Diablo IV - There's no Sanctuary to be found here

Back when I favorably "reviewed" Diablo III, I was not exactly a fan of the franchise, and even my excitement for it waned soon enough when the review "mode" was over. As you may recall, it did re-emerge, with a vengeance. Diablo III eventually managed to pull me in enough to not only buy and play the expansion and the Necromancer DLC, but to also play through various seasons, soloing 100+ level Rifts, on multiple characters, and leave it with more than one of each character per class geared to the nines and an almost by-heart knowledge of multiple builds for them. I even bought the game on console, namely Switch. To a hardcore Diablo player this will sound like child's play, but to me, that was huge.

I actually started reading up on the lore. And, more importantly, on the fascinating start of the franchise. In fact, I was so pulled in that not only did I buy (twice) the remastered version of a game I tried over a dozen unsuccessful times to get into when Diablo II Resurrected came out, but to also play a fair bit of Diablo Immortal on my phone. Hell, it even made me buy the original Diablo again on GoG and give the OG Diablo II another go before Resurrected came out. However, none of the games managed to scratch the same itch that Diablo III specifically had scratched for me.

So, after seeing the pre-release footage and articles regarding Diablo IV, I made the obvious choice to stay away for a couple of years. Give the dust time to settle, the teething issues to go away, the price to drop. Maybe wait for the inevitable expansion or DLC that will add the monk class back.

But just from reading this, you all know how long that decision lasted, right?

If you're looking for a one sentence verdict: it's good. Like, really good. If you want to know a little more, Diablo IV is, in many ways, Diablo II: Part II. However, it retains many of the changes that made Diablo III last for as long as it did with a playerbase as wide as it has. 

If you want to know more...then let's break it down.

Visually, Diablo IV is a lot closer to II than III. Though both games had a healthy (or, depending on your viewpoint, unhealthy) dose of horror and gore elements, IV veers closer to II's muted, gothic aesthetic than III's more vibrant overall look, its earthy tones of brown and grey mirroring the juxtaposition of Quake to Doom. The overall art style opts for a more...realistic view than its last two predecessors did, which lends itself well to the aforementioned gothic look. Gorgeous visuals, coupled with impressive abilities, enemies exploding into bucketfulls of liquid gore and viscera, enemies of various shapes, sizes and types, imposing bosses, varying environments, customisable player models (more than just gender and gear, this time), a zoomed in, cinematic eye for cutscenes that include actual emotes rather than simply voice acting, pretty much everything that the previous games did well visually, IV not only repeats, but also builds on and surpasses. From a PC standpoint, the game while certainly more demanding hardware-wise than III, is nevertheless not outrageously so: 3440x1440 with everything turned on to the max will net you an everage of 100-140 fps on a system that would have been considered entry-mid a couple of years ago, and that's without FSR or DLSS active.

This "yes, and" approach persists across many of the game's aspects, from gameplay to story to sound to loot systems. If you've played Diablo II Resurrected, you'd be excused in feeling that game played, in retrospect, both like an experiment regarding the players' reception of IV, as well as a refresh of what is, for all intents and purposes, IV's source material.

Now, it's well documented that I was not a fan of II. Even Resurrected did not manage to excite me as much as I had hoped. And yet, IV retains enough of the combat and story flow of III to feel like a middle ground between II's more "stilted" approach to progress and III's illusion of fluidity and bombastic viscerality, balanced just enough to feel both organic and, at times, tactical. The game makes sure that you take stock of this from very early on in your adventure, using many of these familiar yet evolved elements in tandem, within the first half-hour, to show you that this is not your daddy's Diablo, making the story even more integral and impressively (and, importantly, personally) told, without however imposing it or doing it in a way that's detrimental to the gameplay. 

