How Many Clicks Does It Take To Get to the Center of Diablo? [A Franchise Retrospective]

[Music] I was born in 1988 into a world that feels increasingly alien and foreign as time goes on every generation's got to go through it I suppose and at 35 I'm already deep into my back in my day this used to be all orange groves era the amount of Change Is So total so overwhelming that it becomes necessary to track individual things across time instead of trying to discuss the whole in terms of video games and pop culture Diablo is a particularly fascinating lens through which to view almost 30 years of colossal growth in the industry Diablo 1 was a major pioneering title when it was released on New Year's Eve 1997 one of the first realtime action RPGs the first game to feature Blizzard's battl net multiplayer matchmaking service it was an experimental gamble that resulted in one of the most iconic instantly recognizable games of the 1990s Diablo has never had regular sequels there are typically 5 to 10 years between releases but each sequel has released to a greater and greater frenzy of popularity and as the series moves along greater and greater criticism for its Embrace of naked profiteering pushing the boundaries of what players will tolerate when it comes to monetized game design Diablo at its heart is one of the most fundamentally simple game Concepts there is you click on the monsters they die and you get a reward this feels good so you kill more monsters and get more rewards the early games conceive of this as an activity that you might eventually want to wind to a close the later game create an environment where a player can click on Monsters to receive rewards indefinitely seasonally a looping and self-reinforcing process designed to preference players who put hundreds on hundreds of hours into the game over those who attempt to engage with it as a more finite experience Diablo today is a brighter more impressive more polished experience than it ever was in the 9s yet it's also a far more corporate manipulative product modern Diablo is still full of gorgeous art exciting pulp Gothic storytelling and tremendous atmosphere it is still a creative work but increasingly the Diablo games are art and an obvious tension with their goals as consumer products between 1997 and 2024 clicking on Monsters has become big business people around the world will collectively pay millions even billions of cumulative dollars to click on monsters and they have Choice why would a given customer click on your monsters particularly what can be done to keep these customers focused on you your product at the expense of other products and experiences how can the moldering corpse of BF Skinner be reanimated and made dance to the tune of modern e-commerce is the person who buys your game an audience or a customer are they a rational being or a trainable animal what is the line between gaming as I would Define it and gaming as the state of Nevada would Define it 27 years shouldn't feel like such an extremely long impossibly distant time ago yet within that time the world of the internet grew up from a chaotically creative Frontier into a stratified world of cash shops and infinite content gaming changed that way Diablo changed that way back in my day as a kid in front of a heavy wood and glass cathode ray television there was a commercial for a candy called Tootsie Pops where a wise cartoon owl would challenge young scholars and Woodland creatures to answer an important question how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop the commercials made it so the question was rhetorical existential the candy was just too damn Delicious and long lasting the end of every commercial was the owl saying the world may never know of course Scholars aren't owls in the pocket of big candy took issue with this and four universities have done actual studies on the matter it's around 200 licks pretty reasonable not a mystery [ __ ] you Wise Owl truth however is not a large concern when it comes to selling candy you have something that's simple cheap and kind of effortlessly tasty it sells itself so you need as a business to go One Step Beyond it isn't just tasty it satisfies it compels if it actually solv D your hunger you would need to buy one again so the product lodges itself in between hunger and satisfaction creating a treadmill a recursive Loop keep focused on the candy keep licking always receive satisfaction never actually become satisfied in trying to make sense of Diablo as a franchise I can't escape this image of the wise old owl for tits Pops I have played throughout my life well over a thousand hours of cumulative monster clicking in Diablo I have beaten the games but not all the ways they can be beaten and I'm sure there are plenty who will say I didn't engage with them correctly or even at all despite this massive absurd time investment where does it end when have I slain the last monster is such a thing even possible or allowed or to put it another way just how many godamn clicks does it take to get to the center of Diablo Diablo 1 is one of the real Masterpiece titles of the mid90s it's primitive and janky even compared to Diablo II but that was the games industry as a whole during those years that dense half decade 95 to 2000 was a frantic push into structures and art styles that were untested and new from dozens of developers across hundreds of titles there was no road map for anyone just fog and an Impulse to say here there should be monsters Diablo is a classic example of both the chaos of those untested ideas and the lasting reverberations of a smash success at such an early stage of the medium the end result for the first title seems enviably tight solid and considered it is a four chapter 16 layer dungeon with fast character creation real-time combat and a gory dark atmosphere there is a certain prototypical jankiness to it most notable being that all subsequent Diablos move at a much faster speed than the first game your character walks slowly often hits slowly and movement is sometimes awkward or uncoordinated across the grid driven play Space the decision to even make the game Real Time came late in the process Blizzard at that time had just released the original Warcraft it acquired a studio called Condor to be renamed blizzard North and it was that division that made Diablo the initial pitch was dark and Gothic but also more traditional something turn-based David brevik one of the original lead developers recalls in an article for industry website game developer quote eventually blizzard South they approached us and said Well we'd really like to make this a real-time game and I voted no but everyone else voted yes so I guess we can do this end quote in an IGN Diablo retrospective revic elaborates a little more saying quote I remember it like it was yesterday the moment that we made it real time instead of turn-based it was a big debate in the office for quite a while I resisted it I didn't want to make it real time I really loved the tension and the perade and things like that games like Rogue and net hack stuff like oh my god I've got a little bit of Health I've got to make this decision what am I going to do it didn't feel like a real-time game could give me that tension and so I resisted end quote this perspective really fascinates me because it illuminates how basic assumptions about video games [Music] and then you level your stance there is no narrative choice no character building that isn't numerical it's a dungeon craw which is ultimately one of the most traditional tabletop RPG structures today the focus of something like D and D is much more about the imaginative aspects the performative aspects '90s DND ad and queued closer to its name dungeon crawling Monster hunting complicated rules to facilitate each Diablo comparatively not only moves lightning fast with real-time combat it does so without needing so complicated a rule set as ad and D had at least not a visible one the visual representation on top of a functional grid the incorporation of all the numbers and dice rolling into a single click the use of sound cues and visual cues to represent threat in Combat Opportunity instead of any spoken or written scene setting Diablo is one of the earliest games that comes from the background of tabletop RPGs to fully embrace the possibilities of video games as a medium separate from tabletop role playing games in terms of placing adapting and hiding those complicated systems the numbers matter the dice rolls matter it's just that these things are no longer the game instead of being measured in turns the game is measured in sweaty nervous seconds of clicking and clicking until your finger feels like it's made of clay if it was only the real-time element Diablo would not have made the impact that it did on pop culture in general Technical Innovations are impressive but if that was all it took why wasn't the crisis franchise in alltime great among the FPS Pantheon what is pioneering is not necessarily what comes to define the thing that it Pioneers Diablo 1 not only established the format of the action RPG it established the entire mood and rhythm of it and it was only able to do that by pairing all of its technological innovations with equally compelling artwork revik stated in the game developer piece that he was inspired by a fighting game called Primal Rage which had a stopmotion clation art style which made it stand out from any fighting game like it at the time well that and the dinosaurs Diablo's art style turned out much different than Primal Rage but still held on to the look of painted figures a tactile arts and crafts kind of vibe Warcraft had a similarly handdrawn look to it the beginnings of the blizzard house style of fantasy art Diablo though veered into much darker moodier territory than Warcraft did it's a gorier title more visceral deliberately skewing towards Gothic fantasy in contrast to warcraft's pulp fantasy it isn't just the intention here that's so masterful it's the execution of that darker mood as well Diablo's dungeons are assembled by the game itself randomly from template pieces each piece of the given template is given a ton of attention and detail from Tumbl down bricks to thick wooden doors to modular Quest specific rooms that bolt on to the larger dungeon structure the random Arrangements seldom make sense this nonsense however contributes heavily to the atmosphere of horror its hostile architecture magical architecture made for No One filled with death escalating downwards from tombs to Earth and catacombs to caves to a fragment of Hell itself the nonsense makes more sense the deeper a player gets the more surreal the environments become the monsters themselves with their slightly puppet-like Aesthetics are much more detailed than any true 3D model of the era would have been in 1999 there was a Diablo knockoff called darkstone which was in some ways much more ambitious than the original Diablo but its true 3D art style was forgettable and generic it made no impact whatsoever and is largely forgotten today it wasn't until 2002's Dungeon Siege that a 3D Diablo clone came out with anywhere near the personality of the original Diablo game The Dungeons of Diablo 1 are so menacing and evocative its monsters are so charismatically nasty and no playthrough has exactly the same combination of either even the equipment is unpredictable aside from certain special items usually obtained as a quest reward the loot table rolls randomly and assigns certain prefixes or suffixes do an item to give it special magical properties this is perhaps the most significant individual design Choice Diablo 1 made aside from going real time instead of turn-based every interaction in the game has the potential for something special to occur a major reward a sudden windfall this dungeon layer for example spawned a library precious spells and Scrolls that might not have even showed up in a different dungeon layout the game's most absolutely classic Quest the butcher was incorporated into my warrior characters playthrough but the game replaced it with something different when I tried out a rogue the uncertainty of a given playthrough is a major part of Diablo 1's hook and appeal cumulatively what was so impressive about Diablo in the 9s was that it took full advantage of the possibilities of video games as a medium in every aspect of its production that randomization would never be so easy and smooth and immediate in a tabletop setting you'd be rolling 2d1 and Consulting an index every couple of minutes at minimum the game draws the map faster than any pen and graph paper process the animated models can be more expressive than any putor and glue Warhammer figurine the combat happens literally as fast as your finger can click it's too bad that the generations didn't quite overlap because I bet Telegraph operators would have been [ __ ] outstanding at Diablo games little about how slow or awkward the game is compared to Modern titles really matters in the face of how fast and how precient the game was in relation to what had come before four on its release tremendous forward-looking structure gorgeous Timeless visual art and a sound design that sits at the foundation of every single Diablo game to come after it the sound of an amulet falling to the floor the sound of a skeleton being hit with a mace the sound of gold coins being shaken in a sack a simple pleasantly looping guitar Melody simple things on the surface complex enough things ultimately to compel millions of players to keep playing the Diablo games one more monster one more dungeon one more sequel at a time Diablo as a franchise is so much less about reaching an end State and climax than it is in crafting a Perpetual Flow State a permanent present tense anchored on either end only by feelings of power ahead and powerlessness behind no matter what else humans are and can be we are also weird Mals some folks think that that's a diminishing perspective but I've always found it aspirational I think it helps frame what a Wide World of Sports it truly is out there on the one hand humans are cumulatively smart enough to coax electricity to move through sand and metal in a way where it can create Vivid hallucinations at 60 frames per second and also cumulatively Maman enough to where the thing that bonds us to this magical process and keeps us interested is the sound of metal coins clinking together indicating that we have received a little treat to be both cunningly complex and ELO a selfish silly little Goblin creature is the Beating Heart Of The Human Experience the contradiction is the joy of life the Diablo games play on these contradictions in both positive and negative ways across their sequels and iterations in the first two games the use of behavioristic design and oper and conditioning as part of the gameplay Loop feels mostly Artful and playful it's only later when cash money gets put on the table so often does the whole thing take a turn Diablo 1 Embraces behaviorism as an almost accidental consequence of good dunge engineering the sound effects are as good as they are because especially in the '90s video games were an extremely mixed medium with strange and fluctuating technical limits nothing was realistic in 1997 no game could convincingly approach realism from a visual perspective and without visual realism audio realism is muted and dull and pointless video games had their own bright evocative soundscapes the Nintendo noise in the background of homes in so many movies or shows the tradition goes back further though to the way radio dramas did sound effects differently than TV shows trying to make them Bolder and clearer more legible to the imagination FY work it's called these approximations and imitations of sounds for radio and Screen Diablo is dark and hard to see partly due to mood partly due to being made for small resolution monitors hooked up to chattering beige box PCS making the sound effects bright clear and distinctive lets the entire game be more instantly understandable when you hear that sparkling tone of a jewelry item being dropped on the dungeon floor you take note and because it's such a cool rare reward that you have this impression of braving danger to acquire the brain remembers it then little by little the brain craves it you are no longer passively listening to the sound you are preemptively listening for the sound it is conditioned its importance and the expected response into your mind not in a nefarious way just a regular human mammal kind of way like the chirping of a walk indicator at a crosswalk for Diablo 1 these clear and distinct indicator sounds sounds are a way of making the game play better communicating to the player what is going on with more immediacy than just dumping them on the ground to click on to be invested in the game and its systems is naturally to become excited when these Victory sounds play for you what's unique about Diablo is how closely these sounds are tied to the in-game items and the interactions they represent how even blindfolded a person would be able to determine what was happening in a playthrough the variations in tone and extra little flourish for certain heavy and magical items for for example create varying levels of excitement when you hear the victory tone the soundscape becomes part of the rhythm of play not just a small part but is a foundational part of the whole game's basic experience I think this is why so many of the sound effects from Diablo one and two carried over across a quarter Century of changing development priorities these sounds become part of what a player craves from a Diablo experience without the sound that a player has been conditioned to hear the brain doesn't so freely dispense those Savory Victory chemicals Nintendo games are very clever with creating these consistencies across titles and even decades the sound of their own coins all the Chomps and cheeps and chirps and drum rolls Diablo created its own internal language of sound effects and did such a good job the first time that the franchise can never fully move away without sacrificing a core part of its personality the musical score is particularly incredible Diablo 1 and to have the best soundtracks out of all of them everyone talks about it particularly the main track Tristram that plays while in the town of the same name it is impossible not to talk about it it's one of the best there ever was like the rest of the game it wasn't necessarily meant to be a major classic or a hugely pioneering work it was just the art that felt right at the time in a 2017 interview with a website dread Central composer Matt Wellman is asked quote did you ever expect that theme to have such an impact on not only the gamer community but also the music Community as a whole end quot and he responds no we had no idea that Diablo would take off quite in the way that it did in terms of the soundtrack or the game as a whole in retrospect I can see why it was so successful in terms of our timing on the platforms we were on and the state of gaming and the fantasy genre in general at the time but as a group of kids still in their 20s we didn't as a development crew expect the reception to be quite as big as it was I think the main thing I was hoping to get was the Medieval vibe that the best folk rock of the early 70s had like on Le Zeppelin 3 and 4 that and some Latin American influences all had a role it also helped that I had played the main Rog like that inspired Diablo along with Dave brevik so I had some natural sense of what the ideal Vibe would be for a safety shopping Quest zone I'm happy that I was so lucky to be in the right place at the right time given that even a track with bad production values which the original Tristram most definitely had could get over and really be effective by virtue of originality and solid writing still I don't know know quite who the 22-year-old is who wrote it he's a familiar but still very distant person to whatever I am now end quote speaking personally I was completely obsessed with Diablo 1 when I was like 12 it was a huge part of my late childhood then Diablo I was a huge part of my high school years and Diablo I came out when I was in a difficult period of my early 20s I only distantly remember those people myself Diablo was so important to those iterations of my past self and all it really takes to trigger those memories is the guitar work in Tristram in the push towards realism in visual art and video game Graphics it is sometimes easy to forget that these are completely imaginary spaces they do not exist in any meaningful way outside of their capacity to speak to people as art a song like that written by a 22-year-old who digs Zeppelin can have more impact than a big expensive orchestral piece that sounds like competing choirs arguing on a conference call even thematically Wellman's music fits into everything else Diablo has going on it's grounded in Tradition but modern and experimental created by Young Folks in a young industry with little oversight and no concrete expectations Wellman's soundtrack didn't just provide accompaniment to the game it became part of the game sense of place Tristram the town and Tristram the music track are inseparable they are the same thing the place has become the vibe the vibe has become the place Tristram shows up in every single Diablo game both the town and the music track even Diablo Immortal to Pivot away from Tristram and do something entirely new is to lose that thread of nostalgic connection which is risky as a media company part of Diablo's problem as a franchise is that it has never been able to reinvent itself its main appeal is replayability familiarity when it comes to sequels among the things it's conditioned its fans to do is ask for the same thing over and over and over again I liked the noise that said I did well and get a treat I want to hear that noise again and I will click as many times as it godamn takes for you to play me the happy good boy noise the way a person clicks and how a person Clicks in Diablo depends a lot on what sort of hero archetype they choose at the beginning of the game in the first Diablo it's very fluid and a little random in some ways how a character progresses Warrior is the most straightforward you can use most of the weapons you pick up and those weapons are constantly improving on themselves you are sturdy but inventory dependent and always open to being damaged by the monsters in close combat Warrior works the best in terms of the basic concept of a real-time dungeon brawl the class interacts in the simplest ways with the combat grid and benefits the most from the loot that drops Rogue is the ranged bow Centric option Rogue is a lot more fragile but because of the ranged combat thing Rogue doesn't even take damage in most circumstances a major difference is that there are a lot fewer kinds of bows in the game than there are the range of Swords axes and other stabby weapons which means that you end up upgrading only ever so often there's a more tangible plateau of power for the Rogue for long stretches than there ever is for the warrior I didn't play one but there's also a wizard class who relies on ranged combat like the Rogue does but in a much more high-risk High reward way magic is very finite in Diablo 1 your Mana limit spellcasting with no way besides potions to restore it staves and other magic weapons with store spells have a set number of charges and need to either be traded in or recharged at massive cost ranged combat with a rogue is simple arrows are free and not dependent on resource management but spell casting in the game adds a huge layer of complexity to the ranged combat idea your class determines maximum stat like the wizard can never be as strong or as durable as the warrior and the warrior can never have a Mana pool that's very large but spellcasting itself as a gameplay tool is universal between characters if you invest in the stats to use magic it can be added as a tactical component to any build the Spells you find in the dungeon and at the merchant which Adria are randomized you can't control exactly how the build goes even as a wizard class you just got to fight through it make do and cross your fingers that kind of risky randomization extends to a cool mechanic called shrines shrines can have beneficial or negative effects either affecting you momentarily within the level or permanently altering your character sheet in some way because there are sometimes big consequences for interacting with a shrine it became common advice Among players not to interact with them if you don't know what their name indicates that they'll do to me that takes the fun out of it it's it's a gamble shrines are like little side bets in the broader hand being dealt by the game the fact that they can hinder you just makes them spicy it makes using a shrine feel genuinely tense because Mana is limited and spellcasting is finite using magic feels special Trixie a genuine money on the table kind of way to interact with the game augmenting a warrior with a few key spells can really change the whole trajectory of a playthrough without finding firewall and then upgrading it by being Lucky by finding even more firewall TOS I would have been total screwed in a lot of the later dungeon Maps but with firewall suddenly I had a way of controlling the battlefield segmenting it dividing it between monsters I could deal with in one go and monsters that were too many saving Mana for the town portal or sacrificing precious inventory space for Town portal Scrolls also a cool risk reward Choice Diablo 1's character classes are less absolute than they became later on in Diablo 3 for instance and act mostly As statements of intent which then fracture and mutate depending on how the random loot of the dungeon progression goes it makes new playthroughs seem very exciting it makes the progression of each character feel personal Diablo 1 story is much simpler than the giant heaps of lore to come later but the story that matters most to every Diablo game is established here in the original the path to power the feeling of authorship over your character where their build and their inventory is directly tied to your choices your courage and a healthy dose of random chance to make the journey seem authentic instead of predestined getting powerful equipment tied directly to the game's very few quests further deepens the weight of player choice where the highest peaks of Power are narrative instead of mechanical emergent or random your inventory becomes a series of trophies both victories over the plot and high roles on the loot table that's the story Rags to Riches glittering sharp riches that allow you to lay waste to your opponents and fulfill your role in The Narrative of demons and Devils it's not much of a role at least not yet but it wouldn't really be an RPG without one Diablo 1's lore has been more or less completely reconstructed into something that can accommodate the weight of all the World building yet to come the first Diablo isn't even available on Blizzard's own storefront they kicked it over to good old games in the Gog Galaxy Diablo 1 is a relatively self-contained experience that has a lot to do with it it has a clear ending point although it was one of the early games to embrace the idea of a new game plus and allow for replaying the story at higher difficulties for greater rewards using an existing character that is already completed the campaign once the lore was not originally meant to contain Toms of ARA Side characters in world history from which the franchise could infinitely expand the lore was meant to deepen the atmosphere on the plot's journey from point A to point B within this one self-contained title so what's there is kind of scattershot a little inconsistent what's interesting about the almost total retcon of the plot evence of the first game is that so hungry for Content as the franchise is none of those elements were left behind or cut from the later games everything in Diablo 1 Echoes outwards all the way through to Diablo 4 all the retroactive edits relate to expanding the story adding heaps and heaps and heaps of detail where before there was just a vocative suggestion found in scattered books and Scrolls mentioned in passing by NPCs and Snippets of conversation all NPCs in Tristram will have a unique comment on any given Quest although for many of them it's some variation of sounds bad man good luck with that for modern blizzard the franchise begins at Diablo I that's the earliest title where the lore is compatible and the gameplay feels comparable to the modern experience but none of the games can seem to let go of this initial Adventures importance in establishing the world itself its atmosphere its tone Diablo 1 introduces Deckard Kain The haradrim Scholar who identifies your items and gives you lessons on the world's mythology voiced by Michael go this character's and presence became so important that he reprises his role as mentor and guide in Diablo I Diablo I and Diablo Immortal Go's performance became part of the consistent sound Escape of Diablo just like the noises of gems and coins and Fireballs other NPCs got less like w the orphan Gambler who can sometimes sell you amazing items but mostly taunts you with garbage his peg leg is a reference in later titles and all that really remains of him the witch Adria on the other hand is completely ignored by Diablo II only to bounce back as one of the main characters of Diablo I retroactively Rewritten as having had a secret child with your hero character in Diablo 1 well perhaps not your hero character but the warrior PC who was not only determined to be the canonical hero but also an actual character named Aiden later on who is also the son of the king and kind of a big deal these retroactive details become so important to the story that going back to the original and having none of it come up at all is perhaps kind of jarring for modern players so the original game is decoupled from the modern franchise sold on a different platform deemphasized and overwritten which is too bad having no idea how much lore in