especially for those who play the Seasonal Realm and dig more into the online aspects of the game.
We may as well discuss that quickly. In Diablo IV you can play a character in one of two realms: a Seasonal Realm or an Eternal Realm. My basic understandings of this, from a single playthrough, is that the Seasonal Realm is the always updating, always online, end game focused way to play. The Eternal Realm, on the other hand, is more akin to the vanilla singleplayer experience without any of the limited-time or newer content.
I honestly dislike this game design decision. This split feels like Blizzard is trying to have its cake and eat it to by teetering on the edge of making a fully online only experience to milk more money from players, while still offering some kind of singleplayer campaign for those very players who demand it and have come to expect it over the years.
Despite my choice to stick to the Eternal Realm and not touch anything involving multiplayer, other players still ran around my world at times, I got lots of in-game alerts about PvP content I had no interest in and I was still forced to log into the servers every time I wanted to play.
Maybe my take on the realms would change if I was playing Diablo IV as a hobby, but right now it all feels superfluous. It also feels like a lot of content is being held from me – content that is already made and being enjoyed by others in exchange for their money, their time to learn the online components or both.
Thankfully, returning back to the subject of complexity, there is a lot of that thanks to the various effects and special armour and weapons the game has to offer. Balancing this, along with your skill tree, is a real treat and it can lead you to some very fun builds either intentionally or, as I learned, unintentionally.
During my playthrough I had stumbled into pieces of gear that made my Barbarian rather tanky with his Iron Skin ability. This was great, but my damage was lacking, until I found a polearm weapon that would trap the souls of defeated enemies inside of it. To release these souls I needed to use a defensive ability, like Iron Skin, and my Barbarian would basically turn into a nuclear weapon. The released souls would run out of my character and explode on enemies like ghastly versions of the Beheaded Kamikazes from Serious Sam. This combination could one-shot kill almost every single boss monster from the middle of the game until the end.
This fun I was having was undercut but the mid- and late-game where new types of gear became few and far between, and I got too familiar with these offerings. Some say that ARPGs live and die by their loot and, in Diablo IV, I think there needed to be a tad more variety as you climb through the levels.
This problem is half on me and half on the game. For myself, I should have been experimenting way more with the existing pool of items to make new combinations, but on the game’s part that pool should have been deeper. And yes, I know I could have looked up build guides and similar, but the Diablo IV campaign is so easy that there’s really no need.
With so many ups and downs we summarise this all into a question: Do I recommend Diablo IV? I’d say yes, but only through Game Pass if you also intend on playing it like I did, as a singleplayer experience.
I’d actually love to come back to the game, in a year or two once I had forgotten some of it, to play through again with a new class and, hopefully, with some new content in the Eternal Realm.
If you want a new game to play as a hobby, I still recommend giving it a try through Game Pass if possible, so you can get that first hit for free.
Diablo IV is worthy of the Diablo legacy despite all the controversy with Blizzard, but I really don’t believe it will be remembered as one of the greats or for doing anything particularly groundbreaking. It’s fun to just turn the game on and mindlessly kill some monsters, and maybe increase my efficiency at doing so by a few percent by the end of the day.
This article is part of an infrequent series where I play through my backlog games. Previous articles cover:
