Diablo 4: My Thoughts
Date: 2025-03-28
The long and short of it is I had a total blast playing this. If I hadn't hooked my wife on wanting to play it couch co-op when we first started I would have absolutely marathoned my way through it obsessively, but as it stands it took a loooong while because she tends to get a bit bored of video games pretty quickly, so we beat the story in like 1-2 hour chunks of playing
I've been what I would call a Diablo fangirl since the very beginning. I'm the exact right age that I was 9 when the first one came out so I was a young teen when 2 came out, and those two games had their hooks in me deep
Diablo 2 especially, I'll always have a soft spot for. The summer of 2000 was the only time my family ever moved. I had lived in North Dakota for my whole childhood, and in the summer of 2000 we moved to another state where I would spend the rest of my youth (Middle and high school and undergrad). I was absolutely despondent to move. I'm quite sensitive to routines as an adult and as a kid I was as well, so I wasn't, y'know, handling it all that well.
My folks more or less bribed me with getting Diablo 2 on release, and in a memory that is still as vivid in my memory right now as reality was then, the same day I got it I kicked the computer tower out of frustration as it was taking a while to load and it made some unholy noise so I ejected the play CD and discovered I had scratched it badly. I cried the entire way to the Comp USA in the neighboring town where my dad bought a CD repair kit that somehow (?????) worked.
In a kind of wonderful way, I can similarly place my playing of Diablo 3 and now Diablo 4 into these fascinatingly distinct categories. Much like when I first played Diablo 2, my wife and I moved across the country just this last fall and I wasn't feeling incredibly hot, but we started playing it and it's not so connected to this specific place which we've grown to love.
What I find so interesting about discussions and chatter and reviews--and even development!--about all of the games in this series is how important the grinding and high end dungeons and repeatability and longevity are, and here's where I'll show a bit of my weirdo flag when I say that my entire passionate engagement with this series has always been with them as more or less one-and-done story games: I never played D1 on Battle.net after the first time I ever did and got in between a PK v. PK-PK battle and decided it wasn't for me. I beat the game with all three heroes and was done. The same was true for D2--beat it with all the classes and that was that. With D3 I didn't even play it until the Necromancer was in and I just played the story.
And now here were are with D4 and I'll be very, brutally, totally honest with you: I genuinely don't know what it means for there to be these "seasons" the interface is hitting me with. On the lives of my cats I promise I'm not doing a bit when I ask: how is one meant to play this? Am I meant to create a new character each season and replay the game every season? To what end? For what purpose? I truly don't "get" it.
For me, the Diablo games are story games first--and I love all of the world building and the whole setting (I'm a lesbian Episcopalian who was raised Roman Catholic of course i love this religion/demon stuff). I especially love how this one is a post-apocalypse. It feels so barren and sorrowful and wretched and dark but without being (imo) like, grimdark. This may be a weird pull, but I found it compelling in its sort of millenarianism/dead world energy in the same way I found that in the Zelda Switch game. There's something so compelling about traversing your way through a world that's existing as a candle flickering in the wind
Fundamentally, I'm the last person you're going to be interested in getting like, concrete button-pressing gameplay action vibes from: I played as a Necromancer and I just had my skeleton friends and a golem and pressed some buttons while my wife was a Rogue who shot arrows and such. The honest truth is that I don't think we were ever in any serious risk of danger even in the big bosses and I'm glad for that because we were just there to press buttons and whatnot
I had an absolute blast, and I'm so excited for us to play the expansion