storytelling bloat it would have to later support is a strength not a weakness Diablo 1's narrative is lean complete so lean in fact that the Hellfire expansion pack was released largely without the consent or support of anyone who worked on the original game the expansion pack Hellfire is a completely Superfluous element on top of Diablo 1 you don't need to play it what it offers is tangential both mechanically and narratively because blizzard felt that Hellfire was such a balancing nightmare they even outright refused to allow the expansion to be multiplayer restricting it to a single player campaign even in 1997 the Battle.net multiplayer service was a huge part of why people played Diablo what was an exciting adventure for one was even more exciting for two to four players at a time much more so even because of the novelty of online matchmaking at the time those services so absolutely standard today were brand new and highly volatile back in 1997 in 2018 polygon released a fantastic postmortem about the production of Hellfire written by David kic kic's piece is so comprehensive as to basically replace anything I might have to say personally about that history the story is tremendous well worth a time if you want to hear the larger version even in brief the whole episode is fascinating blizzard as a company didn't used to be such a big name as it is now nor was it always coupled with Activision Sierra online used to be Blizzard's business Overlord feeling like there was money to be made that Diablo 1 wasn't already making Hellfire represents the franchise's first ever corporate cash grab against the wishes of Blizzard Sierra online had another developer called synergistic software create follow-up content to keep Diablo fresh on the market for a longer period of time the name is kind of ironic because the new content has no Synergy with the old it sticks out quite noticeably in terms of art quality and art style and because the business relationship was antagonistic from the start there was no Synergy with blizzard itself in fact it was mostly piss and vinegar on both ends from both developers resolved only through Spite and an editable text file Hellfire mainly adds two new four-level dungeons one is the hive a slithering goopy biomass with weirder monsters than the other level sets the other is a deeper secret Crypt that feels so similar to the crypts under trist Chapel in terms of how the levels are put together but feature instead an ultra aggressive mix of endgame monsters Hellfire as an expansion slots in only at the mid toate game in a certain way I feel this has a mechanical benefit the extra experience points and levels make the hell levels of the main campaign feel less impossible and impressive to be able to take the PC a little further in terms of the power curve than would have otherwise been natural feels exciting it feels fun and there's some quality of life benefit that are very nice that come from Hellfire like increased movement speed in town some additions like trap runes feel like inventory clutter other editions like the new unique items are Pleasant boosts of power blizzard wanted to keep such control over its original game that they wouldn't allow synergistic software to implement their own intended quests or jokes offended and having already done the work synergistic software allowed every piece of content they couldn't officially release to be toggled back on with the use of a modified text file and terms of 1997 file management that's about as easy as flipping a switch the most offensive thing to Blizzard was the fact that this toggle could toggle on multiplayer connectivity as well Hellfire odd balance changes were no longer in isolation the retribution from blizzard was so severe that it destroyed synergistic software as a company polygon quotes David brevik remembering quote we tried talking back and forth synergistic and blizzard those conversations were pretty heated I was pretty young and cocky so I'm sure they weren't easy conversations especially because the head of synergistic had been in the industry much longer than I had so maybe I wasn't as respectful as I should have been when they finally agreed to take things out they didn't follow through and the situation got pretty ugly there were lost jobs it was not a fun time for anybody it was frustrating for us that Diablo was rip and they did whatever they wanted to in the end we didn't have final say or creative control and at the same time it was sad because those guys at synergistic were really passionate about it it's just that we never saw eye to eye it just didn't go right end quote in places that passion comes through there were things that were oddly preent things that were useful being healed immediately on talking to the Healer for instance or foreseeing the utility for a barbarian class and a Monk class or little things like how it references a long running joke about a secret cow level there is no cow level in Diablo 1 Hellfire adds a secret cow man replacing a farmer with a guy in a cow costume who Awards you the Bine plate the cow level thing continues as a joke in game after game and hellfire was the first to clock how memeified that whole business would become the problem is that the dungeons have almost no unique named enemies and hardly any quests at all they give below average loot for above average boredom the opening cinematic for Hellfire is cheesy basic and adds nothing to the atmosphere I enjoyed playing Hellfire because I never got the chance as a kid and it felt like some kind of resolution on that but as a Critic I have to say that I side with blizzard passionate as it may have been preent as it was in places it adds unbalanced weight to a thing that was sleek and aerodynamic as it was its art feels rushed its ideas feel tangential like if you're playing d and d and your dungeon master says I got a lot to do but this is Ted my brother-in-law he's going to take care of you guys didn't have time to tell him what's going on but he has seen crawl so have fun jablo one success is its gameplay Loop but its art is all tied up in the atmosphere it creates a tone that's so perfectly Gothic that it still influences each subsequent multi-million dollar sequel Hellfire doesn't break the atmosphere but it does vandalize the atmosphere with jokes and nonsense and ultimately that isn't worth the benefit that a few extra levels of Dungeons and statistics that the expansion provides what's most surprising about the tight dense structure of the original game is how it actually feels like a complete adventure one more narratively and dramatically robust than a simple 16 levels of dungeon would suggest the quests no matter which selection of quests the game decides to put before a player all create a sense of place of History they accumulate into a sense of dread and meaning behind the final battle the player learns about a world where the three prime evils scheme for dominance over hell they learn of King leoric's corruption and the fall of the kingdom of curas they learn that Diablo is the Lord Of Terror one of the three primes and the source of all this Suffering The Descent into hell levels are what but really sells the drama of it all and makes it feel complete the caves that come before them are aesthetically and mechanically both boring and annoying they bulbous awkward Arenas full of ridiculous numbers of high level enemies they are so aggressive in comparison to what came before though that the caves work as a fair Prelude to Hell a descent down beyond what Man or Monster might build into Mythic deep then hell itself is nasty and bloody bone walls with fire and corpses being tortured much gorier than any level set before hell is harder than any previous encounter in Diablo 1 partly on account of the succubi they're more powerful ranged enemy than the game had thrown at a player before negating the advantage of all that grid space making it so that ranged characters also suffer the same threat that Warriors do up close and at risk of damage all the time the succubi are also an element that have changed a lot through time within the Diablo franchise here in Diablo 1 they're a '90s pinup kind of succubus subsequent games tone down the sexuality a lot and then Diablo I elevates them to the main plot by making Lilith Queen of the succubi the game's antagonist the later designs are perhaps better but I found myself a little nostalgic for the old designs this playthrough The clamation Inspired models for Monsters and NPCs lend themselves well to exaggerative designs blizzard eventually found its preferred balance of suggestive design with World of Warcraft cementing a certain amount of Pulp sexualization is a key pillar of fan art and costuming that Trend in blizzard games the deliberate inclusion of lightly suggestive content as a hook for players kind of began here in the first Diablo giving the succubi more clothes across subsequent titles seems perhaps more meant to cover up the fact that the pinup design has always been a part of the blizzard formula than it is an appeal to some infernal modesty the foundational titles had little guile compared to what came later they are achingly earnest and that's what makes them work so well they are excellent self-contained stories balanced and booed by lushly gothic art that managed to defy many of the graphical limitations of the day in terms of impact and presentation we can today make fun of this big pulsing pentagram on the ground leading to the boss room but at the time it actually was kind of intimidating it worked for me anyway the boss fight with Diablo himself is the simplest iteration of such a fight within the franchise he has some special attacks but the fight is not driven by animations or area of effect spells like later titles do here within the climax of Diablo 1 I had a warrior with a high block rate from his shield which means most of Diablo's impressive swipes and attacks simply Miss Even though I'm standing right there later titles workshopped this experience heavily becoming more and more truly climactic with each major boss fight in the series in Diablo 1 Diablo is dangerous and intimidating but easily confused and easily defeated by any highlevel character mechanically what sells the climax is the overall difficulty of Hell itself as an environment it is such a slog to get to this point and he has plenty of Hench demons to defeat before it's one-on-one there's a certain fulfillment in having made a character so unlikely to take damage that you can stand before the biggest boss in the game and just be fine other builds might vary what's important is not how Diablo dies but the drama of what happens afterwards the climactic cutscene sets up almost the entire basis of the lore Logic on which the sequels operate and it was a completely Rogue Choice by a separate team that made this possible on a GDC panel in 2016 David brevik explained quote all of the cinematics for the blizzard games were made down South by a cinematic team and they were doing pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to and we had no influence whatsoever over them so we had ideas and they come up and we talk about them and we would go down and do something different and uh so a lot of the cinematics didn't turn out like we wanted them to but then we were starting to get along a little better and things work a little better there's more cooperation things were going great and they said okay we're done we finished the final cinematic so they send it up and we look at it we're all crowded around the desk and we're looking at this thing and then we watch it he dies and then he jams the Gemini's forehead and all of us are like what the hell did we just watch what was that that doesn't make any sense at all was that cool so we had a little bit of an argument about whether or not we were going to have this or not and whether or not this could be the official ending it was pretty controversial down there too so there was no intention of this being the ending to the game at all end quote once again what breik initially objected to was ultimately one of the most unique and memorable elements of Diablo 1 on the basis of it being unfamiliar and unexpected even in this early era of gaming there was an Impulse to create what was known and what was safe rik's success in those instances was due to being open to the idea that he might be wrong that these challenges to his expectations might make a better game they did the idea of the Soul Stone the theme of evil consuming even the most heroic Souls the image of the lone Wanderer even when the games grow tired of specifically referencing this cut scene it is referenced again and again by visual Motif and plot reference it sets up Diablo I perfectly You've Won and in doing so you have lost you are the monster you are the villain the evil and in this way we can begin again with new Heroes without even missing a beat Diablo is more than four times larger of a game in game world than Diablo 1 was the scope of the sequel versus the original is just absolutely massive changing settings four times and then again for its lengthy expansion pack it does this without initially tipping its hand that it's going to be that large at all Diablo I came out in July of 2000 in the heart of what could be considered Blizzard's pre-World of Warcraft classic era early blizzard was known for its cinematics creating amazing short animated films to fill in the storytelling and build atmosphere between chapters as blizzard progressed as a company and games Advanced as a medium these animated cinematics became longer and more impressive they have always been a major part of the blizzard company identity but Diablo I even more than Starcraft was held together by the cinematics in a very important way they set the frame sometime after the events of the main campaign a broken and wormy man named Marius is being interrogated by a strange figure in some desolate bright desert cell he followed the Dark Wanderer your protagonist from Diablo 1 and you follow Marius as your story is played Marius tells his going through the location changes and plot revelations in tight parallel with the player Marius was voiced by Frank gorin a Hollywood veteran who brought a huge amount of very old school performance techniques to the role marius's voice is this grally regretful warble that's a compelling 50-50 split between Sinister and pathetic he makes a fantastic and fantastically unreliable narrator he tells of how he met The Wanderer not far from Tristram and how the wanderer's very presence brought the spirits up from hell once you've chosen your class and begin the game following Marius you begin an encampment of the sisters of the sightless eye the Rogues from which the Diablo 1 class is derived the encampment is smaller than the trist map from the original game there are fewer important NPCs this matters little for the sense of scale because there is no separation between the town and the world Diablo I incorporates both Dungeons and Country Side into the same continuous Overworld map this was not in itself A New Concept in gaming but but the way an early open world was incorporated into Diablo I into its randomized map templates its long loot tables and Wy beastiary this was new this was fresh it was an open world yes but it was remixed freshly each time it was never truly knowable beyond the repeating elements the maps were surprisingly large too it's a good half an hour per open area if you're being thorough all of this combined created a beginning that was exciting Moody and extremely unique to the established elements of Diablo the world felt solid and actual it was fully explorable without so much obvious artifice the lore was immediately expanded using familiar iconic elements as a tool set these familiar threads helped stabilize the sense of consistency while the game completely reinvented how it conceives of character class and character progression the most major change is that magic is no longer Universal the opposite in fact each character class has its own set of abilities arrayed across three different branches of a skill tree and no one character will ever acquire even close to all of these abilities on a given playthrough it's entirely possible to progress deep into Diablo II and find that you've made all poor choices becoming wildly outclassed by the late game enemies where it used to be that the definitions between classes and play styles were soft malleable with multiclassing going on in a casual but constant way now all of those approaches have been broken down by category and made mutually exclusive the roles were split into two in most cases Warrior became Paladin or Barbarian one of them a two-handed weapon High offense melee focused character and the other a high defense spellcasting hybrid wizard has become sorceress focusing on Elemental Magic and also Necromancer with an emphasis on an army of summoned creatures Rogue became Amazon and other ranged Weapon Specialist but now with the added wrinkle of having to do ammunition management for real and also assassin a Trixie trap specialist within each of these General guidelines are hundreds of different internal variations which emphasize different skills or try to create powerful synergies between the skills importantly a single playthrough only gives you around 24 to 28 skill points to use many of these skills only become endgame compatible investing six points or more into them so it's not just a player only uses some skills in Diablo I it's more a player must refrain from investing in anything not strictly critical to their build ignoring 80 to 90% of possible options it's not really true to say that Diablo II is a difficult game although it does have difficulty spikes you click on the Monsters and now you also use your skills on the monsters Diablo I only offers one single opportunity to refund and reallocate points during a play through if your output numbers fall too low below the health and damage thresholds of the enemies you're fighting it becomes hard to progress It's a numbers balancing problem though not a player skill problem necessarily but because there is no recourse for a poorly budgeted and balanced character sheet these mistakes can still create very unpleasant speed bumps and soft lock conditions within the game Diablo I and Diablo through different character classes was the better choice for Diablo as a franchise the inherent replayability is made more compelling through such distinct variations in Play Rhythm and inventory dependence Diablo I is a remarkable sequel not only for its widened scope and capacity for self-reinvention it's remarkable because surprisingly few sequels seem to fully understand the elements that made the original a classic in the first place doubling the classes by chopping up and clarifying the original build possibilities is something that could only have turned out so smoothly by truly understanding both what made the original modes satisfying and where they come up short it takes a critical eye and a loving touch a tricky combination for a product made by so many people across such a long period of Time website vg247 has a lengthy interview about Diablo I's production where developer Eric Schaefer talks about how complicated a process it was to translate Diablo 1's tight and dense design to the more ambitious and spraing open world sequel quote the gameplay was fine in the dungeon in Diablo 1 but we were bringing it to the outdoor with just Wide Open Fields we asked ourselves what are the boundaries what are the obstacles if it's just a field there's no tactics where you move around so we put a lot of work into what should be the sizes of the outdoors areas and giving them boundaries and borders that made sense so you didn't just want to wander forever so we came up with all kinds of weird low walls that surrounded a lot of our Outdoors that don't really make any sense I remember at the time a lot of people were very negative on it it's like why couldn't we just hop over the walls it's going to drive people crazy that were limiting their area I thought it was a big concern turns out it felt really natural and I don't think it ever got brought up again the idea of taking it to the outdoors was one of the big early challenges end quote these conversations about how to balance realism with gameplay priorities and Technical limitations are still a major part of all levels of game development just because you can make something perfectly realistic doesn't mean you should because it might not be legible to the player they might not be able to figure out what's interacting or important Schaefer was worried that the obvious artifice of low walls would strike people as annoying or silly but they're an essential component of dividing up the space and making navigational sense of it people still do get annoyed and complain about those things even today like how in Fallout 76 the state of West Virginia is encased in an impenetrable chainlink fence about waste High these things are functional to the point of surpassing what realism would bring a player needs to know what is and isn't possible within a game space and the more visually clear and consistent that language of possibility is the more invested a player can become by virtue of being able to very quickly read a landscape or a gameplay scenario Diablo 1's soundscape contributed to its immediate legibility and now so does Diablo I's landscape contributing also to the sense of a true open world and further rewarding player curiosity are the many optional dungeons they're often pretty short rarely taking more than 10 or 15 minutes which makes the glittering prize room of magic treasure chests at the end of them even more exciting the loot is random sure but the game is rolling on that loot table with extreme frequency it gets to the point where it isn't even worth picking up non-magical items even to sell these dungeons are smaller than any given dungeon layer in Diablo 1 plus you move and act so much quicker as a character on the screen the pace of the game is extremely fast from the very beginning and your rewards begin to accumulate with an extremely satisfying swiftness it's unusual to go an hour into the game before getting your first yellow coated rare item and once that threshold is passed it's rarely more than 10 minutes before the next really good thing Diablo I was where blizzard system for organizing loot Rarity based on font color really came into being creating more tears and more feedback than Diablo 1 had items are now blue for uncommon magic yellow for rare bronze for Unique gray for socketed items where gems can be slotted to create your own custom bonus and green for set items that are so rare and become even more powerful when the set is collected World of Warcraft expanded the system much further and other games have mixed it up to avoid copying World of warcraft's Color patterns exactly but it is fair to say that the colored font Rarity indicator is now a completely ubiquitous element of game design any MMO most open World Games the entire Borderlands franchise they all have it it had to have begun somewhere and it essentially began here which is quite a legacy what's actually at play here with the colored font system is a deeper layer of operant conditioning we have a robust system of audio reward cues now we have a robust system of visual reward cues so players crave these rewards and the likeliest source is bosses bosses are at the end of every dungeon scattered across every field map hidden down corridors where they've been randomly placed by the dungeon generator curiosity and hunger become intertwined exploitation and reward to become interchangeable Diablo I is a scavenger hunt for things you don't yet know you need or want Diablo I is a game played on the animal level a little more than Diablo 1 was some folks go through the entire thing without listening to a single line of dialogue they just click and loot and click and loot and then Loop and loot again and again on high difficulty New Game Plus which is a little bit of a shame because what's painted over the basic gameplay Loop is a hell of an adventure it is paint though it is Art on top of what is actually functional what holds the thing together the canvas of Diablo I is nothing more or less than behaviorism itself a book by Lauren Slater called opening skinners box great psychological experiments of the 20th century begins with an in-depth profile on him and his work that kind of forever changed how I thought about video games she Begins by giving a basic rundown on behaviorism which I've tried to condense down here even more have you heard about the old experiment where a dog would salivate when a bell is rung because it means that it's time for food Slater writes quote Pavlov discovered what is called classical conditioning that simply means that a person can take a pre-existing animal reflex like blinking or being startled or salivating and condition it so it occurs in response to a new stimulus end quote Skinner's advancement on the idea operant conditioning is the idea that brand new behaviors and ways of being can be taught and then reinforced through positive and negative stimulus quote would it be possible to take a completely random Movement Like turning one's head to the right and reward it consistently so pretty soon the person keeps looking to the right the operant inscribed thus while Pavlov focused on an animal's behavior in response to a prior stimulus the Bell Skinner focused on an animal's behavior in response to an after theact Consequence the food the reinforcement contingencies change the way in which the animal responds end quote all video games and I mean absolutely every single one work using this process no action within a video game is natural we are not born understanding how a controller is even held everything must be learned and the reason why we enjoy learning these things so much is that video games create a buffet of small imaginary rewards for us to enjoy if we get it right so literally anyone who is good at a game is operant conditioned to be that way you have learned an unnatural Behavior which you repeat in certain specific circumstances to achieve a pleasurable result it feels good to play well so we play well in order to feel good this is universal within games what is not Universal what is kind of special about Diablo as a franchise is that it applies these theories very nakedly without hardly any of the narrative disguise that usually makes them invisible when a person plays Diablo over and over and over they are not playing to relive a beloved story or interact with a higher moral they are playing because the game can reliably deliver a rush of dopamine at tantalizingly unpredictable intervals of Skinner's operant conditioning boxes Slater writes quote using a cumulative recorder attached to his box Skinner could pictorially plot out just how long it takes to learn a response when it is regularly rewarded and how long it takes to extinguish a response when it is abruptly discontinued intuition tells us that random and far-flung rewards would lead to hopelessness and Extinction of behavior they didn't Skinner discovered that by intermittently rewarding the rats with food they would continue to press that lever like some sort of sawtoothed junkie regardless of the outcome he experimented with what happens when intermittent rewards are given at regular intervals say every fourth bar press or at irregular intervals he found that irregularly rewarded Behavior was the hardest of all to eradicate end quote so here's something I have never understood about Diablo I or games like it suppose you want to play the game over and over and over again to farm for set items set items if you get the whole set are the absolute most powerful things in the game so it becomes easier to play the game but at that point there is nothing left to do you have hit the ceiling by acquiring the set the the set has become useless to you because now your quest is over and the game is done how then to explain well set items are the most irregularly dispensed reward that there is in the game a player knows statistically that they will eventually get a set or multiple sets if they just roll the dice enough but when is enough how many hours how many playthroughs the anticipation of reward becomes the motivating factor if these set items are so rare so valuable and the thrill of getting a good drop feels fantastic even for yellow coated items then surely this last and final reward will feel even better it will feel best pragmatically it makes no real sense emotionally it makes perfect sense emotional craving is the basis on which the core gameplay Loop of Diablo operates any of the Diablo games it was the second game that truly perfected that behavioral Loop though all those meticulously rendered cutcenes all that dialogue all that art all of it is in service to the conditioned responses of our animal brain the reason that the game is such a godamn masterpiece is that because the higher art of dramatic design and the lower art of behavioralist design work in perfect tandem without being predatory I am already being made happy and receptive before the first word of dialogue is spoken and then the words turn out to be a ton of fun too and the experience becomes complete it's not spelled out as exactly obvious but all three of the player characters and classes from Diablo 1 are present within Diablo to his characters not just the warrior who is now being corrupted into Diablo by the Soul Stone in his forehead who Diablo II would later rcon into Aiden the older son of King leor who just didn't happen to be mentioned at all during the first two games the Rogue you played or might have played is one of the first major bosses that you encounter in Diablo I aara leader of the encampment sends you after her with great regret now called blood Raven she is a corrupted demonic version of herself raising the dead in a nearby Cemetery you need to wait until act 2 in the desert city of loot Golan but the sorcerer is there as well