Ah, yes. A key element that creates this feeling is the gameplay. Take, for example, the skill tree. While it retains the "tree" format seen in II, it has many of the simplified UI elements that III introduced. Skills are divided in categories which progressively unlock the more skillpoints you allocate, allowing you to pick one (or more) per category. However, this time you can further specialize them as well as allocate ranks on them to increase their effect, and passives are also present in the same tree rather than having a separate interface like III did. Builds require more in-depth thought than they did in 3 (and II, for that matter) and seem less dependent on gear sets and bonuses, while at the same time remaining plenty easy to intuit. 

Additionally, further emphasizing familiarity while going deeper, many of the signature abilities return, but they do so in fresh ways, and are complemented by interesting mechanics. An example: the barbarian has some signature abilities carrying over from previous games (such as Whirlwind or Hammer of the Ancients), but this time around is carrying 4 weapons at the same time, can (and is encouraged to) assign a different weapon to each offensive ability, and there are abilities and buffs that trigger when swapping weapons enough times or on a short rotation, encouraging experimentation rather than just clicking on an enemy until they burst into gore and gold. This is a feature that could have been an item set before - now it's a core mechanic of the class. This approach persists for all of the game's launch classes: Barbarian, Necromancer, Rogue, Druid and Sorcerer.

However, IV's gameplay is not solely borrowing and evolving elements from its own lineage, but also borrowing some of the MMO elements introduced in a not that known offshoot of Diablo, specifically Marvel Heroes, a game that has been dead and buried since the end of 2017. And while this may not seem like an apt comparison at first and may, in fact, be dismissed as personal bias because I loved that game, bear with me.

Diablo IV has one large, shared world, in which you will encounter other people in hubs or questing out in the wild, and you can choose how much -if at all- you will interact with them, or -indeed- even acknowledge them. You can choose to approach it as a single player experience, or an MMO one. But at the same time, all story or progress-specific areas or dungeons are instanced, making those areas personal to you (or your party). So the game world is effectively split in twain: the shared overworld, and the personal underworld. Access to the highest levels of difficulty in the overworld is achieved via completion of a "trial" capstone dungeon.

And this, was the exact same model Marvel Heroes introduced back in 2015 (and refined when their highest overworld difficulty was introduced). Now I just know there's some other game out there probably using that same formula (maybe even that introduced it before Marvel Heroes), but it's where I saw it first at least on a large scale, so...sue me?

The approach of warped familiarity mentioned above also affects things such as the loot system (with randomized items now also extending to legendaries), the aspect system that resembles the legendary + Cube system from III, semi-randomised world events and areas, enemies, and even game modes (campaign or adventure mode), and multiple tiers of difficulty. Entirely new concepts in the formula (like mounts or the interconnected open overworld rather than being broken down into multiple smaller scale maps) are still familiar and normalised enough as overall gaming concepts, in retrospect feeling more like necessary omissions from previous entries, rather than truly new additions. In short, IV will feel familiar enough yet fresh to veterans of both II (Resurrected more so than vanilla) and III, while launching with a formula that aims to achieve the longevity of its predecessors. 

However, I cannot, in all good conscience, not go to this one final disclaimer: unlike its predecessors which were one and done in terms of purchases (expansions notwithstanding as those were at least substantial additions in terms of content), Blizzard has peppered the menu interface with dedicated pages of microtransactions, which initially both scared and infuriated me to see on a 70 dollar game of a company that should be desperate to earn some good faith back from its fans after the multiple years of misconduct allegations, mass walkouts, dwindling playerbase on their main cash cow of WoW, negative media coverage, WarCraft III Reforged, Diablo Immortal backlash and the most recent Overwatch fiascos. Especially considering that Diablo III also launched with a store/auction house back in the day, something they themselves decided they had to remove a couple of years later (the official line was it was for gameplay approach and balance issues, but rumour has it they just didn't want to keep maintaining a feature the playerbase did not use as much as they had hoped and was not providing enough revenue to justify its continued upkeep). The silver lining is that - at least for now- these microtransactions pertain solely to cosmetic items with zero gameplay impact (unlike Diablo Immortal currently and Diablo III back at launch) and are thus completely optional.