his breaking into a secret repository called the Arcane sanctuary of horizon precedes a lot of the city's suffering that you witness in act two and is the secret reason that the palace is closed when the player arrives in the city it's very cool to have the first game storyline Incorporated in this lowkey way there's even a return to Tristram itself the chapel collapsed in the buildings on fire old Griswald is a zombie W is a corpse but Deckard cane has a long life of expository dialogue ahead of him he needs rescuing Tristram has been destroyed but the conflict has exploded outward from tristam into the wider world the town finds ways to appear in every subsequent game anyway despite being burnt down whether in the future or in a dream Diablo I tucks Tristram away hidden behind a portal the widening of the world was the focus not any kind of deliberate Nostalgia for it even with Tristram burned old tropes and Quest structures from Diablo 1 remain like the Countess first you have to find The Moldy Tome which describes her many FR fronts and depravities then you find her ruined Tower deep in the woods climbing to the bottom of its blood soak dungeons you confront the evil CEST and lift an ancient curse all in a very short tidy highly rewarding period of time each Act has a maximum of six quests including main quests side quests then stand out as being pretty major diversions though in the playing of it nothing is ever very major each Act is maybe four to 6 hours the game is done in 20 hours unless you'd like another go around with a new character or at a higher difficulty because each Act has its own narrative Arc and power curve the rate of advancement through Diablo I feels blisteringly fast it still feels as fast in 2024 as it did in 2000 this is something even the modern Diablo share the main plot is usually done in 12 hours or less everything else is optional everything else could mean an additional 10 hours in Diablo II or an additional 100 hours in Diablo 4 that part is highly variable but the core Narrative of each Diablo sequel imitates Diablo I's rhythm of never allowing a player to stay in one place long enough for it to overstay its welcome if the gameplay of clicking on monsters until they die is inherently repetitive the fatigue of this repetition can be totally paved over by a constant churn of visual changes and tonal changes a major component of Diablo's charm and success as an action RPG is its enthusiasm for constantly mixing it up Diablo 1's random randomized dungeons were just the start Diablo I puts far more effort into varied environments than its predecessor did and in some ways did an even better job of it than Diablo I even within a single dungeon there are tonal variations in visual storytelling being done the first acts final dungeon is the monastery of the sisters of the sightless eye which begins like a nod to Diablo 1's classic dungeon design it feels so much like the initial Crypt beneath Tristram but then there are bigger set pieces like Courtyards and cloysters or more impressively the main Cathedral Hall they might not seem like a big deal now but in 2000 they were part of what made Diablo I such an impressive sequel the environmental art completely outclasses what was possible just 2 years before the advancement of 3D Graphics during this period is often the big story of the industry at large but even with titles like this where it was completely its own art style there were massive leaps forward within a short window of time Diablo I pushes the darkness Gore forward a little too as you get deeper the torture rooms become filled with a mangled corpses of dead Rogues many of them nude this was toned down in the higher resolution version of the game it's part of the pulp horror the kind of thing a Clive Barker short story might have and I think it mostly leans in that direction but I also appreciate the perspective that sexualizing violence is an uncomfortable creative choice in a lot of contexts tonally there is so much in Diablo from the era of schlocky sleazy 70s and ' 80s wh stuff like reanimator or layer of the white worm when you pull that thread all the way up through the series you end up with a balance of Pulp and schlock that works gorgeously well like everything that was done in Diablo 4 with Lilith as a villain the schlock evolves and resolves with the rest of the games as the industry evolves there are parts of Diablo I that come off as perhaps excessively Grim dark or self-consciously edgy but the impulse Behind These choices to embrace the gothic grotesque is what gives Diablo its force of Personality act one of Diablo I is like a self-contained imagining of what the dungeon structure of Diablo 1 could have looked like it expands and deepens all of the elements of the original game from the detail of the wooden doorways to the gore of the vivisected torsos by accomplishing all this in the first 6 hours of play there is nothing for the game to do but change it all up again for the second act the town of lot goolan is a much much larger and more populous city than Tristram and the Rogues encampment it feels convincingly like a small City even if it's really only a neighborhood shopping Oasis there isn't much to it besides a few pages of spoken Exposition and a strong Vibe but there doesn't need to be again it's about Impressions and legibility too much time spent exploring the city too many NPCs to keep track of this slows down the players progression through the game there's an introductory establishing quest in the sewers and it's off to the desert with you by Design the deserts are more confusing and open than previous field maps they lack the low stone walls that divided the previous ax Wilderness into discreet manageable chunks instead the main way to orient is by finding the barrier Cliffs and then working inwards looking for ruins and landmarks this is disorienting enough in the daylight but then a scripted Eclipse plunges the desert Into Darkness the wide open field coupled with the narrow field of view creates a genuinely vulnerable feeling plus the sound track once again looping music helps cement the mood and the sense of place some of Diablo I's most memorable tracks are here in the second act adopting some musical motifs that call back to the mummy and other Egyptian Adventure Tales more percussive though more driving and Moody Diablo I's ability to define a separate distinct personality despite being constructed from all familiar genre elements is impressive moving away from a Gothic environment it creates an equally dark and intimidating World from a sunbleached template there are some parts that of it that feel irritating or slow it's a more deliberate scavenger hunt structure and some of those items are in very deep pits I suppose it's mostly the worm tunnels I'm getting annoyed about wide empty Pathways twisting randomly for level after level it is so boring as to make Hellfire layer levels seem impressive by comparison most of the temples and ruins of act 2's dungeons are pretty cool though Diablo 2's levels are randomized like Diablo 1es but the levels are typically smaller and the templates are simpler the very dense completely hostile maze design of the first game never truly makes a reappearance within the franchise act 2's temples are a series of large Arena rooms connected by corridors they don't have these weird recr of hallways and frequent dead ends that characterize the first game which helps move things along there is rarely ever a wrong choice of how to progress what dead ends there are come at the end of a sequence of rooms full of rewards there's no time really spent navigating within Diablo I the forward momentum is never really broken even by the brief backtracking because of how infrequent that backtracking is the progression of act two is also fond and distinct from the First Act creating a final temple in a Hidden climactic Valley of temples you could optionally play any or all of them only a randomized symbol determines which Temple holds the true path forward you enter the valley knowing which is which already it's only if you're hungry for Content or not paying attention that could drive a player off track you're given a new game mechanic this act as well the rodric cube it's an item crafting device that lets you combine and refine items like gems gems themselves are a new mechanic that allow a player to socket these gems and boost relevant stats the cube allows a player to use three from a lower tier of gem to craft a higher tier of gem gems are kind of rare in any form but the lowest tier and so no single play through will have too many big ones the system is more meant to incentivize and improve the experience of doing multiple playthroughs the bonuses of lower tier gems are modest but by the time they're fully upgraded they can significantly affect the momentto moment feel of playing a given character the expansion also adds runes which have a much wider range of effect and can be combined in even Wild Elder ways the runes drop so inconsistently that it takes two or three playthroughs to even get a foothold on the system they can also be transformed and upgraded within the herodc cube while these kinds of cross character progression systems are common today they were deeply uncommon at the time of release in 2000 so not only did Diablo 1 mostly invent the concept of the arpg Diablo 2 established the loops of reward across multiple playthroughs that still Define Diablo today so many of the systems that make Diablo Immortal a predatory cash machine are essentially exaggerated versions of What Diablo I pioneered with gems and runes it's a matter of intention and degrees that makes one thing fun and one thing predatory Diablo I did not intend to monetizze the entire experience after a player has paid for the game and owns it the intention is simply to deepen the experience of spending a lot of time with the game with these systems they create flavor they are not essential which if you only play through once can be somewhat unimpressive because you only have middling gems and runes which do not express the full potential of those upgrade systems same deal with set items to get a single set item on a single playthrough would be an insane statistical anomaly if it's even possible at all act one of Diablo 2 is all about expanding on the first game the second act is about exploring what's newly possible within the sequel about establishing new mechanics establishing a new sense of possibility the climax is also clever a baiton switch you are led to believe that the boss will be Bal one of the three prime evils but he's already gone a demon named duriel is in his place instead in the Tomb is a whole new kind of character who establishes the larger extent of the in-game mythology tyel an angel tyal becomes equally important as Deckard can in the franchise's pantheon of repeating characters the angel reframes the scope once again all this chaos has a deep history there is a war between Heaven and Hell and All Eyes of each side are on you and what you will do in this moment Diablo 1 had a sense of larger Stakes but because it ended Darkly nothing was saved and nothing was resolved now it's not just one town at risk it's the world entire and you must travel that world to save it act three takes place in a jungle swamp once home to a beautiful city that has now fallen to demonic influence all Left Alive are clustered around some ruined temples down at the Docks it is an even darker mood than the last two acts you are so close now to the Dark Wanderer he appears briefly when you arrive Diablo's influence is strong he has already won in this place for the most part aided by the Primeval misto who was primarily responsible for the city's corruption the Overworld is structured differently to support this climactic escalation each Wilderness Area is structured around a flowing river at the other end of the river is the dead city the city itself is massive more buildings than the game had clustered together ever before as a space only for NPCs it would be way too big but deciding to do the whole city as a four map integrated dungeon well that's absolutely genius just a jungle is a good amount of environmental difference but to have the entire design philosophy switch halfway through the act from Wilderness to Urban density makes the ACT feel faster moving and more impressive than even the previous one mechanically it's also a major spike and difficulty they're these flamethrower guys out in the jungle that are just death machines they're difficult to avoid and massively powerful though not much of a problem if you're not a melee focused character and only a handful actually are I died often as a paladin in act 3 where I only died once in each of the previous acts the mobs of creatures are denser and more overwhelming than they had been before and this is in preparation of throwing a Mob Of All Bosses at you not only do you arrive at the High Council of traven call you fight them all at once the only act where Diablo I slows down is the second one the challenges and the rewards escalate in the third and fourth acts faster and faster until it seems impossible to go further with the format then the expansion escalates even further in a new and updated format where full Warfare between man and monsters is on the table the sense of pushing it as far as it can as fast as it can is part of what makes Diablo II so classic the loot Loop is the primary way a player is rewarded but the exploration is the main way a player engages with the world these big Wilderness maps are part of the hook hunting for bosses hunting for optional dungeons greedily vacuuming up every available prize and resource act 3's quests are its only real weak points they're not as interesting as the ones in the other acts only the Council of traven call really lands there's a scavenger hunt for the body parts of an honorable priest who was dismembered for resisting the corruption which is a cool story beat but it's also structurally identical to the last act scavenger hunt completionist exploration in act three can be a little Annoying too considering how a player needs a backtrack down the other side of the river to fill in the map in a lot of places which is ultimately a trivial complaint because the overall environmental design of act 3 with the clear goal of following the river and transitioning from Wilderness to tight Urban neighborhoods is the strongest in the game act three also knows when to deliver narratively the main plot had been dithering around the main Bloss had alluded you last act not this time this time you fight Mesto Lord of hate in a goldplated blood soak dungeon beneath the high Temple the boss fight is dramatic and difficult a good mechanical climax but it's the Cinematic chapter break that truly delivers this is where the Dark Wanderer your character from the first game fails and dies for the final time Diablo literally bubbles up from inside him consuming and becoming him all while the music swells and a portal to Hell Quivers with black muck and tortured souls for any kind of Dark Fantasy this is a tremendous setpiece any Conan movie back in the day would kill for this kind of production even the 200000 release of Diablo II was on par with the special effects being done on TV at the time with something like Xena Warrior princess it's worth pointing out that the appeal of Diablo I was not simply that it was dark fantasy but that it was uncommonly high production Dark Fantasy that actually understood and embraced the most deliciously cheesy of the genre tropes involved it feels like the fourth act would be a good chance to explore all that being set in Hell itself but the fourth act ends up being the smallest of all of them consisting of three field maps in a final dungeon it's full of great ideas that don't get enough time or Focus even the basic structure of the maps is intriguing you begin at the pandemonium fortress perched on the edge of hell a small and ancient Refuge from the Eternal battlefields the path to hell is a winding staircase finally depositing you on the floor of the infernal River tyal in particular is wonderfully voiced and full of fascinating Exposition during this act about the setting paired with Deckard Kan another Exposition machine the feel of the ACT is mostly Story Time with the old men instead of the kind of major arc that actu presented with loot gain there are two merchant NPCs in the pandemonium Fortress but they have no dialogue whatsoever it seems like this would be the ideal time to have talkative new characters here on the frontier of the game's mythology but act four is where the developers ran out of time Diablo I was one of the most notorious developer crunches in blizzard history David Cru who wrote an entire book about the development process and also that polygon article I quoted earlier describes a scene where developers were given sleeping bags so that they could work the entire time between waking and sleeping meals provided never having to leave the office at all in a group interview with the website vg247.com developer Eric Schaefer said quote it was physically hard people would be sweating and you can just see the stress on their faces we barely had relief if someone had to take a week off or couldn't stay a few nights other people would say well why aren't those people staying we've got to stay and we as managers as the people in charge we didn't have good answers for that we didn't handle it very well I had total confidence and that's what made it okay that there was going going to be an end and it's going to be great but for people who didn't have that confidence it made it even worse end quote in that article brevic only takes mild responsibility for the extent of the crunch but kic calls him out in particular speaking about brevic to Wired Magazine in 2021 saying quote he was one of the people most burned out by Diablo I because he put so much pressure on himself to succeed it was kind of controversial because towards the end he kind of checked out he was playing a lot of EverQuest and a lot of other developers who were still burning the night oil were upset with him but his marriage was falling apart he'd put a lot of pressure on himself for both games he just kind of needed to check out mentally he said I was a seagull manager I would stay home most of the time and then I'd come in and I'd crap all over everything squawk a lot and leave and he said that that's my his own admission I have a lot of respect for people who put the truth the creative truth ahead of their own ego end quote I'm torn on how to feel about this sometimes I ELO completely collapse under pressure and turn to comfort media when I shouldn't but I've also structured my professional life so that these failures don't add work to anyone else's plate as a video essayist all that happens is a delay if my mental health was better I'd do better that's always been the way a compromise between what I want and what I'm able to do brevic as a boss could take those breaks as his capacity to perform was burning out his other developers accountable to brevik could not and that's where it becomes kind of shitty the best boss that I've ever had was when I was working at a Seattle Pizzeria he worked the same shift as everyone else he did the same work as everyone else he chopped diced cooked box Pizza ratted orders and dealt with paperwork and accounting on top of it when he asked for something it was always easy to say yes because he never asked for anything that he himself would not do kic saying that brevic admitting he was a seagull manager during an already brutal crunch was putting artistic honesty over ego to say would feel more true to me if brevic was more forthcoming about it in most interviews instead brevic often focuses on the game which is fair the crunch hit everyone hard I have no trouble believing brevik was one of the ones most burnt out but he had something of an obligation I think to put in the same hours in the same way as he asked others to do I've never believed that managers are in a class of their own the way to build respect and hold respect as a manager is not to be above the work but at the front of it games are art but they are also a colossal mountain of tedious effort to climb in order to reach the point where they feel like art where they become a complete experience these circumstances of development influence the art so a simple question like why does act four feel incomplete has a wildly complex answer based on budget allocation time management and the chaos of individual personalities conflicting in a stressful situation it's taken two decades for all the stories about Diablo I's development to come out and paint that picture just playing the game on its own there's nothing left of the notorious crunch besides a vague sense that something is missing and something went wrong consider the game's final dungeon the chaos Sanctuary it's one of the most Moody and Gothic locations in the entire franchise there are so many questions it would be fun to answer about why it looks this way or what Diablo is doing here but that Exposition is slight and underwhelming and mostly non-existent this is his house he lives here and you've come all this way to kick his ass so now it's time it doesn't have to be more complicated than that but in the later franchise I prefer it when these climaxes are more set up and feel more dramatic the fight is a tricky one the fight is switched from Dice driven to animation driven there are now many unblockable area of effect attacks to dodge for the kind of Paladin that I was playing Aura driven and such I had to be right up close the fight was one I had to run away from multiple times taking the portal back to town for more healing potions different classes will have different experiences but for me this confrontation with Diablo lacks mechanical and narrative satisfaction for such a strong game with such a strong start it's kind of a weak boss fight close I think that's always factored into why I never really got into doing multiple playthroughs with multiple characters back when I was younger this always felt like a good enough place to stop my excitement has wavered and so bouncing off the game feels natural that was before the excellent Lord Of Destruction expansion which I never played back in the day made in just a year without the Crunch and without the pressure that troubled so much of Diablo 2's production Lord Of Destruction massively improves The Narrative experience and lengthens the mechanical rise to power allowing progress much deeper into Builds on a single playthrough and offering challenges that require every scrap of that power to answer plus it's fully integrated into the main campaign's narrative to the point that the narrative is incomplete without it at the end of the main game in the cinematics it is revealed that the figure interviewing Marius is ball Lord Of Destruction on the hunt for his own soul Stone the Asylum Burns as ball walks free the expansion opens with his assault on the Barbarian stronghold of haraga it's a fantastic scene characterizing ing the cruelty and strength of the demon Army through a doomed attempt by the city to Parlay to escalate the setting and the action Beyond hell itself is a tricky exercise how to keep the same intensity without feeling like moving backwards within the setting Mount arot is Lura side just a mountain it's not nearly as magical a thing as hell a setting is not just the landscape though it's the composition of what's within the landscape in this case a battlefield more intense and deliberate than anything in the franchise so far as a full five acts The Arc of action and Rising scale of encounters is immensely satisfying Diablo I begins with what's familiar reestablishes its rhythms and verbs then it widens the world of sanctuary with several acts of giving Chase and once that chase is done an actual war begins by that time you are an accomplished hero there is a great narrative Synergy between the overpowered character you play and the dramatic expectation that you alone can turn the tide of battle NPC fight alongside you on the battlefield not many but enough to help give the impression that this conflict is larger than just you the player a number of quests relate to Battlefield rescues and such forther giving folks a chance to play a traditionally heroic role there's more satisfying Synergy between narrative and gameplay within the structure this is a climb to the top of the mountain as it always kind of has been when you reach the temple hidden within the highest peak the game will end it just feels correct for the Epic end of a Mythic conflict Lord Of Destruction fleshes out the ending so that it feels complete it fleshes out the whole game that way too the version of Diablo I included in the resurrected Edition which I used since it's easy to toggle between the old look and the remastered one to do a playthrough of each has everything bundled together as a complete and seamless thing the new character classes the Rune system the genuine climax that the Fifth Act provides this is the game at its most realized and complete I'll talk more about the resurrected version when we reach it in in release order but it's important to some people that I mention that I did not use an original cdrom version of the game this modern version has years of balance tweaks and updates included within it it could be said and probably will that I didn't play the real version of Diablo II because for whatever person is saying this the real version is whenever they most enjoyed playing and everything that doesn't feel exactly like that memory is trash personally this does feel like I remember Diablo I to be it feels great I've never been so knowledgeable or particular about the details of how the numbers within the game have changed over time to say anything really meaningful about that anyway a problem that blizzard games have even more so in the modern era than back in Diablo I's Heyday is that they are designed with their top players in mind the player who casually engages and plays the game once every few years or so is less valuable and less important than the player who Loops the game over and over who spends hundreds or thousands of hours on an experience that could be as little as 12 hours for someone who's just playing to see what the game is about and enjoy it as a linear experience World of Warcraft was where this trend really began to take off but we'll see it within the Diablo franchise going forward as well Diablo I's runes and set items were the beginning of this trend Lord Of Destruction as an expansion may have introduced and supported that conception of an ideal player but it did not yet preference the ideal player in any way the expansion feels more than anything else about creating a sense of epic climax that had been so underwhelming in the original release it enhances the game's linear experience it does not itself incourage looping or repeating anything in particular it adds a variety where it can contrasting itself with Hell by creating increasingly frigid and icy environments it uses the battlefield to expand the scope of play increase the activity on screen and justify your outrageous abilities for me the only one misstep was a complication in the main quest where the barbarians are getting betrayed from within break the momentum of the climb to the top of the mountain for a mandatory interior dungeon it's fine and a small complaint in any case but something to keep in mind going into the more pronounced and deliberate storytelling of Diablo I many players do not listen to any dialogue at all within the Diablo games entirely Satisfied by gameplay and atmosphere those who enjoy repeat playthroughs pay increasingly less attention to the story by the time Diablo 4 rolls around the seasons assume that a player will skip the story entirely having experienced it once if it feels in the later games like there is a strange disconnect between story and gameplay systems that begins here too and the push and pull between streamlining for those who only want to click on monsters and those who want dialogue to justify the time and effort of doing so even as a narrative focused player who loves all the convoluted nonsense about demons and angels I still felt a little irritated about being diverted from my ceaseless thoughtless climb to the top even if for a moment in the service of a narrative beat it doesn't take much to interrupt momentum when that momentum is measured in seconds like a Diablo is when you kill more monsters in a single dungeon than tabletop D andd campaigns do in an entire year Lightning Fast engagement and impulse-driven game play do not benefit from contemplation they benefit from continuation from being kept in perpetual motion like a plate spinning on top of a pole still without a strong narrative Foundation at least the other games could not have broadened their own world so completely or easily ball seeks to corrupt the world Stone the magical heart of the entire setting discovered by the Angel inarius and the demon Lilith the world Stone kept Sanctuary neutral ground in the War Between Heaven and Hell it is not enough to fight the boss and win tyal shatters the stone to prevent ball from succeeding in his goal of corruption in doing so tyal shatters the status quo of the setting allowing sequels to reinterpret the relationships and conflicts within the mythology as they see fit it's very cleverly open-ended that way and a dramatically exciting thing to do when in perfect keeping with the tone established by the last game's climax You've Won but at what cost instead of consuming the hero alone the battle has consumed the world's stability Anything could happen now it perplexes me then that what would primarily happen with Diablo I was to take it all from the top in almost the exact order we did it this time Diablo I was so off-putting to me when it came out that I didn't play Diablo again in any form for more than a decade that game that I hated so much no longer exists Diablo I after its complete revision with loot 2.0 and the expansion pack Reaper of Souls doesn't play anything like my memory of it to check if I was misremembering I reloaded my old character after playing through the game twice with the same Barbarian once on normal once on hard his overall power and Effectiveness as a character was like onethird of where my new version character was at after a single goar around I remember struggling to find anything useful within the launch version version of the game and then if I ever did find something good trying to sell it on the Cash Money auction house for in-game gold because I never found anything at all worth cash I remember feeling so underpowered as a character and so cheated as a player that I became hostile to the story as well I just hated Diablo II everything about it annoyed the [ __ ] out of me and made me feel bitter playing it again over a decade later I had a completely different experience it still isn't what I want from a Diablo game and I'm still disappointed by how safe and corporate it is with many of its creative choices but it plays so much better and feels so much more rewarding than it did on release Diablo II after years of tinkering and a complete overhaul has finally become an action RPG with rhythms similar to the games that came before it it is a vastly different game than Diablo I or four with a strange approach to character advancement and an oddly bright art style but after much revising it has at least achieved a rough parallel with a momentto moment excitement of gameplay in the other Diablo titles it's not the worst Diablo anymore that that Crown having been passed to Diablo Immortal being the worst was what made it notable though without that dishonor ific Diablo I has to settle for being the most forgettable Diablo instead it's the visual style that primarily makes it so Bland the visual mood and the art style is a constant it can't be Sid stepped or bypassed in any way gone is the clamation inspired artwork that initially defined the series which makes sense because Diablo I took that aesthetic about as far as it could reasonably go in May of 2012 when the game came out blizzard had established a new and very consistent art style across its titles of bright colors and maximalist designs Diablo 1 and 2's Moody muddled gothic look was wildly inconsistent with these newer titles so Diablo I was created to conform to the new style instead of remaining faithful to the old this took so much away from Diablo I's personality and identity in preference to an immediately recognizable corporate art style even without an interface a screenshot from Warcraft 3 or World of Warcraft or Starcraft 2 or Diablo I will have immediate and obvious consistencies with those other titles on the one hand to be able to create a house style like this and apply it so universally is actually very impressive there are obvious things like use of color or using more rounded and cartoonish character designs than other Studios but there are hundreds of subtle things too from the way that blizzard does thatched roofs to the way that enemies run that all come together to create this cumulative impression of consistency that becomes recognizable as the blizzard house style St Diablo's original Developers for the first two games blizzard North was a separate team from the main Studio Diablo I was the first Diablo made entirely after blizzard North shut down as a primary Flagship product for the main Studio I can sympathize from a business perspective with the idea that if the art could also function as branding then it would fit in better as an alternative parallel experience to the grindy fantasy worlds that blizzard already offered World of Warcraft had been such an unbelievable financial and cultural Juggernaut for so many years by that point that it had completely eclipsed to the popularity of any of the early Diablo games the majority of people who bought Diablo II were going to be players who became familiar with blizzard games through World of Warcraft Diablo I suffers in many areas from being merged and blended with motifs and gameplay expectations from World of Warcraft what feels special about the Diablo games in terms of tone and art style is often absent entirely from Diablo I what remains is colorful mush a little of what one was a little of what happened to the year since a little of what seemed like it might be popular at the time updates have vastly improved the moment to moment playing of it they never solved Diablo I's essential foundational blandness there feels like an assumption baked into Diablo I that most players will be completely unfamiliar with Diablo 1 and 2 the third game takes elements from both its predecessors and remixes them choosing not to do anything truly original until the very end where it's almost too late to matter it's it's kind of a soft reboot of the whole Diablo concept one generation down the line sometimes this works well in a game franchise I enjoyed it a lot as the Gears of War Games moved on into their later iterations by creating a generational Gap as a way of resetting expectations Diablo I doesn't reset anything though it just takes it from the top without having any real kind of justification as to why we begin in Tristram Under Siege by demons and the Undead new Tristram of course since the other one burnt down although that doesn't really matter either because within 20 minutes you're also exploring old Tristram the old layout with a blacksmith shop anchoring the Town Square with its iconic Fountain your object is if you're familiar with the original Town not hard to find Adria's Shack on the fringes this is the heart of the big retcon of Diablo 3 in an interview with PC Gamer developer Sean copelan talks about how his role of senior lore manager had not existed before within the game franchise no one had kept the scripts of Diablo 1 and 2 or kept track of the loose story threads Diablo 1 and 2 had to have their scripts transcribed by hand to even figure out what bits and pieces there were with the Laura to work with from these fragments a new Cannon was created most of everything in the lore for the modern franchise was clarified and introduced within Diablo I and the comics and novels that surrounded its release this is where they said Hey what if we gave the Dark Wanderer a name made him ingal to the whole fall of condur plotline by making him also a prince and also he [ __ ] Adria part of the cult that worships the Primeval seduces the prince in the days after the climax of Diablo 1 Adria Bora daughter Leah who was destined from the start to be nothing more than a vessel for Diablo to reincarnate again there are minor inconsistencies with this retcon and some frustrating limitations with what the retcons lead towards but at least some kind of rcon was necessary to create a foundation on which to build out the setting in a more consistent way going forward Copeland defends the choice quote what I found when it comes to creative sessions is the word no or being l police as it were usually doesn't help the creative process we want to make sure that we give writers the suggestions to make their stories work because at the end of the day we're all trying to tell cool stories end quote the problem is that cool and familiar are the only two narrative goals the game is willing to work towards Diablo II takes plot beats and aesthetic fragments from the earlier games and tries to make them bigger louder more cinematic the game's first dungeon for example is the same first dungeon as Diablo 1 underneath trist Cathedral into the winding Crypts and catacombs a star has fallen from the sky Awakening the evil so the colors here are much brighter there's all this blue magical residue everywhere Deckard Kane's already there being chased around by monsters he sends you out looking for king leoric's crown so that the Skeleton King can be defeated you know again and so that you can also experience the Diablo I sequence of having a big Cemetery full of optional quests and dungeons the Fallen star is none other than the angel tyal back from or Exposition all although the game dither on this with the annoying plot beat of having him lose his memory there's no tension or uncertainty the player knows who the guy is more or less right away unless the player had never played the previous games and in that case the big name revealed that he's tyal has no real weight to it the Revelation that he was the famous guy who did cool stuff isn't much of a hook on its own it's only dramatic in sequence with the other games in which case the Amnesia thing feels frustratingly contrived even the butcher makes a reappearance with a big climactic boss fight Diablo I's First Act reinterpreted the first game in a way that was fun and clever because of how it emphasized what was newly possible it referenced these things in a way that was obviously beyond what the previous game could have portrayed Diablo I feels like less although the Dungeons and Open Fields are still assembled from template so that each playthrough is somewhat unique with a randomization of it there is no longer any labyrinthine element at all there always a couple dead ends but Diablo 1 and 2 were often about mazes that were mostly dead ends the recursive winding nonsensical Maze of the thing was a major component of its atmosphere of dread there is a massively reduced complexity to the levels that Diablo I assembles it no longer feels like a hostile environment this way it is not meant to confuse it is not meant to cause friction it's just an obvious easy playmat for you to move your toys around on the purpose of the levels has flip-flopped from being a component of difficulty to a method of Distributing reward the only aspect of randomization that feels like it still matters much Beyond monsters and loot table is that optional Dungeons and event encounters are chosen from a longer list than can be in the game at one time it's a lot like how side quests were done in Diablo 1 which is an actually useful resonance to go for as a sequel because Diablo I is meant to be replayed over and over again the large diversity in what side content might get remixed helps a great deal in keeping it fresh there's a massive achievement checklist system which lists all the things you need to find to have seen everything in dio 3 and I've never in my life ever come close I never will these variables feel meaningful the variations in level design do not for the most part these levels are long corridors that Twist and Turn but only ever flow one primary Direction I sympathize with the idea of making Diablo dungeons more legible but Diablo I's approach rounds off the edges so much that the thing has nothing at all to grasp onto it's odd to say this considering everything I've written and how I am with video games in general but a major problem with Diablo I is that it's just too damn easy generally speaking I hate excessive difficulty I despise repeating things I've already done I am instantly exhausted by any demand that I have to enter a series of inputs perfectly I believe strongly that challenge should be variable and that a game should allow a player to meet its mechanical demands at a rhythm and pacing that feels comfortable comfort of challenge is such a very individual preference that any broad gener moralities about too easy or too hard are likely untrue and are often just a projection of the feelings of whoever is saying it with Diablo 3 it isn't just the mechanical difficulty that creates this sensation of it being too easy it's the simplified level design it's the progression system where abilities are given to you and improved on a set timetable no point investment required builds are still a thing because you can only have so many abilities active at a time but you can instantly swap to any other build or any other combination of skills Diablo I you could easily wind up with a build that had no Effectiveness in the end game it was extremely harsh too harsh with heavy consequence for every choice Diablo I has neither consequence nor choice in the character system you can mix and match the whole toolbox as you see fit when you see fit or at least on the linear leveling schedule in an RPG gaining a level is always part of the hook the XP bar builds anticipation as it fills and then bam a fancy special effect in a bunch of prizes the most exciting part of this in most RPGs is the element of player choice and customization that progression Point feels like it has value because of its scarcity and the work that a player puts in getting one spending something valuable feels good it's part of the basic reward Loop so basic it works mostly unconsciously as part of our impulses as mammals without getting to spend a reward resolving the anticipation in a way that feels personal that anticipation just doesn't offer the same sensation of having gained something as a resolution which is where the low mechanical difficulty of normal comes into play there is so little mechanical friction that Victory is essentially automatic if Victory is automatic the rewards are automatic and the way forward is always Straight Ahead then it's no longer really active media quite the same way even the sometimes disparaged walking simulator genre provides friction in the form of navigating the environment of bearing the burden of putting the narrative together through reading the environmental storytelling you win a walking simulator by paying enough attention to understand what you're seeing and why you're seeing it a task that being completely passive and unengaged makes impossible apathy creates a fail state in Walking simulators from an artistic perspective a person can be exceptionally unengaged and apathetic while playing Diablo I and to still experience the full game it's odd so I cranked up the difficulty to hard and that was better and a little while later I wondered how hard expert could be in comparison if this was called hard and I realized ized it wasn't much harder at all it is strange to me how unclear the whole system is normal seems like where a person ought to start but even as an advocate for easier difficulties I found it unengaging hard isn't hard and the only expert qualification a person needs for the expert difficulty is to be familiar with the idea that monsters will die if you click on them later Diablo titles change the way they refer to these difficulties grading them into tears instead Which is far clearer with its intent and meaning to experiment with the difference in reward structure between difficulties I played a new character where I started on Expert and then went to the much higher scaled master and torment one difficulties where hitting level 70 took me until the expansion pack in my first playthrough I hit level 70 in the middle of act three the second time on the higher difficulties I helped it along with gems from my first playthrough that provided experience bonuses admittedly but being able to accelerate the reward timetable and the power curve like that made both of them so much more satisfying the lower the difficulty the slower the rewards the more like a bland mush it all seems speed that all up and the game is just giving you new Tools hand over fist to deal with monsters who actually need the bigger numbers and better attacks to deal with it took me playing the game like four times over 10 years to figure this out I thought that Diablo I just sucked I didn't realize Diablo I came with suck as a Gary Larson style adjustable knob of course all these complaints are about the new updated version of the game on release the whole thing was much harder for the most frustrating of reasons the biggest overhaul Diablo II received was with its expansion which introduced loot 2.0 this system which makes so much sense makes it so that the loot drops are almost always relevant to your particular character there's plenty of vendor trash but when something good drops it's something that is very likely an improvement on what you already have the previous system was centered around a player-driven trading economy like actually seriously the Diablo II auction house dominated and defined the experience of Diablo III for the first few years when I returned to it after a decade the auction house was the first thing I looked for only to find it excised like a cancer loot drops used to be much more truly random on the assumption that what was good could be sold at the auction house to players of other classes then those profits could be used to buy stuff relevant to you however inflation in the player economy made this basically impossible for anyone playing casually I never had the money to afford good items I didn't have good luck with items from my character class actually dropping in this way normal and hard felt much harder because my character's numbers were so far behind the curve of where they were supposed to be loot 2.0 keeps each player on track for the intended power curve of the game instead giving them upgrades at a rate absolutely guaranteed to make a player feel powerful loot 2.0 works too well at the original difficulties and so now expert and above are the only difficulties where a player might actually experience friction this is so much better though than being beholden to some dark Gothic eBay for all of your progress world of warcraft's auction house was different because for one magical items are found at a much slower rate and for another there is no additional cash money involved not by Design anyway for Diablo I it was real money from the start the valuation of fake items for real currency also drove huge inflation in the player gold market as players at the top level of trading sold and bought items for more and more and and more players who were irritated and impatient would pay real money actual human money to stay on the power curve now guaranteed by loot 2.0 if you didn't want to grind and didn't want to play at that intensity of commitment you were priced out and shut out from the player economy on which the entire Loot drop system was balanced auction houses in the real world always take a cut of each transaction and the blizzard had already conditioned its players to expect this by placing transaction fees on every World of Warcraft Auction House sale using its internal currency fake currency no one blinked as blizzard took a cut of every real world transaction in the Diablo I auction house supposedly this was not done primarily out of a profit motive speaking to PC Gamer in 2022 developer Jay Wilson explains quote when I was at blizzard the reason for doing the real money auction house was security it wasn't money we didn't think we'd make that much money from it but the biggest problem with Diablo I was item duping and duping hacks and all the gold sellers and all those things there's almost no way to fix that problem without somehow controlling the trading Market there's lots of good ways to do it but that was our idea at the time the trading markets in the game we control it so the hackers don't the short answer about the profit it made a little bit of money nothing compared to World of Warcraft we never expected it to be we really thought of it as a courtesy to making the game more secure if it made more than 10 or $15 million I'd be surprised it sounds like a lot of money but World of Warcraft probably made that every 10 seconds it was not very popular end quote Diablo 1 was one of the first games to ever face the problem of multiplayer hacking and duping so it makes sense that they would try to come up with something that was a more creative solution this particular idea though is just destructively poisonously creative it degrades the whole of the game to the point that the production director John height publicly admitted that it quote undermines Diablo's core game playay end quote The Presence at the auction house made the entire game into a parody of the modern gig economy repeating mindless activities for a vague and inconsistent opportunity to get ahead by investing and then reinvesting all your progress into an open unregulated hell Market that's just bad escapism right there the online outlet venturebeat did a profile of people who actually did exactly that and used the Diablo I auction house as a part-time job one more casual user Kevin kryan said quote I spent quite a bit of time at launch just playing the game which included leveling my Barbarian but once I got the hang of things and moved on to other games or activities for leisure time I got into a routine of logging in to check the auction house in the morning before work listing my auctions for the day and bidding on and buying items to resell I would literally invest all of my gold into bids in the morning and then come back at night to list the items I won collect my gold and money from auctions I sold and then reinvest all my gold into bids end quote Venture Beat Goes On To quote a user on Reddit who made $10,000 on the Diablo I auction house he defends the whole thing as kind of inevitable expression of capitalism coming up through any crack in the pavement it can grow which is tiring but summarizes himself extremely well in a statement that goes quote you always pay to win because you either pay in time or in a currency some people are rich in time some people are rich in currency and anyone who spends more time will also have the skills to back it up plus why not let people with that kind of money give your game time real world value end quote this kind of attitude led to the thankfully short-lived and mostly unrealized concept of of nft games where gaming experiences are converted into monetized tokens that can be openly traded what's odd and wrong about that whole line of thinking for me is that it equates gameplay to labor it assumes that there is no inherent artistic or humanistic meaning to what you experience in a game you play to win and then you pay to win with time or money that crossing of the finish line is the only satisfaction that this perspective can conceive of there is no room for playing out of Joy or out of osity and therefore these things are not worthy goals for the game mechanics to pursue we'll talk about this more when we talk about Diablo Immortal Diablo I was a pioneer of an extremely dubious sort it was one of the first major AAA games to truly push the boundary of what audiences will tolerate in terms of their playtime being monetized and converted into profit blizzard pushed too far the backlash was huge and if it wasn't literally written on the back of the box as a core feature they would have backtracked on the real money auction Auction House long before the Reaper of Souls expansion in the absence of the auction house there is a tangible vacuum within Diablo II a rotten Hollow that swallows up the intended balance of normal difficulty and hard difficulty it's an improvement but only in as much as losing your toe to Gang Green instead of losing your leg is an improvement Diablo II didn't start off feeling like a Diablo game it began as an early prophetic glimpse into modern profit models of mobile and live service game design compromised and contorted in the most self-destructive ways in a certain way I ought to love Diablo I because I actually enjoy the plot in worldbuilding of these games quite a bit Diablo I has more Exposition and dialogue in its First Act than the first two games put together the problem is that at best the dialogue is mostly filler by filler dialogue I mean dialogue that gestures towards strong characterization in answering the questions that the plot raises but actually extends the time that you spend waiting for those things longer than it would if they had never been foreshadowed at all there is no twist that isn't obvious no characterization that isn't already clear as day it is an incredibly large number of words spent on things you already know or things you could easily guess to me this is filler dirt and gravel and nonsense which pads for time without adding anything Diablo I had quite a bit of expository dialogue every character had something to say about every Quest mostly but the characterization was primarily done through Voice work alone giving the written lines a particular tonal flare this time you're going to learn every detail of every vendor's life an exhausting detail the impulse too deep in the characterization is positive the execution is the problem these Back stories are portioned out so that it takes most of the game to finish any of the storytelling they are structured and metered based on the mechanical progression of the game not any kind of narrative or dramatic Rhythm because these character backstories aren't told in a way that feels genuine or human it is hard to feel like the characterization is genuine it feels like lore about these people not anecdote not story to feel like an anecdote the metering would have to disappear the story would need to be condensed down into just a few conversations that feel weighty and meaningful tracked within the vast Achievement System these conversations become part of the checklis process of Diablo I and divorced from the actual narrative drama that's unfolding consider the many frustrating repetitions of the second act just like Diablo I were in a desert looking for a Wizard's layer instead of the Summoner waiting within the Arcane Sanctuary it's a guy named zolan K A renegade member of the hodm the same organization that decard Kane had been a part of Calum is the city instead of luk Golan but because the city itself is not a hub area and you don't go there very often it doesn't feel active or real the same way loot galain did there's a child ruler on the throne who is obviously a front for the big bad but the game again diers endlessly on revealing the twist that had already lit up with a neon and firor Works Act 2 of Diablo I is seemingly only interested in recreating the mood of Act 2 of Diablo I and I don't understand why what's the purpose in doing it over if nothing is meaningfully changed the main quests are more active with more steps and more drama injected into them but they don't actually outperform moments in Diablo I like where you finish the serpent Temple and reverse the eclipse consider Magda the villainess of act one and early Act 2 she's a cult leader with a thing for butterflies in act one's most surprising and bold plot beat she kills decard Kan kills him flat this is genuinely shocking because for an important Legacy character to suffer consequence like that is something that the game is otherwise often very unwilling to do but it's also very silly Magna is just kind of impossible to take seriously her costume is fine is like Rave Weare but compared to the tone of the previous two games it's like Deckard Kane might as well have been executed by the Ghost of Christmas present from Bill Murray's screw as a plot beat Deckard Kane dying does clear the way for Adria to become close to Leah and gain her trust in act two setting up the big betrayal at the end of act three Leah as a tragic character is also I think a positive impulse for the storytelling where it falters is just in how obvious and telegraphed the Betrayal is Leah must necessarily be an extremely naive person not to see it coming Leah's story would feel more tragic if she seemed more in control of her story and her Destiny if there was some element where she failed and faltered or had a hand in her own downfall or maybe if just the Betrayal was hidden better so that Leah isn't the absolute last person to figure it out the second act has tons of narrative content but like with the camp NPCs it's hopelessly drawn out and duded Diablo I knew when to let the gameplay and environment speak for itself Diablo I talks just to talk at 3 doesn't deliberately copy the previous games Act three at least but only because it chooses to copy the previous game's Act five instead you begin by defending a stronghold from a demonic Army's assault on the slopes of Mount arot familiar somehow to you eventually you work your way up the mountain but because we blew it up last time you go down into the crater this time instead because Diablo II does not have an act that goes to hell specifically act three and four divide the hellscape between them areat crater is one of the first areas of the game that looks new in any way but it's just a series of roundish Arenas something that people who are very invested in action RPGs will talk about is Monster density packing areas with as many monsters as possible for the best possible experience rewards for the most rolls on the loot table mount arot in Diablo I has a fantastic monster density and not much else people who find Diablo I compelling often enjoy how fast it is how many kills per minute you can rack up how efficiently a person can climb the infinite ladder of rewards it even has a Perman Death Mode where one fatal mistake deletes the character back when the game came out I had a friend who put hundreds of hours into the game mostly on Hardcore perade Mode he'd be slamming pans around in the dish sink at work and we'd be like you're okay man and he'd say yeah I got too [ __ ] drunk and lost my character again I'd be pissed too if you only have a few hours of recreational time a week which is what happens if you work full-time Food Service losing those hours hurts but this guy loved the sense of risk that the pade mode brought that was his hook for the game it's also why he often won big playing $100 hands of pyal that juicy proposition of risk has never been a hook for me personally with the Diablo games for these players the players who do enjoy risk that way the plot and dialogue doesn't matter just the grind the push into the higher difficulties and the highest reward tiers in this way Diablo I's abundance and excess of dialogue feels especially strange there is so much effort being put into it when most players will ignore it and for those of us who like the World building and are paying attention it spends the majority of its time telling us what we already know and [ __ ] around with soul Stones only when the game leverages its twist for the climax does it feel like something substantially new Leah's character Arc is only as long as it is and as detailed as it is to help sell the tragedy of her betrayal and to the game's credit there is an actual sadness to it Leah does seem like a good and caring person a strong person someone who would have been a survivor in this world all of that contributes to the feeling of loss when the Black Soul Stone obliterates all that she was in preference to The Infernal soul of Diablo Lord Of Terror the destruction of the world Stone in the last game means that open Warfare is now possible Between Heaven and Hell and so the fight moves to the Gates of Heaven just like Diablo I in Diablo 3 all the most Supernatural stuff is right at the end which is frustrating because this is the good [ __ ] A corrupted besieged Heaven is so much more compelling than the last three acts in their selection of classic Diablo biomes this is not only new it's extremely visually Dynamic it takes advantage of the full 3d presentation to create an environment that is impressively like a battlefield even better is the characterization of the Angels tyel was a classic good guy a real Beacon of Hope type character Noble and self-sacrificing this makes sense for him as an angel but it also stays in keeping with the Christian mythology that says Heaven is all good and hell is all evil Diablo I tries to differentiate itself from Christian definitions and Mythos by making the Angels a more alien and hostile culture than that tyal is the exception he thinks humans are kind of neat and he has a soft spot for them the others see Humanity primarily as a threat the lore goes that humans are the Nephilim hybrid beings born from Angels and Demons taking each other as lovers instead of enemies heretical and offensive to the angels already you see they see the potential for corruption and evil in humanity is damning that if Purity is not inherent it can never be achieved and the impure might as well just be cold making heaven as cruel and Stern as hell in its own condescending way is fine Gothic World building it adds to the feeling of a pessimistic world of Horrors to have all sides of the supernatural conflict arrayed against you no allies besides those who can count as true friends although you are here to help the Urus Council blames you for creating these circumstances in the first place offering no sympathy all of this is also foreshadowing for the expansion which is better script writing and story work than anything that came before act four is where Diablo I becomes finally a sequel to Diablo II and not just an imitator this war on Heaven is a much better finale than Diablo I had in every aspect it's longer as an act more detailed more exciting the World building is much more detailed and actually pretty engaging the fights are better and bigger the 3D aesthetic translates well to the golden marble halls of Heaven better than it did to the gothic spires of hell some people think the whole lady Diablo thing is a bit silly but I actually like it quite a bit blizzard games thrive on Camp sometimes overindulging to the point that it becomes turgid and irritating but this is the kind of Camp only possible by going incredibly hard with ideas that are fundamentally kind of silly Diablo reincarnating again and again every game is silly at its base it becomes tiring without variation this variation gives the Lord Of Terror some Shakira Hips to swing around and I think that's fantastic within the lore the scheme to combine the Essences of all seven Lords of Hell into one Prime Evil is something that hasn't happened since the dawn of time it's the culmination of a whole trilogy's worth of demonic usurping and undercutting I'd be sassy about my victory as well in those circumstances for Diablo I the most compelling thing about the climax is the way it sets up what's to come these characterizations of Heaven and Hell will stay consistent across the rest of the franchise this is the end of the anything Go's era introducing the Nephilim as a way of setting Humanity apart alone Against The Gods is a great plot beat in the wider storytelling Diablo games have always been mechanically about the path to power growing so strong that nothing can stop you now the whole cosmology is aligned to that perspective as well Reaper of Souls is as fantastic an expansion for Diablo 3 as Lord Of Destruction was for Diablo I it was arguably even more transformative with how its release also introduced loot 2.0 into xiz the auction house but it was also transformative in how Diablo I accomplished its action storytelling everything that was exciting about the fourth Act of the main campaign in terms of fast pacing dense and compelling Exposition and high Supernatural Stakes continues here in the expansion right from the beginning a renegade angel named malal has stolen the Black Soul Stone and convinced the Urus Council to go to war against the Nephilim after all you and your other player characters across the last few games have defeated all the Lords of Hell major and minor trapping them within the Black Soul Stone the biggest demonic threat left is the Demonic taint of humanity itself you saved an ungrateful heaven and saw what happened when the demons invaded them now you see the horrors of the Angelic host as they come down to exterminate Humanity like so many ants it's just as brutal just as cruel as what the demons were doing it feels extremely apocalyptic and there's a lot of attention paid to creating moments where the scope of the destruction and the intensity of the conflict is made clear by overlooks and Vistas the main campaign often ignored this kind of scene sitting the expansion is Nar ly tight in all ways in comparison even its events and side quests are tied to the action with stuff like people taking advantage of the violence to act on political vendettas there is a forward momentum to the action funneled by the streets of West March into a more linear experience than the previous acts the linearity is good it focuses the experience and directs it towards a peak much like the climb to the top of Mount arot in Lord Of Destruction the amount of narrative consequence involved in this expansion is literally world changing it's canonical going forward into Diablo 4 that the Angels call something like 40% of the world's population it feels apocalyptic because it is an apocalypse it is an end to the entire setting's previous assumptions and the stability of the supernatural order except it doesn't happen at the end of the expansion as a climax it happens at the very beginning as a frame and we witness it as players it's the exact opposite of playing it safe and recreating familiar environments as a player gets deeper into West March the extent of the massacre is kind of Staggering ing malel has harnessed the power of death itself which is visually portrayed with Eerie Blu toned magic it's contrasted with the blood soaked kind of demon massacr you've seen before colder and so much more clinical more all-encompassing Reaper of Souls is consistently engaging and surprising throughout in ways that Diablo I never was on original release like the expansion pack before it the experience of Diablo I is completed by all the additions made by its expansion pack made more narratively and mechanically fulfilled looking at all the many threads the expansion resolved and tied off it only really highlights how Fray a thing the original release was the companion characters are the thing that spring immediately to mind there's a Templar of zachar room who has an evolving plot line about a crisis of faith in a realization that he has been manipulated and brainwashed by his order this is all conversation based in the main campaign the expansion gives him an actual quest to resolve it with a dramatic confrontation and everything it's a genuinely satisfying resolution to cormack story and a release of all those prior conversations then there's the scoundrel who is one of Diablo I's most irritating elements because he's written as a sex pest a little goes a long way and he is just absolutely Relentless with his [ __ ] he's a tired one joke Pony for most of the game until towards the very end when he lightens up on all that a bit the expansion treats him Lyndon as if he was a real character all along giving him actual motivations and complications beyond the obvious the Reformation work the expansion does to make him seem like a human being after all sets the stage for him to be such an interesting side character when he's brought back in Diablo I as an old man then there's the enchantress who was sent forward in time to Aid You by a mysterious figure called The Prophet she's alone and uncertain in the new world with only the player character to cling to the expansion gives her room to be her own person via a cathartic conversation with a ghost of the Prophet resolving her sense of Duty to the Past allows her to Envision a new future for her self it's a tidy fun adventure with storytelling that improves and resolves a character who was otherwise incomplete even Covetous Shen the gem Merchant gets his own side quest I am not a fan of shen as a character but the expansion doubles down on the suggestion that he is an old trickster God and gives him the chance to atone for his greatest sin the scene is genuinely pretty sad and kind of well done it is a surprise emotional ending for what seems at first like generously a gimmick character it also adds a new Merchant and her own campaign long dialogue who handles some legendary AIX and suffix transfer services and cosmetics and such her dialogue is interestingly fourth wall breaking because she knows the future and perceives that all of this is just a cyclical Loop of events that repeats over and over with small variations like you she knows how the game ends but she is bound by magical taboo not to say anything to anyone but you it is oddly comforting to have a character around who is willing to commiserate about the existential weirdness of playing the game over and over and over again I think that's at the heart of what's so revitalizing about the expansion in context with the original campaign it understands it isn't just trying to add new features and drum up interest it is willing to identify where the game came up short and then build it up the rest of the way to a point where it does feel satisfying and worthwhile if you enjoy the plot and setting of Diablo as a franchise you can't really skip Diablo II even though the vast majority of Diablo I is just kicking the can and spoon feeding a player what it knows they enjoy already these last twists with Diablo becoming the Primeval and assaulting heaven with Heaven retaliating against The Mortals on Earth these are indispensable parts of the story and fantastic pulp fantasy the last part of the expansion ought to feel like more Nostalgia bait because it's fighting through hell to the pandemonium Fortress again but it's fighting backwards this time up from Hell towards the corrupt Judgment of Heaven the version makes it dramatically interesting it's not just oh the thing you remember though it is that as well one of the more clever choices in making the game more replayable is how each character class and both available genders of each character class have their own narration it slightly changes the tone and content of the exposition throughout the game and the expansion as you go through the campaign here at the true climax each character class gets its own unique Quest interaction it's a small touch that adds a tremendous amount of what feels like personal resolution to to your story even though there's not a lot that's actually very personal about it Reaper of Souls as an expansion doesn't just improve it corrects it betters the whole to the point of almost balancing out the long boring slog of the first three acts not like when you're doing those acts but afterwards retrospectively the pandemonium Fortress is a completely different place now there's some lip service paid to it changing form based on who controls it but the real reason is clearly that the Fortress is too cool of an idea to be stuck is two rooms and a staircase like it was portrayed the first time around this time it's big dramatic and Loud Diablo is good this way but it Embraces high camp and high stakes when it commits so hard to the consequences of its own storytelling that half the world dies in a supernatural Apocalypse at the end of Diablo I your character the Nephilim is certainly stronger than any angel or demon death itself is the final boss then it is impossible to escalate from here so the game ends as is traditional with a Melancholy and temporary victory that leaves the future uncertain the next decade of Diablo is mostly defined by playing the same games over and over again in three ways first was the addition of Adventure Mode which broke the Diablo II world map free from the campaign it's a completely new reward structure but I did not want to play more Diablo I just for the sake of playing more Diablo II so I didn't really explore it too much much more compelling to me is that one month out of the Year Adventure Mode has an event where the Diablo 1 campaign p is recreated within the Diablo I engine it even has a pixelated faux retro filter put over everything with the player utility bar converted back to the original color scheme and patterns of the original user interface a lot of classic loot drops of often duplicated items like The Godly plate of the whale are replicated as kind of novelty items for your character it even recreates the town part of Tristram but the NPCs are dead or missing and only finding items associated with them allows any kind of interaction besides that though the quests from the first game are all lovingly recreated including stuff that doesn't even seem like it would or could be satisfyingly recreated like the quest with the Hall of invisible monsters your walking animations are slowed down and stiffened to mimic the old movement style from Diablo 1 it is a wild impressively thoughtful modification of Diablo I to roughly mimic the experience of the first game bringing in modern powers and classes makes it impossible to feel exactly like it used to and there are no new tile sets this makes hell especially disappointing for this sort of remaster because dungeon layers 13- 16 are just super Bland in this version that's forgivable though they worked with what they had it's not like a high budget release or an official remake it's a game within a game hidden only available once a year around New Year's to celebrate the originals anniversary to me this makes it especially fascinating Diablo as a franchise is unusually obsessed even among nostalgic franchises with taking characters bosses and motifs from the original games and presenting them exactly the same way time after time I have fought the butcher three times in Diablo 3 Once at the end of act one as a climactic boss once during act three as a weird surprise boss and here again as explicit Nostalgia pixelated and slower in an attempt to evoke the good old days of the 1990s Diablo is not just about replaying one title over and over because the things that make the games familiar are so constantly repeating it is often as if you are replaying all the titles all the time in little ways not often so explicit or impressive as recreating the whole 16 layer dungeon that started at all it takes a couple hours to run the whole thing which is much quicker than it typically takes to play the original game as much of an imitation as this is the level assembly is still Diablo I there is no Labyrinth to speak of and that's what really holds this imitation back and makes it so short it's not just Nostalgia that makes the earlier games more memorable to the point that the newer titles are still in their glories and successes it's the fact that those earlier games have rough edges and a complexity that made them more compelling experiences in 2021 blizzard worked with a development house called vicarious Visions to remaster Diablo I leading to the resurrected version that came out in August of that year the resurrected version is absolutely beautiful keeping the mechanical core of the game's Rhythm and feel completely intact while overhauling the graphics to something that looks lushly modern what's so fascinating to me about it is how it what shows nine or so years after the fact that it was perfectly possible to recreate the dark Gothic Vibe of Diablo I within a fully 3D environment Diablo I just didn't want to in an interview with Euro gamer developer Rob gallerani explained the process like this quote the first thing is if we were to remaster every Sprite in this game I believe it would have been like 140 gigs when you talk about the feel that's Paramount to us and so that's why under the hood all of the logic and the simulation is still being run byy Sprites it's still a grid based game hitboxes so in a modern game you would probably have your character represented by a capsule and it would do a collision check because it's 3D we don't do any of that our engine that runs on top is a visual engine but all of the things of did this attack hit Are you standing in the right spot did this Arrow make it to the Target in time that's still all being run by the original game at the original frame rate now our visuals run decoupled so we can have 60 frames per second of animations and we can add turnaround animations everything like that but once again that logic and your break points are still going to be driven by what the old game was end quote because of this you can toggle between the old graphics and the new ones with a single key or button there's no difference essentially between the old game and the new that isn't just cosmetic while there's a shared stash between characters and a small amount of quality of life issues like Hellfire added some quality of life improvements to Diablo 1 the Cosmetic Improvement is honestly enough if someone wants to try the Diablo franchise and hasn't ever played any of them before this is the absolute best place to start by choosing not to Tinker with the structure and pacing of the original game at all it is still the extremely tight and fast-moving Adventure it always has been the new art style wall 3D is a remarkable achievement the developers in various interviews refer to a 7030 approach where 70% of the art is attempting close Fidelity with the source material and 30% is where they feel they can creatively adapt and improve the original designs the whole thing feels so truly faithful to Diablo I that it seems far higher than just 70% but I suppose that's the cleverness of the remaining 30% just trying to one for one recreate it with modern 3D and high resolution detail would feel a little flat because the higher definition would necessarily include things that the old designs didn't portray clearly or else didn't portray at all the artistic impulse then is to create a kind of idealized or maximized version of the original something that feels like how a person remembers it in their imagination a little more than it actually was Nostalgia always makes things seem more detailed and meaningful than they might have actually been and Diablo I resurrected spectacularly delivers on this Nostalgia by presenting a version that actually is deeper and more detailed that lives up to nostalgia's heightened expectations it does this very unobtrusively layering the change in so lovingly and naturally that the 30% that's new never draws focus at all the key element is The Game's willing to be dark not tonally but with the lighting system Diablo I was so bright and so colorful throughout even in dungeons that were meant to be gory and for boing this new version Embraces Shadow its content to hide what's ahead just beyond the torch light this gives the action and exploration a tension that was present in Diablo II but absent in Diablo I the animations of Diablo II were so abrupt geysers of blood sudden explosions of Gore monsters freezing and cracking apart by basing the actual game part of the game on those old rhythms and anchoring the new animations to them none of that exciting reactivity is Lost in Translation it just looks so Lush and detailed now the spectacle is enhanced without having to sacrifice anything at all Diablo I resurrected makes no accommodation for modern tastes or modern Trends it just takes what was once one of the best action RPGs around and dresses it up so as not to seem so old to new or younger players which creates a small mystery if nothing about the game play is new why doesn't it also feel as old as the Sprite based Graphics all of these games are clicking on monsters until they die this is true but the games vary widely on the risk-reward proposition of clicking on those monsters Diablo 1 didn't move fast enough but Diablo II in many ways moved too fast in that game you have a vast inventory with which to hold sack fulls of crap you don't need to salvage for scrap so that eventually after much churn and burn of total crap you can craft an item at the blacksmith that's got good stats but since that's random too it might not even be better than what you found it's all random nothing feels like it lasts or matters in Diablo I it always just boils down to a Hunger for More more distractions more abilities more achievements and grinds and long-term goals when I play an older game and it feels old that's usually because it's got more friction than I expected it to in more ways it feels hard to use it feels slow it feels clunky it runs contrary to my expectations Diablo 1 feels old when I go back to play it Diablo I's improvements over Diablo 1 refined it to an edge that feels timelessly razor sharp this rhythm is the core of what makes Diablo feel like Diablo not just in terms of remastering a classic with Diablo I but also in terms of what all the sequels are still chasing after so many years later this core gameplay Loop is what's still buried underneath all the complications of Diablo 4 or Diablo Immortal or Diablo I this kind of moment by- moment excitement and engagement is still the metric by which the success of the modern games are judged so of course it doesn't feel old it's still with us part of the modern games underneath all the other stuff like a car engine with all the digital controls Stripped Away by bringing the graphics in line with the modern era for Diablo II it just makes obvious what a Timeless success the mechanical balance and feel of this early game and what a contrast it is to the modern interpretations of the Diablo experience Diablo immortal takes its Visual and gameplay cues from Diablo I where Diablo I follows more closely in the vein of Diablo I resurrected but both are heavily monetized and optimized for engagement metrics they both conceive of the player as a consumer and a customer far more than they conceive of them as an audience alone Diablo I resurrected doesn't have any of that it's a game to be played as a game for fun for enjoyment out of curiosity or Fascination it doesn't require your attention for more than that and does not cry out for attention when you are done with it if only more games could be so content with being what they are and not leverage themselves so frustratingly towards further monetization and things in the industry have not improved in the past 20 years behind the scenes either 20 years after the death march crunch of Diablo II Blizzard Activision found itself in the middle of a massive backlash for having done nothing to prevent a culture of workplace harassment and mistreatment that chewed up and spat out dozens of talented developers the lawsuit against blizzard described a situation where women employees suffered quote constant sexual harassment unequal pay and retaliation end quote Diablo 2 resurrected came out the same month there was a massive employee walk out in protest to everything going on at blizzard in 2023 blizzard had to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission a $35 million judgment for their fuckups which sounds like a lot until you recall the quote which suggests that World of Warcraft makes that amount of profit every 15 minutes or so games as wonderful as they are are still a luxury item people should not suffer to make them developers shouldn't have to put up with cruelty and [ __ ] from their Publishers just for a paycheck many folks still feel that Activision Blizzard has never fully taken responsibility for what happened or made adequate amends I love the Diablo games even the ones I'm frustrated by but it would be irresponsible to talk about blizzard games in the modern era without at least mentioning all the heinous stuff that came out about the company itself plus it helps contextualize things if it seems in Diablo Immortal as if exploitation and profiteering is the whole point perhaps this is just a reflection of a greater dehumanization pervasive within the development process I played Diablo Immortal after I played Diablo I and I wish I had reversed that order because I would have been less confused by some of the structural changes that made Diablo 4 seem so strange with its pacing and progression Diablo Immortal is like a live experimental laboratory for the franchise where new mechanics and new motivational structures are field tested along with a broader experimental goal of seeing just how monetized a game can become without toppling over entirely critically this is not to say the game cannot be played or enjoyed without spending a dime I made it a goal not to spend any money at all on Diablo Immortal and I felt like I was able to see almost all the content at a pretty reasonable Pace it was not hard to avoid spending money when I committed to doing so but in making that commitment it became obvious that I was being directed to spend money constantly in many ways and at many junctures there are more than five different currencies in Diablo Immortal only one of which is directly tied to spending cash money but several more are indirectly tied to paid battle pass rewards in order to actually be useful Diablo Immortal is one of the most cynical games that I have ever played it's also a fascinating lens into where the line is between gaming and gambling the difference between a game the player plays and a game that plays the player Diablo Immortal is a much more massive project than I ever expected it to be like people told me fallout shelter was pretty good for a mobile game and it was extremely slight when I tried it Diablo Immortal is a larger game in some ways than Diablo I was it also plays very similarly to Diablo III and looks almost exactly like Diablo II tablets and smartphones are now so powerful that they can handle these decade old graphic demands easily Diablo mortal has also been supported by several major expansion updates that add entirely new regions to the map and follow a new interconnected storyline so there's two campaigns really the launch campaign and the post- relase campaign there are multiple game modes just for fun two randomized separate Rift dungeon tracks a weirdly Baroque and overproduced multiplayer system side quests bounties pets a pet upgrade and trading system every system that was ever in any Diablo game and a dozen more that shouldn't be are all jammed together competing for attention Diablo mortal is not just a mobile spin-off it is a full ass sequel it took me around around 50 hours to get to the end of The Narrative content and what felt like the end of the game or at least a reasonable stopping point Diablo Immortal because it's primarily a mobile game doesn't often come up in discussions about the Diablo franchise but it should it is all the worst impulses of the franchise mixed up with some of the best Diablo mortal as just a game is actually a pretty good one certainly one of the largest and most impressive titles developed primarily for mobile the problem is that everything it's learned from previous titles about good game design is leveraged against the player in the pettiest of ways at first money isn't even disgust of course not that would be so coarse Diablo mortal is an extremely sophisticated money extraction machine it would not be so obvious right out the gate no the first 20 or so levels of character advancement and the first couple main chapters of the plot are all oriented around providing a classic familiar Diablo experience the classes are mostly old standbys from a variety of titles but there's one that is new the blood Knight a vampire class that can frenzy and become this big blood Abomination thing there's even a whole quest line later in the game just to establish lore for them I gave blood Knight a try since it seemed like the most game specific way to go like Diablo I the skills you get at level up are predetermined all characters Advance at the same rate the only unusual thing is that Immortal takes it a step further and lets you change class at any time as well you are all things at all times whenever you feel like it the only draw back to changing class like this is that Immortal follows in the footsteps of loot 2.0 from Diablo I so you mostly only find drops appropriate for your current class you would have to build up a new inventory for a new class if you swapped and that is time consuming otherwise however there are no penalties at all it's a very open system meant to encourage player experimentation and keep players engaged as their paragon levels start climbing into the high hundreds and low thousands for very invested players when you upgrade items it becomes so overwhelmingly expensive to do so that you can just transfer upgrade levels between any items of the same type helmet to helmet weapon to weapon so on fundamentally character class doesn't matter in terms of progression once you've gotten past the initial 60 levels and into the Paragon circuit what matters is something called resonance and that's where all the trouble begins resonance is a multiplier that affects all of your stat bonuses to play on a higher tier of difficulty or to participate in multiplayer there is a Thresh hold of residents that a person really has to meet player versus environment play doing all the single player story content like I did does not require paying very much attention at all to Residents it is still important but can be accomplished without spending money I reached a point towards the very end of the last expansion Zone and on the mid-level hell difficulties where I felt very flat and very underpowered as a character I would need to upgrade my resonance to restore the game feel and rhythm of play to what I had been enjoying before resonance comes from One Source only legendary gems these legendary gems themselves come from One Source the Elder Rifts the Elder Rifts are gated by a ticket machine you feed in tickets called crests up to 10 at a time at least one ticket is needed there are three tiers of crests all increasing the likelihood that something good will drop but a drop is not really guaranteed it's all driven by a random number generator a gamble in other words if you play for free there are enough reward tracks along the free battle pass and elsewhere with things like weekly and seasonal events that you can do Elder Rifts occasionally very rarely for a full 10 ticket dungeon and even more rarely involving the orange middle tier tickets I never once received a purple top tier ticket among the free reward tracks to upgrade a legendary gem you must Salvage an exponentially increasing amount of other legendary gems first it's just one if the gem is basic and not very good and then five or they start at five if they're good then you need 25 more and more Way Beyond anything you could do with the crest tickets that are available on the free track it is fine as a free player to be content to disregard this entire system except for the few rare occasions when you get complimentary tickets you'll get through most of Diablo mortal just fine doing PVE stuff without the resonance but paying players will always have more functional competitive characters crests come in the paid battle pass crests come in bundles crests come in these Paragon reward tracks crests just get thrown at you hand over fist if you pay money when the opportunity to spend money arises within the game if you are ever feeling stuck or underpowered or unsatisfied with a rate of progression then this can be solved by feeding cash into the game and receiving crests in return the crests do not directly translate into a specific item so there is a certain amount of plausible deniability in saying that the game is pay to win but the fundamental design of Diablo mortal is that players who pay are allowed to participate in all elements of the game constantly and players who do not pay must save currencies over time and receive rewards a couple times a month that paying players receive a couple times an hour if they want the legendary gem system is a cynical deliberate Honeypot Eternal orbs the one currency that is always tied to real world cash money can always always be used to buy crests orbs can also be used to buy another rare resource that you barely get any of on the free reward track Platinum Platinum can be used to trade items on the open player market so you could make platinum that way selling Goods on the auction house if you had something good but you'd only get something good that's unlocked from your character account like an unlocked legendary gem if you buy Eternal orbs to guarantee one through the purchase of a top tier Crest basic entry for new player into the Platinum Market is contingent on having made cash purchases not explicitly it just happens to work out that way Platinum is also the only currency you can use to upgrade charms which provide small effects that only become useful if you upgrade the charms enough with Platinum what is free will only get you so far full participation in the game absolutely does require Cash Money suppose you don't pay what are you really missing out on with bad charms and low resonance not so much nothing narrative no feature is explicitly barred to you but you are always missing out you are always severely underpowered compared to paying players you need to save every little scrap of platinum and every stray Crest you need to put in more of your human time to grind it's a corporate version of exactly what the Diablo II Auction House Traders said some players pay with time some players pay in cash but everybody pays in the end Diablo mortal is a product where character advancement at higher levels of play is so tied up in various internal currencies that it better resembles a peculiar colorful part-time job than it does a game in an interview with vg247.com Diablo mortal lead designer Joe grub said quote I think the first highlight is all the major gameplay systems in Diablo Immortal are free that includes the main story line the dungeons the helar raid the in-game cycle of strife you can do everything in Diablo Immortal completely for free part of that comes from our philosophy of never circumvent ing core gameplay and optional purchases are always a bonus talking about some of them they range from General value bonuses that you'd expect like the battle pass Cosmetics at a AAA quality you'd expect from blizzard you've also got legendary crests to enhance the Elder Rifts the other core piece of this that we thought was important was that these optional purchases should never be a way to acquire gear or experience we will never sell gear we will never sell experience in Diablo Immortal what this means is that you have to play Diablo mortal to increase value you have to have skill at your class if you want to be skilled at The Necromancer you have to be skilled at The Necromancer you have to earn legendary items by killing demons and raising your Paragon level you need to actually go out and find the legendary items for a particular skill build you're looking for end quote true but only to a point they don't sell experience directly they don't sell gear directly they only sell tickets to the place where you make the gear and experience most effective it is wildly close to an actual lie to say that crests enhance Elder Rifts crests are Elder Rifts if you use just a few with the lowest tier of Crest you might not get any legendary gems at all hell even the highest tier crests are no guarantee of the highest tiered gems one streamer spent the New Zealand equivalent of $12,000 americ on Diablo Immortal until he got a five-star gem six of those gems are required to max out a player's residence Forbes and other outlets widely reported a player who spent over $100,000 American on the game to max out his character at which point he won every multiplayer thing he ever tried to do and the game's matchmaking service tried to ice him out the player objected arguing that he had indeed paid to win and should be allowed to do so at that price these are edge cases the edge cases are so absolutely bizarre and severe because the entire structure of Diablo mortal is intended to extract value from its players you can feed 12 Grand into the feel-good machine and not get the Feelgood pellet to roll down the shoot video games do not usually operate this way slot machines operate this way so to understand Diablo Immortal I turned to a fantastic work of non-fiction by Natasha shul called addiction by Design machine gambling in Las Vegas the book is full of fascinating information and cutting analysis but the thing that was most interesting to me as a game critic was she was able to Define where machine gambling crossed the line of digital interactivity into territory that video games have traditionally occupied over and over again in interviews with gambling addicts the gamblers deny and downplay the urge to actually win as the reason they are drawn to slot machines sh opens the book with something a woman told her about why she kept feeding money into the machines over and over quote in the beginning there was excitement about winning but the more I gambled the wiser I got about my chances wiser but also so weaker less able to stop today when I win and I do win from time to time I just put it back in the machines the thing people never understand is that I'm not playing to win I'm playing to keep playing to stay in that machine Zone where nothing else matters end quote to put it as bluntly as possible the success of the entire Diablo franchise is its ability to put people inside this machine Zone even Diablo I completely devoid of any monetization scheme whatsoever is exciting not because clicking on monsters until they die is particularly complex or compelling all on its own but because doing so creates an EB and flow of action and reward that keeps people so engrossed they do not perceive time passing Diablo games when they are good when they feel right create self-reinforcing flow states that continue perpetually until the player chooses to walk away this is good game design often with Diablo games the emotional feedback loop is so thoroughly enjoyable so perfectly meshed with a gameplay Loop that it's godamn great game design Diablo I's auction house was such a bad idea because it interfered with his feedback loop it short circuited the feedback loop and made it feel weak Diablo Immortal learned much from Diablo 3 it learned that what was monetizable was not the core gameplay Loop what was monetizable was the desire to accelerate ahead of the loop to go beyond and once hooked to stay in that accelerated Zone as you gain levels into Diablo Immortal prior difficulty modes stop giving experience points but you need to be geared properly and add a good resonance level to function on those higher difficulties Diablo Immortal puts cash barriers on access to the feeling of that flow state it meters entrance into the machine Zone not at first because you have to know something first to Crave it just later by slow degrees making it so that the deeper you get into the game the more disappointing it feels to be a free onping user writes quote solitary observative activity can suspend time space monetary value social roles and sometimes even one's very sense of existence you can erase at all the machines you can even erase yourself an Electronics technician named Randall told me contradicting the popular understanding of gambling as a desire to get something for nothing he claimed to be after nothingness itself as Molly put it earlier the point is to stay in a Zone where nothing else matters as machine amblers tell it neither control nor chance nor the tension between the two drives their play their aim is not to win but simply to continue what addicts them is the world dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play end quote video games when they are good are lauded for these World dissolving properties that is the art of them that is the thrill and traditionally video games have wielded this power with artistic intent slot machines machine gambling in general are an entire industry which is like the other side of this artistic coin the dark path the low path increasingly the line between one industry and the other is often blurred in pursuit of profit Diablo Immortal is special though like its storied Nephilim it is the child of both the good and the evil inherent in the human craving to live suspended within the machine Zone the Blended impulses of Heaven and Hell art and commerce Joe grub can talk all he wants about the philosophy of never circumventing core gameplay because the core gameplay is the hook that drives the monetization process not that you must pay but that by paying the experience would become obviously and immediately more rewarding Diablo games are not complex games they are not narrative or dramatic games at their core their core is an electronic process by which the reward centers of the brain can be stimulated again and again by sound and color and light and the impression of having gained something valuable or accomplish something difficult so you have things then like the adapt path free item rewards for advancing through paragon levels but look for just 20 bucks you could double those rewards when this track runs out another one appears El for 20 bucks when one battle pass runs out another one appears also for 15 bucks there are paid blessings which wildly accelerate the rate at which you acquire gold and other resources for 10 bucks it is possible to have have nearly $100 worth of concurrent overlapping paid reward tracks activated at the same time those edge cases we talked about earlier show that you can feed far more money than even that into Diablo Immortal to push the pace of reward even further the more you pay the deeper into the machine Zone you go and all of it healthily protected under a layer of plausible deniability where because the player must participate in interactive systems and voluntarily go through extra step steps after purchase the developers can claim that none of this is necessary and all of this is free after all I didn't pay a dime and I got 50 hours of clicking monsters out of it I was allowed to exist within the machine Zone and I was never threatened with exile for being cheap this particular manner of weaseling out of taking responsibility for what a predatory product they've created is something sh talks about frequently when discussing the gambling industry itself she writes quote unlike gamblers who could be said to act upon themselves through gambling devices with the goal of regulating their own effective States the designers marketers and managers of the devices are in a position to act on others at a distance delegating to technology the task of soliciting and sustaining specific kinds of human behavior lur and his colleagues have conceptualized design as a process of inscription whereby designers inscribe certain modes of use into the products that consumers will interact with the resulting products carry scripts that inhibit or preclude certain actions while inviting or demanding ing others by setting the parameters for the user's actions a given product and by implication its designed team plays a role in guiding this Behavior undermining their own claim that slot machines are powerless inert things members of the gambling industry invest a great deal of resources and creative energy into the project of guiding player Behavior through technology endeavoring to create products that can extract maximum Revenue per available customer or revp pack of this allc consuming objective they talk freely and explicitly among themselves on conference panels in journals and in the aisles and meeting lounges of exposition floors how to get people to gamble longer faster and more intensively how to turn casual players into repeat players end quote for Diablo Immortal the process of inscription was honed across titles for whom monetization was never the point and in the case of Diablo I a title where there was a deliberate counter-reaction to monetized design so strong it provoked an apology and a top to bottom redesign of the entire reward structure Diablo mortal aesthetically and narratively is more closely tied to Diablo I than any other title in the franchise so how can it possibly get away with this predation where Diablo I did not part of that might be the audience and intended Market the website PC games n reported that fully 50% of Diablo Immortal player base had no previous blizzard account suggesting that they had never played a Diablo game before predatory monetization in the mobile games Market drives that entire sector it is in some ways expected that a mobile game will have extensive microtransactions for me this is what makes the predatory monetization of Diablo Immortal most Insidious because there is a real actual game beneath all that [ __ ] in a certain way Diablo mortal is one of the better titles ever floated in the mobile games Market because of its length production value and visual complexity it is a AAA title in its own right even among action RPGs for the PC it plays well and feels exciting and all of that effort every ounce is for the express purpose of extracting maximum rev pack from its player base it takes advantage of the fact that many mobile players haven't played much of anything else quite as large or as deep as Diablo mortal as large and deep as the game is every winding path leads back to a screen suggesting that you buy something as shul puts it quote the job of Casino layout is to suspend walking patrons in a suggestible effectively permeable state that renders them susceptible to environmental triggers which are then supplied end quot she references a man named Julian Dibble who wrote quote textbook capitalist exploitation thrives in peaceful and productive coexistence with the play Drive of the exploited end quote dibble's theories about the potential for the gamification of Labor and suffering are referred to as Ludo capitalist Theory Dibble didn't pluck the theory from thin air he came up with it by observing the phenomena of how player demand for fictional gold in World of Warcraft created an entire Black Market of foreign laborers who mined the gold and sold it for real cash currency to wealthy westerners who played for fun blizzard doesn't just represent the most egregious participant in the phenomenon of Ludo capitalism they're the [ __ ] what made the term necessary in the first place Diablo Immortal is the laboratory in which these luto capitalist theories are tested pushing player tolerance for monetization to the brink and a market where that kind of exploitation often passes completely without notice it's ironic I suppose that an franchise about demonic corruption and the slow unraveling of the self in the face of evil that a game like this would eventually emerge the most ironic most peculiar aspect of the whole mess is that if you leave the entire monetization thing out of it which is impossible to do but let's pretend the game has gotten steadily better over time each major update has been more impressive and higher production than the last and the secondary serialized campaign that takes place after the launch campaign is over provides a better narrative experience than most of Diablo I there are aspects where Diablo Immortal is actively a better game with a more interesting game world than Diablo II was it didn't have to be all [ __ ] up and morally dubious like this and there are impulses within the game that hearken back to the design of earlier Diablo titles where the player is the participant and not the customer it doesn't start out very promising though in fact it starts out almost exact exactly as Diablo I did regurgitating bits and pieces of previous titles for no other reason than nostalgic familiarity the very first dungeon has you fighting leoric the skeleton king again the second dungeon features the CEST whose Tower you delved into back in Diablo 2 the Countess in the dark woods though is an interesting example because of how much Diablo Immortal expands the presentation in storytelling aspects from what was in Diablo I there's an hourlong Quest chain just to get back into the countess's tower and over the course of that hour you have to deal with all of these blood flowers popping up all over creating a kind of Gore swamp in the middle of what was once Gothic Woodland it feels kind of like an actual sequel that way doing up something previously tangential in a larger more impressive manner di Diablo mortal takes place between Diablo 2 and 3 providing connective tissue even where that tissue is not needed or feels repetitive the main plots main problem is scarn its villain scarn is just such a basic uninspired demon with such an irritatingly Simple Plan he was one of Diablo's old war Masters so when Diablo was slain during the events of Diablo I scarn used the primevals essence to create a new subm of hell where he could be ruler alone this is the realm of damnation foreshadowing the revelations of Diablo I his plot hinges on the Nephilim concept he's going to use shards of the shattered R Stone to somehow eliminate the Angelic part of humanity turning everyone into soldiers for hell Diablo himself was never much of a villain but besides being large red and mean but other villains of the series are often much better portrayed ball had so much more personality than scarn even mafesto did Malil was a particularly good one his grievance sending ripples throughout the entire game Universe scarn has no personality besides just being kind of a dick the way he fits into the broader World building feels tangential and slight while the ways in which you foil his plot are over familiar and repetitive Deckard Kane helps you look for the world's Stone shards one region at a time guess guess what comes after the opening Woodland areas if he answered sandy desert or the equivalent congratulations you're just as fatigued with the progression as I am the desert here called the chasser sea is split between an outdoor region and an indoor region called the library of zultan kol it interacts really weirdly with Diablo I by making these familiar choices it's a prequel technically but it depends on having already played Diablo II for text and if a player hasn't then all this Nostalgia baate would be really vague and unformed who and why is zolan cool well you already know no reason to explain it because the graphics and gameplay are so similar between Immortal and Diablo I it doesn't often feel like a prequel it just feels like a cheaper and pointless parallel version only when Diablo Immortal begins constructing its own identity does it do anything truly exciting and it only begins doing that in Earnest after after the main campaign is over tutorial isation of basic game Concepts takes place throughout the main campaign often long after I've begun to use those features anyway out of curiosity it seems as if I was meant to play the campaign straight through without doing any side content which is odd to me because I never play RPGs like that at all you can't play the main campaign on any of the upper held difficulty levels but you also stop gaining experience from anything below the hell difficulty levels so I wound up stuck in this kind of weird gap between difficulty TI where the game felt very unsatisfying to play I had played it wrong somehow by being curious about the game and satisfying that Curiosity without being explicitly told to do so so what is narratively boring becomes especially frustrating when it also becomes mechanically boring for no other reason than an oddly strict timetable for when the player will finish I don't really have a motivation to kill scarn other than him being the big bad and being therefore obligated to do so unless you also count the social obligation old pal Deckard Kane to help him out I mean the man gets murdered by a woman in the stupidest costume in Diablo history coming up here in the events of Diablo II why don't we just cut him a break in any case the way the game is constructed beating scarn is not the end if you actually play the game the way it apparently wants to be played Without exploring any side content until you're invited to do so beating scarn is basically the beginning all the zones are unlocked all the tutorials are over now your grind begins because these games are not about The Narrative they're about turning small numbers into large numbers they are about hunger and craving they are about creating within a player the expectation of reward and reinforcing the satisfaction of that reward everything else is just a vessel for conveying the reward in the first place sure is plain popcorn is just a vessel for butter and salt this is what's so interesting to me about the post-release campaign blizzard had released their derivative predatory product they made their money and could now quite easily produce low effort [ __ ] for it perpetually it was not necessary for blizzard to improve upon the game in any way they did though each of the three major expansions was included without further cost as part of the base game not as special paid tiers or paid content in any way and each expansion is better than the last in terms of pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the game engine the fights get bigger more cinematic the storytelling becomes interesting meaningfully serialized so that what happens in one expansion carries over into the next creating a whole new cumulative story line that is as of this writing still unfinished it starts off kind of slow with the First new area but the content is immediately more engaging than most of the previous zones the plot guides progression in these new expansion zones the first one takes place on a Barren rainy Peninsula called it storm point you begin down in the shanty towns before using explosives to blow open the prison Fortress and rise to the top of the Forbidden cell blocks visually the nautical theme is actually pretty new it's one of the first times that a mortal feels separate and distinct from previous game worlds it's different in format than previous Diablo games when it comes to all the zones as an MMO of sorts all players play concurrently to each other within a set zone no more randomization outside of instances side quests only appear in a Zone once the main plot is over or on a different difficulty from the main plot as a way to encourage replaying the zones again and again with all the initial zones the ones available on release there's a sense that the zones were primarily designed with these looping repetitions in mind they are designed for the grind the new areas feel narrative focused they are divided into more visually distinct sections and neighborhoods so that the plot can move between moods and thematic Focus not all of it is good there's some kids and Peril stuff that's twe and annoying but the main thing stormo tries to do is establish rapport with a character named Zam in an astounding feat of narrative restraint for Diablo Immortal anyway everything to do with ZM in this chapter is actually intended to lay the groundwork for story beats that only pay off in the next chapter stormo is mostly an introduction for other story elements as well now that Diablo's Essence has been released from the realm of damnation following your victory over scarn his Terror cult is trying to make him manifest in the world again you even revisit the very first area that you went to in the game Wortham and the tutorial cave where it all started these sorts of Storytelling tra are actually fantastic they deepen the sense of immersion and add meaning to the interactivity of the experience these sorts of large Loops are common in longer larger AAA open world titles it's not anything revolutionary or even particularly notable in a more mainstream video game but this level of effort and craft felt so absent from the previous hours of play it's like the game suddenly took itself seriously but I can't find anything about the development process to corroborate that feeling it just gets better after the first couple dozen hours more impressive than the new storytelling style is the more vibrant approach to visual spectacle the boss fight here at the end of stormo takes place over three stages all with their own Vibe and backdrop it's a bigger climax than the actual climax with scarn and this is probably the least of the expansion zones once you're done with these new zones there is always an intermediate chapter where you figure out where to go next and then do a special dungeon to get there in this case it's called dread Reaver a sustained fight on the deck of a boat through a storm an encounter with a strange vessel and you board that strange vessel and survive its Horrors it's not a lot of physical space or distance compared to the game's other dungeons but it is so much more active of an environment this is at last better than any other given setpiece battle in Diablo I even the expansion to Diablo I it's not even obviously derivative of that older game this is Diablo Immortal being its own thing and actually doing very very well at it is this enough to balance out the monetization if all of this is free it takes the sting out certainly it gives justification to my time investment as a free player I feel like I've arrived at something close to what I actually wanted out of Diablo Immortal in the first place each new Zone does have a difficulty threshold though which means it needs you to have a certain resonance level and a certain range of levels and item bonuses to gain entry to these new zones there is some grinding involved grinding that can be avoided by paying each dungeon you unlock offers its own special reward package they start at like a dollar $2 $5 and then by the time you do dread raver they're asking over 20 bucks a loot box even if just a small percentage of the player base feels obligated or intrigued by these paid bonus loot boxes it can mean a stack of money much larger than the full retail price of a video game that does not use monetization tactics like this it's easy all they have to do is irritate enough people with slow or on- engaging progression and the money just materializes in their bank account so these new zones are kind of like Islands in an ocean of [ __ ] a wonderful reprieve but you can also see better all that lies between them the second of these islands ancients cradle is my favorite of them while Diablo mortal is a very poor prequel to Diablo I because it remixes elements instead of effectively foreshadowing them Diablo Immortal puts itself in the unexpected position of doing an excellent job foreshadowing Diablo i instead de the basic conflict of Diablo 4 after all was primarily established in Reaper of Souls in the exposition about how inarius and Lilith established sanctuary and created the Nephilim cradle of ancients establishes Lilith and Denarius as characters however and not just mythology which is something more interesting and harder to do especially because they never actually show up within the plot it accomplishes this through the story of their motten children creatures from before the time of the Nephilim who only take after one lineage or the other the the Inari claim Angelic Heritage the lillin claim demonic Heritage in the lore inarius banished Lilith from the universe itself into an unknown void this plot line in ancients cradle illustrates the aftermath of this old Choice inarius came back from the schum cold and scornful he suppressed thein and elevated the anari to be their tormentors thematically it follows both Diablo 3 and four in their characterization of the angels as being equally as unpredictable and wrathful as the demon individually it foreshadows the way inarius behaves when you actually meet him in Diablo 4 at the head of his Reformed Church of light these corrupt Inari are the Prototype on which the crimes of that future Church of light are based it is fantastic prequel work a great twist that sets the scene to come in Diablo I perfectly Zam is from here in ancients cradle it turns out he's an anari who became ashamed of his kind and left to try to find a way to destroy the island when it becomes obvious that your character would prefer a more heroic option Zam betrays you the Betrayal feels fantastic with all that investment in making his character seem Vivid in the last Zone Zam gives one of the final wh Stone fragments to your enemy The Bride of Hell she's not much better of a villain than scarn was but what makes the storytelling different is that the Bride of Hell constantly wins and gets the better of you my guess is that there's some sort of big reveal coming where it's just Adria because in order for Diablo I to happen you can't really defeat the Triune plot Diablo will return although maybe you'll get to fight him at the end of all this anyway I don't know I can't delay the video anymore to wait and find out no matter if it's Adria or someone you actually get to defeat the narrative sense of being one step behind all the time feels kind of cool it adds an urgency that wasn't there before in a certain way we're still just recycling familiar elements from all the Diablo games it's just that these pieces are now being assembled in new patterns patterns that create new connections both backwards and forwards within the franchise mostly even if it didn't have it on release No Diablo can seem to resist the call of Tristram Nostalgia here we are again leoric's manner Tristram Cathedral dredging up the past and presenting it in slightly higher quality 3D than last time it's a complete retread of the entire story and concept of Diablo 1 except this time it's produced in the most bloated and melodramatic way possible the Two Princes the king and the often ignored Queen are all given their own extended flashback sequences non-combat flashback sequences this is much more frustrating to me than regular dialogue interrupting the flow of combat because even if I disagree with the way a dialogue is going at least it's usually going somewhere pointing to the next thing this is just a more interminable version of what I already know as a player of course this is deep into the long-term post-release development cycle for Immortal blizzard Knows by now that full half of their player base doesn't know anything at all about Diablo 1 probably not Diablo 2 or 3 even this is their chance to explain it the purpose of this is probably not so much to tickle my Nostalgia as a franchise fan as it is an attempt to prepare Diablo mortal players to interact with all the lore they've missed by only playing the mobile Title Here look I'm fighting the butcher again to appear in every game like this I am beginning to suspect the butcher has a better contract than most blizzard employes always do Diablo I's seasonal event does a much better job of recreating the Diablo 1 Vibe than Diablo Immortal does with this dungeon but Diablo Immortal isn't interested in creating any kind of Labyrinth at all this version of tristam Cathedral is only the new stuff high production setpiece boss battles one after another after another it is structurally so different from every interpretation of the Tristram Crypts that came before it that it actually is kind of compelling and how opposite an approach it is from from anything traditionally Diablo across all its modes Diablo moral attempts to be quite literally everything to everyone in One Way or Another for example every difficulty level is only unlocked by participating in multiplayer raids the matchmaking really sucks and is sometimes difficult more difficult the higher you want to crank the difficulty because fewer and fewer players bother to put in the time to get to that point you are kind of expected to participate in Social MMO elements like guilds to get through this stuff which I don't really care for at all if I can't Solo in MMO it turns me off of them quite a bit the raids are only required every 10 or so hours of play as you rise out of one leveling bracket into another being required at all is frustrating though and of course they have their own elaborate and Meandering quest line to go along with them involving some sort of demonic tree overflowing with Spirits The Raid bosses themselves are actually very welld designed with extremely varied Arenas likely drawing from the long years of experience the company had with the World of Warcraft the deeper you get the cooler The Raid bosses are the more interesting and compelling then once you change the difficulty the rewards will be better hope you kept up your resonance eh maybe need a few more tickets to the legendary gem slot machine come on it doesn't cost that much for just one more spin oddly a good way to get a huge amount of resources and bonus experience quickly is to participate in the free side games because they aren't especially popular you get shockingly fat payouts for participation here's a Mode called called survivors Bane which is like a horde defense mode where your abilities trigger automatically on cool down all you do is steer and try not to die it's actually kind of fun I liked it to the point that I played on the endless mode for a whole half an hour until it generated a secret boss for me and actually did come to an end guess who's the boss yes it's the butcher again that [ __ ] here's a mode where you go through a very old school dungeon format of individual rooms connected in a grid it's like a weird nod to text Adventure dungeons within the larger contemporary hole of a mortal here's a tower defense game incorporated into the realm of damnation map I won because no one else seemed able to figure out how to get the build menus to come up and to be fair I only figure that out because I tried it twice although the Elder Rifts are ticketed challenge Rifts are not they don't offer much in the way of dropped loot but playing the challenge dungeons is one of the only way to get the upgrade material you need to upgrade set items that you wear beneath to your armor and upgrade with a separate upgrade currency from your regular armor the number of spinning plates a person has at any given time is so Preposterous that a player will by Design never run out of things to do because once you push one thing forward three others fall behind even the narrative can become jumbled this way for example Deckard Kan eventually decides to leave putting in charge an old friend of his named Kon there is a higher order side quest system called Elite quests that does things like introducing The Blood N class show the history of the Demon Hunter class that kind of background stuff but it also has the quest where you get to know Kon as a person playing that Quest out of order with the story beats where you're expected to know this already is jarring decard came leaving is an oddly emotional story beat though as much of a mascot character as he is he feels kind of real in this scene very old very tired sad to move on but compelled by the fact that he must later die in Diablo I it's a more satisfying good byy than you get in Diablo I and I think that might be the idea behind it as the franchise moves ever forward along its timeline we will not really be seeing Deckard Kan much again Diablo Immortal is an odd exception where the character exists within the Contemporary franchise this is the last chance to say goodbye to Cain which makes it feel actual and actually Bittersweet Kon replacing him feels right because Immortal is so obviously a better thing when doing its own thing even if it never can stop itself from drinking from The Well of nostalgia for long the last expansion zone is a mix of the new stuff that's good and the self-rising recycling that makes Diablo Mortals so bad so often in the original release campaign this region the southern dreadlands is a chance to show the consequence of the shattering of the world Stone it's a much more Vivid portrayal of the aftermath of Diablo I's climax than the arat crater of Diablo I the southern dreadlands have a horror Edge to them which is an obvious direction for Diablo but one that Diablo I never really got down and IM mortal never much bothered with there's a creeping corruption and in the wake of all this disease and violence the aristocracy has been making it even worse so there's a strong local plot line involving helping the peasants rise up and defend what little of their lives is left in the wake of tiel's intervention suffering has radiated outwards it's a good story beat I just wish they hadn't actually involved tyal he saves you from Diablo and then becomes a voice in your head which is mighty convenient for writing ambient dialogue you have to find his sword just like you already have or alternately are about to do in Diablo II there's so much a person can do with the gothic pulp fantasy setup that Diablo has so I don't understand why I'm fetching the same sword for the same guy as part of a mostly identical story Beat Again the craziest thing by far is this expansion's choice to further redcon Diablo 1 one brother becomes the boss of Diablo too this is known the other brother is meant to be dead this is tidy and better but no alas he is risen he was secretly saved to become a vessel for Diablo just like his poor brother I mean for [ __ ] sake write someone new or write someone you already have better this absurd redcon is just a huge red flag for me for where the story might go from here because it was doing so well and now this but this is just the serialized part of the the plot the dialogue and tone control over the local concerns and side quests within the southern dreadlands are better than ever it's strange but ultimately that's the experience of Diablo Immortal what is quality design is inseparable from what is complete [ __ ] well-designed zones sit inside a web of currencies and bottlenecks and irritations meant to provoke spending the farther I get into the game the harder it is to stay content to feel as if I'm keeping up with the game's curve I cannot win I literally cannot win it is designed without a win state although exhausting the story content is close enough to satisfy me it is less a game that you play to win and more a game where you play in order to stand in one place in order to feel powerful and to stay that way it is a game where you pay in time or currency to stay comfortably within the machine Zone on a treadmill of content that has no definitive end compared to all this Diablo I is a massive Tri it is significantly less monetized throughout and doesn't really compel spending in ways Beyond selling costumes in the battle pass more importantly it's a game that has rediscovered what was so good about Diablo II it is dark in the same ways moody in the same ways most exciting for me particularly is that Diablo I is the first Diablo game to preference narrative in a way that works perfectly it begins with my favorite blizzard cut scene I've just about ever seen a fantastic and brutal little horror short where this band of cutro scavengers managed to claw their way deep into a forgotten tomb and not by accident it was all a demonic plot by the ring leader a cultist in Disguise who seeks to return Lilith from the void of her Exile the ritual bloody and weird and absolutely fantastic goes off without a hitch here she is resplendant in Gore this is the kind of tone that completely eluded Diablo I and Diablo Immortal Diablo I wanted to be Epic Fantasy but they defined Epic Fantasy in terms of consistency with other blizzard worlds familiar tones familiar elements Diablo 4 goes hard for a blizzard title embracing the gore embracing the pulp maximizing it in the most bombastic possible ways this to me is the heart of Diablo unrepentantly Gothic schlock turned up to maximum volume because when it comes to schlock the line between success and failure often comes down to how hard a piece of media is willing to commit to the bit to be too self conscious to metatextual this kills the power of a thing Diablo I knows exactly what it wants to be in terms of tone and presentation and just Nails it on every front it would be my favorite Diablo game except it's kind of two games there's playing your character from levels 1 to 50 within the confines of the main campaign in the first two tiers of difficulty and then there's the second game from Level 51 to 100 on difficulty tiers 3 and four this game I I didn't even finish like Diablo Immortal I played until I exhausted all the narrative content I could find and then called it quits even with substantial grinding and fiddling around with randomized dungeons I didn't even get close to level 100 I didn't even hit 80 the first game within Diablo I is everything I loved about Diablo II it is a thrilling adventure a little open world but mostly linear this second game is widely open world with a hundred things to do at any point in time but it only EX exists for one purpose to keep me within the treadmill of the machine Zone this game never ends it exists mostly to amuse but it exists also to periodically ask me to spend 25 bucks every couple of months to do it again as a new seasonal character on a new battle pass within that endlessness I lose touch with all the things I actually enjoy about Diablo I and a lot of ways it's an opposite kind of game to Diablo Immortal it's much better in terms of Storytelling ual design progression and basically any other metric but it still Embraces some of those predatory and manipulative design elements that make Immortal so egregiously monetized a different atmosphere and impact than Diablo I's Embrace of behaviorism for the purposes of pure entertainment since the expansion packs for previous Diablos are often so transformative and tend to complete the experience in unexpected ways that's also probably true that my experience playing it at launch and during the first season won't be reflective of the Diablo 4 experience a few years down the line I'm curious to see if the pattern holds if Diablo I will become more the game that I was initially captivated by or more the game that later dimmed that enthusiasm down to the gling that first game within a game though that's everything I ever wanted out of Diablo and more I think the presentation is the core of what makes it so compelling to me it's familiar without exclusively relying on Nostalgia it's a genuine sequel in terms of how it feels like a bigger more refined version of the basic Loops pioneered in Diablo I faithful to the older rhythms there's a deliberate pivot away from the rapid character advancement of Diablo I things move slower fights take longer especially boss fights which have been heavily re-engineered to Showcase move sets and demand a kind of Battlefield agility that was only ever part of higher difficulty play in games past to be fair I did play on tier 2 or hard but it's only rarely truly difficult tier 2 feels relatively close to the way Diablo 1 and 2 felt and so if you're coming off those earlier titles it helps keep the level of friction consistent it hasn't really been since Diablo 1 that individual non-boss enemies felt genuinely threatening within the basic difficulty settings and getting back to that Rhythm goes hand inand with the more selfs seriously dark mood diablo4 not only captures the mood of Diablo II perfectly it intensifies it the elements of Gore and Gothic Decay are even wilder than they were before without feeling edgy that's the impressively Fine Line Diablo 4 walks it isn't exactly Grim dark storytelling because there's no element of powerlessness or hopelessness the world is cruel brutal but the recurring point of each game in the franchise is that brave Heroes can carve their way out of any dire situation supposing they've got the stats for it no matter how blood soaked and pessimistic it gets at times this is still an adventure it still orients towards the emotions of excitement over heartbreak determination over disempowerment to give yourself over to the nihilistic urge is actually Lilith's whole deal essentially Queen of the succubi daughter of hatred temptation is obviously her main mode but not in the more stereotypical or expected ways Lilith is gearing up for war against all the prime evils starting with her father misto she plans to use the Nephilim as her Army not by magically removing the Angelic aspects like Immortal scarn tried to do but by emotionally appealing to the idea that our better Natures are useless in an unjust World Lilith is properly demonic she shows no mercy or regard for the sanctity of any particular life but she has a protectiveness about Humanity as a whole by debasing Humanity teasing out violence and selfishness and cruelty she prepares Humanity to triumph over the demons humans if they try can be better at evil than the demons they can be stronger at it all they need is just a little push this makes her role as a tempus villain much more Vivid than other roles like it which Define temptation more narrowly characters betray you for Lilith constantly almost all of the minor villains are in some way good people who simply could not refuse an offer made by Lilith an offer which invariably destroys them it's such a classic Trope of Gothic horror but rarely in video games has it been portrayed so well it took taking Lilith seriously as a character and giving her complex motivations complex for operatic pulp fantasy anyway to make her such an effective villain Diablo 4 continually takes all of its characters seriously in a way that I never felt from Diablo I or Immortal those felt cartoonish this feels too Lush and overproduced to be cartoonish exactly it's more like if you put BOS lurman in charge of a Hellraiser sequel the genre is horror like Diablo 2 was which is a tone that's actually difficult to maintain where the entire goal of gameplay is to smash through more monsters than you can even count without breaking a sweat a big part of that is starting small at the very beginning you accomplish your first Quest and are celebrated by the town pretty standard but it's a ruse you're drugged and fed the blood of Lilith about to be sacrificed at the last moment you're saved and off you go a dark nasty little setup that works so well at establishing what's to come showing off a new and more artistically cinematic approach to the presentation of the story The Diablo games have always aimed towards parody with big money visual fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings ever since Diablo I and its ahead of its time pre-rendered cutscenes Diablo 4 uses tricks from more subdued sources horror sources like The Conjuring films or Edgars the witch the best thing Diablo 4 borrowed from the witch actually is voice actor and regular actor Ralph inis shortly after being saved from the towns folk you meet him in the form of the character lorath lorath was raised among the haradrim and now he is one of the very last he was present during the opening cut scene of Reaper of Souls actually saved by tyel as a child he is not like Deckard K he did not want to be a friendly face or a kindly teacher or even particularly involved in all this [ __ ] at all lorath is a foil for everything decard Kane represented and this tonal difference also helps differentiate Diablo I from its predecessors as a game with its own very distinct identity it's clever with where it conforms to expectation and where it deviates unlike Diablo I which attempted to conform to every expectation as dotingly as possible lorath has the exact same structural position as Kan did he just fits even better within the setting and comes across as more complex which is something generally true of most of these reinterpreted structural elements it really is the best blizzard campaign in years one that feels truly connected to the Glory Days of the early 2000s where it seemed like the company could do no wrong releasing Banger after Banger it's only when the structure of the second game within a game began to emerge that I started to chafe against Diablo I Diablo I and Diablo immortal are both structured on the assumption that a player will focus on the main quest in campaign without exploring the side content until prompted not understanding this playing the game like I would any other open world RPG I did all the side quests in the first area the snowy mountains of the fractured Peaks I was so thorough exploring this one zone of five enormous zones that I left it around level 40 I hit Level 50 halfway through act two of the game the green Woodlands of scin the trick of this is that tier one and two difficulty stop scaling at level 50 you are meant to finish the campaign by then tier three only unlocks once the whole campaign is complete so I found myself caught in this frustrating Dead Zone where I had about 10 hours of plot ahead of me where I would kind of spin in place mechanically getting minimal experience rewards and rolling on items that would be immediately outclassed by even the most basic drops of tier three what would have been a straightforward clean mechanical progression in Diablo II is this weirdly bisc easily interrupted division between campaign and post campaign for Diablo I like the horse I had completely cleared 25% or more of the map by the time I unlock to this core quality of life traversal feature the campaign as high production as it is occupies the same role of extended tutorial that it had in Diablo Immortal there are just mercifully fewer overlapping system so the tutorial iing is more intermittent this is not the true game the this interactive story that's so engaging and so thrilling this is the introduction to the game to come where you can really make those numbers go up by creating this dead zone where there is no mechanical advancement to go along with the narrative advancement it saps The Narrative of some of its impact it's still better storytelling than any previous Diablo game but without being accompanied by the same constant Morse code of dopamine hits the core gameplay Loop delivers when it's working correctly the system just doesn't hit right it is not what I have been behaving Al conditioned to expect and therefore I am unsatisfied in my weird Mamon Cravings it goes against my instincts as a person who plays a lot of open world RPGs this way when you start a new character you're allowed to skip the entire campaign eliminating this weird disconnect but it's baked into the first go around which I find equally backwards and unnecessary this is the most effort ever put into Diablo in terms of dialogue and presentation why would anyone create a circumstance that might sabotage this in some way perhaps there's some pattern in the mass data that games like Immortal collect that show side content first players like me are uncommon enough not to have to even account for I don't even know not all games have to be designed to my tastes of course but I don't think it's a problem of taste when the game's difficulty in reward structure can create a circumstance where curiosity is punished the requirement is almost kind of redundant anyway because there's a dungeon called a Capstone dungeon of a set difficulty with a particularly difficult boss who you have to do to activate tiers three and four one boss for each it seems to me that if you can meet this threshold then that ought to be good enough maybe it's narrative each Capstone dungeon represents the base of operations for one of the major antagonistic factions tier four is the Triune the cult that worships the prime evils but tier three is the main Cathedral for the Church of light who you don't really get on the bad side of until the very end of the campaign is that consistency really worth the awkwardness of it why BCT the campaign from the repetitive content so wrongly and then there are some side quests that have extra post campaign dialogue where you can ask why the given NPC would help you at all considering being labeled a heretic and the enemy of the church which would suggest the other direction that these side quests were actually meant to be played prior to the campaign being over game design is so much harder than people give it credit for it's easy to say as a player I don't like this this wasn't designed for me therefore it's bad or alternately this perfectly satis my assumptions and is therefore excellent but the actual developers must balance what is known about how people actually play the game with the fact that there is never any pleasing everyone something will always disappoint somebody this difficulty tier system seems like something where it tried to split the difference between incompatible player Styles and fell between the cracks neither one thing fully or another there are many things in Diablo I that feel this way halfway towards a new idea or a strong idea but stopping short of the the point where the difference would feel truly meaningful consider the open world connected multiplayer elements it does exactly what Diablo imortal did creating a static map with no random variations outside of dungeons where those variations are minimal there are multiplayer events like World bosses but they require a healthy population of players to be functional I played a little while I was writing this section long after most of the footage was recorded and no one besides me showed up to the world boss event at all I couldn't solo him myself so I guess never mind in this footage from the month of release the world bosses were a really cool and fun addition plus you got such crazy good loot from them I don't know if it'll ever necessarily be that way again maybe on season servers maybe when the expansion comes out it was a mechanic built on the assumption that people will continue to play Diablo I over and over and over and that just isn't true estimates for 2024 are that active players are hovering around 200,000 when the game was closer to release there were literally a million more active players at a given time without these numbers Diablo 4's multiplayer elements like World bosses and Legion Events integrated into the world map as an intended part of the gameplay Loop suffer really badly from dead Maul syndrome yeah you can get a very sad Orange Julius and you can still go to Foot Locker but beyond that it's a whole lot of space that feels uncomfortably empty the vastness of the open world feels less vast than it ought to oddly Diablo I's world Maps often feel larger to me because the randomization makes them all unknown in a certain way Diablo 4's choice to make the Overworld static and consistent for all players in service of the multiplayer makes it so that the world becomes very familiar over time especially after trying to grind out levels on tiers three and four I am not rediscovering the world I am working little part-time jobs within it to run the treadmill of getting better loot to stay powerful as I Advance once what is possible both environment Mally and experientially become routine the game loses its magic and its shine and for this reason more than anything I think people have a hard time just continuing to exist within this world because it feels weirdly in between an Ubisoft style open world with a long but finite amount of content and a destiny style open world where you repeat the same areas and dungeons over and over in a slightly randomized grind it doesn't ever feel quite like Diablo II even though Diablo II is so clearly the influence for so smaller visual elements within the environment even the basic progression is retained Diablo 4 throws an initial curveball with a snowy mountain region but then it's a Scottish Countryside literally called scin and then not one but two different desert regions where to next a swamp right yes indeed it's a swamp howar is ultimately one of the most interesting and novel areas in the game but still the progression of these regions is meant to evoke a certain kind of nostalgia for what went before which is so strange to me here is a chance to go harder and Stranger than ever before but instead we get a kind of stretched out maximized version of what we've already had to be able to visit so much of the world of sanctuary as one interconnected environment was a huge selling point of the game to me one of the things that I was most looking forward to in the end it was also one of the most striking examples of Diablo 4's indecisiveness about what kind of game it truly wants to be consider the PVP zones also integrated directly into the map these zones are mostly oriented around more player versus environment activities but with a Competitive Edge where you play against instead of alongside other players the zones have much higher monster density than usual and seem to drop better loot but they were mostly entirely empty even when the player population was high this is because the people who are invested in PvP just immediately destroy any other player in seconds so casual players learn not to bother or go there at all and without prey the hunters also leave creating a big Dead Zone on the map where an intended game function is supposed to go this is part of the idea behind seasons have everyone start a new character from scratch repopulate the multiplayer events and zones with big spikes of activity every few months as opposed to trying to maintain an absolutely constant player population but back within the Eternal realm things are empty and shuttered World bosses are on fought PVP zones are ghost towns Legion Events don't accumulate enough metal tank of some kind it's like a cross between power armor and as it turns out an Iron Maiden every movement kills him slowly and yet he fights he accepts this gory obscene punishment as the only correct way to atone for his sins vigo's death is tragic and lands well the scene is extremely sad which is hard to do in a game like this it accomplishes World building through the character arcs instead of just in toning it via a reputable Source like Deckard Kan the second act revolves around a haradrim named Donan who was once a very successful Adventurer in his later years he has grown very comfortable looking to his son as the source of future Glory meticulously Lilith dismantles everything Donan holds dear saving the corruption of Donan son for last throughout the rest of the game Donan will attempt to recover from this trauma and recapture some piece of his former self while some of the ways it does this are a little hokey like having his cathartic Epiphany be part of a psychedelic shaman ceremony the cumulative effect is that Donan feels like a meaningfully flawed individual capable of both great courage and crippling pessimism in the Final Act he is fatally injured but I didn't feel like that landed quite as well as vgo's death all that attention paid to Don's character felt like it was leading up to something more than oh [ __ ] I should have looked before I went to grab that thing I feel like it wastes some of the dramatic tension the game had built around his character Arc his death scene feels oddly insincere but Lura or more accurately the grally music of Ralph innocent's voice sells it well enough lorath is deard Kane's replacement in every way the game itself even pokes fun at this you run into an elderly mhif the boat captain from lutan in Diablo I mhif mistakes lorath for Kain and never lets go of the error talking about old times there's even a curiously well-written and affecting bit of dialogue mif gets where he reflects that he kind of peaked when he met the heroes of Diablo I and helped them all his life since then has been waiting for something like that to happen again listless permanently unsatisfied Diablo 4 gave a silly stupid throwaway character with a Preposterous accent a compelling existential crisis what the [ __ ] I mean it's good it's just good in such an oddball counterintuitive way I'm not entirely sure what to make of it but Diablo 4 is like this in many places the dialogue is actually good the characters are quite Vivid Laura's Arc is mostly about his relationship with the supporting villain Elias who was the one who arranged the summoning that occurs in the opening Cuts scene lorth takes the news poorly and by the time you catch up with him after the first and second act he is drunk as [ __ ] Cain was so kindly so supportive lorath struggles he does not want the responsibility the attention or the burden he shoulders it anyway and this reluctance is compelling it's a classic Trope of course the reluctant hero but it's done very well with lorath as your character rises in power and meets increasingly long odds of success lorath pulls his [ __ ] together and Rises to the challenge alongside you Elias is excellent as a foil for him as well in the whole concept of the Herod If Heaven and Hell both hate us who are we to turn to besides ourselves Lilith's doctrine of radical and murderous self- Liberation makes a ton of sense within the setting of sanctuary considering all that's happened Lilith and Elias are sympathetic villains in that way in the broad strr Elias struggles in some of the cuts scenes with Lilith's demonic nature her callous brutality her abiding sadism and Lilith it becomes clear is making as much a bid for power in hell as she is for freedom in sanctuary Elias is a pawn as knowledgeable and Powerful a person as he becomes when he calls lorath a coward with his dying breath though it's a genuinely fantastic moment a real rebuttal of Lura as a character he is flawed and failing but nevertheless Elias is not wrong about the rodm having just supported an obviously untenable status quo for the past few Millennia lorath needs to do better and he feels that pressure it's just a great adventure story it hits fantastic story beats with an Earnest emotional complexity that is Miles beyond anything the franchise has done before it's storytelling that's a little more nuanced than most blizzard storytelling actually while stuff like the Starcraft 2 campaign knew quite well how to land the big operatic moments it's characters felt slightly too cartoonish to take seriously this way Diablo 4 is ultimately not too far off in tone from the big pulpy storytelling style of Starcraft 2 so the effort made in the main campaign to be more nuanced and have more delicate emotional moments is impressive and what it's able to achieve within all that bombastic operatic noise all this buildup has narrative weight to it it creates momentum and energy all of which is poured into the climax to pump it up into something better than anything BZ put out in years I've talked so much about how narrative doesn't really matter to the game of Diablo and that is still true for Diablo I as a whole but the reason I love the linear main campaign portion of the game so much is because it just doesn't care about that superfluousness why does all this character work matter because by illustrating the villains and the heroes so vividly it means something when they all begin to fight and die something more than just a roll on the loot table or an achievement on the checklist consider the Reverend mother prava she's a fanatic and a minor villain but her conviction as a True Believer is so impressive without interacting with her so much in act one without seeing her as responsible for what happened to vgo she would not be so fascinating to watch when she fails while Lilith is the explicit villain the angel inarius with whom she founded Sanctuary is the implied villain anaras is vain prideful he wants to go back to heaven and wash his hands of all this Mortal [ __ ] his church of light looked looks up to Him in all ways and he barely DS to look down at them at all a confrontation with him early in the game has your character refusing to Bow and scrape like he wants you to illustrating the New Order of Things post Diablo I neither Heaven Nor Hell can be trusted the Nephilim stand alone andarius proves with his action why Lilith is in some way Justified which is just so satisfying certain of his power and Supremacy an Arius leads a Cru a on hell with prava at the Forefront it's a trap an obvious trap even but unlike with Leah in Diablo II the obvious trap is overlooked not out of convenience or naivity but Angelic narcissism all of this is resolved as his tradition in the franchise with a wildly expensive and lavishly produced cinematic cutscene this one is an all it's long as hell almost 10 minutes and across that length it doesn't just tease a war but illustrates one with a thrilling EB and flow the Church of light's Crusade achieves early success and the way they work in tandem is kind of Mesmerizing the cut scene doesn't shy away from blood and it doesn't cut right away when something exciting happens that would be expensive to portray a leser game for example would cut right here at the Clash of armies but instead this is just where the cut scene gets started the broader battle Narrows down to just Lilith and inarius she draws him in she lets him win this is anari's Temptation his certainty his conviction his feeling of being above it all she gives him the victory he wants so that an arus can see that the heavens don't care one way or another she shows him that his victory is hollow this is the exact kind of high production extremely glossy pulp fantasy I crave from blizzard games I don't know if it's ever been better as Lilith kills an Arius in this moment of doubt and anguish the tide turns for the Army outside the scene pivots back out Wards again to The Wider battle completely different in tone a total reversal I've watched so many Netflix and Hulu and Amazon original features fantasy and sci-fi both that never reach this level of actual craft or impact I had almost kind of forgotten that blizzard could do this kind of thing it's been such a long decade of World of Warcraft expansions and OverWatch Seasons it impressed me exactly the way Diablo II blew my mind as a young teenager and that kind of resonance is is so much harder to come by than base Nostalgia as a player you follow in the wake of all this destruction before you actually see the cut scene so there's an added element of how did it all go so wrong as it all unfolds the most exciting moment to confront a villain is at the threshold of their Victory Diablo 4 deposits you at that exact moment for your climactic battle these climactic fights have felt so inconsistent across the franchise to opaque in Diablo 1 to punishing in Diablo I over to fast in Diablo I Diablo I puts unique bosses into the environment in the traditional classic way but it also creates another tier of bosses that feature at the end of Dungeons and long Quest chains they have huge health bars that typically can't just be melted away without major effort the game does a fantastic job in all of its boss fights extending them long enough to feel a lot of mechanical tension there's a push and a pull to the battles they feel exciting and Alive the Lilith fight is long enough and difficult enough to feel connected to the drama of the Moment The Narrative and the game mechanics working in harmony it's a hard fought genuinely satisfying Victory and a tragic one in a way this is just the base campaign there will be expansions to come sequels to come leth knew very well what lies waiting in the dark for Humanity without her these monsters Circle closer around the campfire it's not that she doesn't deserve her fate she very much does but in traditional Diablo fashion this Victory leaves you more vulnerable and exposed than ever Diablo I might be my favorite game in the franchise but Diablo I is surely my favorite story it understands exactly what makes the personality of Diablo feel distinct it does not flinch away from being as over the top as it needs to be to get there and by taking itself so seriously executing on its ideas so earnestly it surpasses what has come before and sets a new standard for what's to come all the main campaigns in the Diablo franchise ever since Diablo I set up their own expansions Within in their final Act Diablo 2 revealed Ball's treachery setting up the expansion's conflict in villain Diablo 3 established grievance with heaven so that in the expansion Heaven could bring down its wrath Diablo Immortal used the destruction of scarn to release Diablo's Essence into the world once more Diablo 4 is no different providing an epilog chapter that sets up Nel as the focus of an as yet unreleased expansion she takes the new Soul Stone that Donan forged before his death and absconds with it on a mission of her own making keeping her objective private telling lorath not to worry and that if all goes well you will never see her again well of course it's not going to go well we'll see you soon that's basically a given but it's exciting that the story doesn't end here that Diablo I will end up with a more final and far-reaching climax than it already has I was feeling so stoked coming off the main story and epilog so hungry to swap to tier three difficulty and get that better Loot and better experience this had been so far my favorite Diablo ever the process of coming to feel differently was a slow but very steady deescalation from feeling empowered and purposeful to feeling continually disempowered and apathetic I had to exist within the machine zone for a long time to become resentful of it I played a full 100 hours on a single character and then even more on a seasonal character if it seems like this is maybe too much time investment in the game the game disagrees I stopped well short of everything the game wanted me to do and I burned out on playing more Diablo 4 in the middle of the Season by the time I wanted to play again the season was over if I had completely invested in the game if I had been truly completionist my hours would have easily doubled I was not actually meant to have burned out as early as I did but like Diablo Immortal once I reached the end of The Narrative content I felt that I had reached the end of the game Diablo 4 is larger in this respect than all the previous Diablos put together when you combined the length of the main plot with all of the side quests all five regions have around 40 side quests a piece for a total of over 200 not all of them are narrative masterpieces some of them take what seems like 60 seconds to complete many are just standard MMO kill X number of Y quests but a surprising number are deeply narrative and used for thoughtful World building purposes these are the things that take advantage of the game's large open world that add life to the repeating cycles of activities and chores that a player is meant to accomplish in the pursuit of level one 100 for example it's only through the side quests that you learn anything of what happened to the Barbarian tribes now that mount Arad is twice destroyed there's a tribe in the fractured Peaks called the bear tribe who have some kind of basic concerns but another tribe in the dry steps are particularly interesting do you remember when I complained about a betrayal subplot taking up a lot of air in Diablo I's Lord Of Destruction expansion this tribe is descended from the betrayer and they have been exiled by the other tribes for the sin their plot line is all about regaining their dignity and their sense of purpose after many years of shameful wandering it's very well done as a series of quests culminating in a surprisingly restrained climax instead of a dramatic emotional reconciliation you need to find a bit of skyforged Steel as was once made on Mount arot if you bring it to the Barbarian blacksmith in the city of kardu she will initially refuse to even acknowledge the Lost tribe but the steel is a gift of significance although she promises nothing she is clearly considering the crane tribe in a different light this feels true to their internal culture as barbarians proud clinging to tradition hesitant to lose anything more to the rapid change going on around them it's more compelling than a tidier happier ending consider the swamps of hozar this last region has a large number of quests involving characters that you know from the main campaign further fleshing out their stories their personal stories often relate back to the strange culture of the swamp a place of disease and Corruption the tree of Whispers is the greatest power in the s and doing favors for the tree all over the world is one of the main ways you grind quests and get loot in the post campaign part of Diablo I but you don't learn all that much about the tree of Whispers in the campaign and you learn nothing about the tree doing favors for it it's only in doing the side quests and listening to how the characters talk about the tree does the tree begin to become a character in its own right aazar side quests are some of the best in the game it feels substantially Stranger than the other regions and the emphasis on disease and rot is grossly evoc and it's full of surprise depth when it comes to the characters that it chooses to focus on Lyndon from Diablo II is here having leveraged his Fame in Fortune into taking over a small smuggling port on the coast lyndon's Quest chain sees him betrayed from within with a very Bittersweet resolution lynon has softened in his old age he has become comfortable he is no longer the scoundrel he was and his former partner resents him for this by betraying him in this way lyndon's partner makes it so that lynon has to either become the that person he was trying to walk away from again defending himself killing his friend or else just roll over and die Lyndon made his choice about who he is long ago and now at the end of his life he is still being called to account on it that's strong writing for an obscure Quest chain or how about the quest chain where you get the full backstory of the opening cinematic the priest who perished so dramatically Simon left a trail behind him you get not only his backstory but more insight into Elias more context on the plan to bring back from the void you visit the same church from the introduction descend to that same dungeon even give the dead man closure by bringing his remains back to his old Monastery that kind of attention to dangling narrative detail is so satisfying and so uncommon there is so much heart that went into the making of Diablo 4's open world that I feel like I must be some kind of an [ __ ] for eventually growing so tired and irritated with it it's the friction between the beautiful painterly landscape and the repetitive artificial gameplay Loops layered on top that wore me down my first time exploring the world was constantly exciting the work being done within the side quests to create a sense of local culture and Superstition goes hand in hand with the way the map tucks away gorgeous Scenic landmarks like IC over lakes and geyser Fields ruined churches and forgotten temples there are little interconnected secrets and fragments of context everywhere you look in an interview with the website PC World Diablo 4 art director John Mueller said quote the connected open world was a gigantic challenge we wanted to be able to walk or ride all the way from the top of the world to the bottom without ever seeing a loading screen in previous versions there originally many portals inviting you to travel the decision to have an open world that can be freely traveled via horseback made us think a lot more about the nature of geography at its core and how everything is connected to give an example if we look at the fractured Peaks it's a mountainous region with lots of glaciers and different biomes in the southern region of the fat Peaks it's actually starting to melt the water that comes from the fractured Peaks flows down into howar creating the swamps this kind of Living World Geography was something we had never had to think about before but it was also incredibly exciting and a great challenge for the whole art team one of my favorite places is the coast of the dry steps I love the beaches that voluminous color palette I love the atmosphere there it was important for us to offer a really wide range of scaras and locations that stand on their own which are able to tell their own stories through their art design each location has its own lore sometimes religiously based sometimes triggered by catastrophes famines Wars these can pay into the main story but they don't have to it's a bit like a work of art that you can read a lot into or just enjoy the atmosphere it gives off end quote a player can bounce between regions based on either curiosity or circumstance staying in the place where that atmosphere is strongest for them individually or following the hell tide chasing the tree of Whispers quests as they're randomly assigned throughout the world this is the part of the problem narratively thematically visually the regions are incredibly distinct from one another but they cannot be mechanically different beyond the writing of the side quests the interactivity is completely homogeneous between them part of the hook of Diablo 4 is that like the short optional dungeons of Diablo I nothing is a very intense time commitment all on its own many activities take 30 to 90 seconds sellers are the shortest they're just an antichamber and an arena as fast as you can kill a hord of monsters a chest pops out with some prizes for you world events are also common but take place in the open world and can be casually joined by other players in the area that's always the most fun being able to be casually Cooperative that way but I found it to be kind of rare usually I do an event alone there are a couple special events per region but most events generate evenly between the regions if you play a lot of events you will start to see them repeat early and repeat often I started to develop a strong opinions about which events were worth the time and which which kind of sucked but I'd play them compulsively anyway because it's just a nice and fast swarm of enemies and loot a hell tide is essentially a semi-permanent event that covers a large part of a region big swarms of enemies scaled one level above a given player populate the map and drop a special currency you can only use during the 1 hour that the hell tide is active so it's like a special grinding hour that you need to participate in for the whole hour to get the most reward out of since hell is not a major region in the whole post campaign hell appears as a kind of special layer on top of the pre-existing landscapes in this way fundamentally it doesn't matter where the hell tide happens because it's always the same grind hell Tides or Whispers or running dungeons or just running across the fields fighting bosses as they come along each region has the same rhythms and the same rewards only changing your character's build changes the Rhythm by which you interact with the world the interactivity is repetitive and homogeneous and the interactivity is the foreground of the game all those well- wrd words all that meticulously crafted landscape this is the background and after enough time and familiarity the background simply Fades away I think the game's tensions can be Illustrated pretty well by comparing strongholds with nightmare dungeons strongholds are scattered across the open world map three per region for a total of 15 each is a major quest of sorts beginning when you enter the boundaries of the stronghold every single stronghold is aesthetically and thematically different there is a massive amount of variation in the objectives you need to complete the kind of monsters you fight and even the reasons why you're fighting them all these things are fixed it's not randomized it's a curated experience and a self-contained Story the strongholds are absolutely fantastic one of the highlights of Diablo I and they do not repeat you play them once and they're done nightmare dungeons on the other hand you repeat constantly as part of the endgame advancement Loop ever since Diablo I the games have had paragon levels where in the absence of a system for leveling your stats traditionally like the first two games did you choose from a variety of bonuses to apply to your character so you can keep gaining experience points kind of infinitely after your skills are all distributed infinitely in the case of Diablo Immortal anyway level 100 is the cap here in Diablo I the time it takes to gain a level in the late game is long often well over an hour eventually over three or four hours if you're not playing in a strictly optimal way like I didn't so to take the sting out of such a long weit to get a level you get four Paragon bonus points per level at every 25% Mark along the experience bar in the end game to genuinely push your stats forward you need to use bonus multipliers called glyphs glyphs can only be upgraded by doing nightmare dungeons it takes serious grinding like playing dozens of nightmare dungeons to push the glyphs toward their highest upgrade levels nightmare dungeons are run by using an item that upgrades a certain dungeon into whatever tier of dungeon is listed on the item it's a fusion of the rift dungeon concept with the open world dungeon distribution of Diablo I but you can't just choose any dungeon to upgrade it has to be one of the ones listed on the ticket item which pulls from a small list of valid choices you are not only running the same dungeon format over and over again you are running the same dungeons specifically over and over for marginal increases to your power so that you can continue to exist happily within the machine Zone while you do not pay in money like Diablo Immortal you do pay in time and you pay rather dearly for a reward so intangible and marginal of the strongholds I remember most of them very clearly because they caught hold of my attention and Imagination of The Nightmare dungeons I remember only the grind the fatigue of feeling obligated to indulge in a game mechanic I was deeply apathetic towards even my favorite aspect of exploration the side quests are limited in many ways by the formats of the game all quests that aren't about talking to someone or killing monsters on the open world either end in a limited dungeon or a Sellar Arena so the words change and the story is new between side quests but the whole mechanical setup of anticipation Challenge and release are exactly the same as any other part of the game even within the parts of the game that are memorable there is a mechanical homogenity Diablo 4 is the first Diablo game to put in so much effort into the World building storytelling and environment that it surpassed the appeal of the core gameplay Loop but it could not help but preference the core Loop all the mechanical effort feels good if it feels like it's leading to something building up to something but once the strongholds are conquered the quests complete and the map filled in there is nothing left besides the core Loop to run and rerun the loop for its own sake self-fulfilling and self-justifying without destination or climax this is why I called the post campaign experience a second game within the Diablo 4 because when you get down to it the game at this stage of play operates completely independently of all the things I came to like about it in the first place surely they knew this because the idea behind starting a new character each season is that you take it from the top all those side quests reset all the strongholds reset and on top of this are layered new quests and new mechanics that rotate out every 3 months if you miss these seasonal quests and mechanics too damn bad the process of leveling your character isn't really done with just quests anyway it's organized by something called the season Journey essentially a big checklist organized into chapters where if you complete a chapter you've probably gotten enough experience points to be at the level of challenge necessary for the next one as you advance along the season Journey you also Advance along the battle pass the battle pass has 90 tiers 27 of which you can access for free for $10 just $10 Michael you can unlock all 90 and how predatory is that really can can't hardly get a hamburger for less than $10 these days for double the price I mean maybe a little more than double just 25 bucks you can immediately unlock 20 tiers of rewards and get a bunch of bonus costumes to boot if you finish the battle pass so here's an extra wrinkle to the proposition of risk and reward you pay real world money for fake items and extra rewards but then those rewards are locked behind a large time investment in the gameplay Loops so if you're perhaps getting tired of the grind and feeling like maybe you want to play something else there's a lingering sense that by doing so you have paid for nothing and abandoned your investment technically you paid for nothing to begin with what you do get with a battle pass and seasonal journey is a sense of maximizing the reward that you get for the effort that you are putting in pay nothing get very little in return pay $10 unlock a long series of bonus rewards to accompany you across three months of play but if you don't play you lose it pay 25 bucks well now we're talking because not only do you get a huge dopamine Rush right away it makes it much more likely that a person will complete their battle pass and extract maximum value from the deal it doesn't actually matter to Blizzard if you complete the battle pass or not just that you buy it they are already extracting maximum value from you the minute you consent to the purchase if you play completely for free with no money down and no battle pass at all on the Eternal realm you also miss out on all the new content and the new mechanics it's not as blatantly predatory as Diablo Immortal but it is equally manipulative there's also a difference of frequency where you're asked to pay for the Diablo 4 battle pass every few months and you're prompted to pay for things in Diablo Immortal every few hours so that's in Diablo 4's favor still it is just as easy here for blizzard to say all the content can be played for free while at the same time engineering a situation where only by paying and buying the battle pass a new each season are you maximizing the time investment the game is already requiring you to make it's not high pressure sales it's patient it's abiding it's waiting for you as a player to say [ __ ] it I guess I'm already doing this and then bam blizzard makes half a game's worth of profit while you get pretend gems and a fake hat it's perhaps Petty to say this but I couldn't even get blizzard to send me a hundred bucks worth of [ __ ] I don't need when I paid them for it I was so excited about Diablo I and so thrilled by the campaign that I bought the collector's box that came with like candles a pin a mouse pad and cloth map I'm not against buying stupid crap on principal I just like to hold it in my hands to feel as if it has value but for six consecutive months they refused to send me the package told me repeatedly it was almost on its way any day now and then eventually sent me an email saying they don't even sell it anymore and here's my money back even in terms of merch I wildly overpaid and got literally nothing in return what you get with the season stories is a few hours of new dialogue and new dungeons and what you get out of the seasonal mechanics is a new flavor to spice up the combat a bit maybe 10% of your seasonal experience will be significantly different than what's available in the base version of the game on the Eternal realm everything else is still the same the world I've already explored these quests I've already completed but it isn't like Diablo I where the proposition of replaying the whole thing takes a weekend I put a 100 hours into Diablo 4 the first time on just one character the seasonal playthrough felt like it was going faster than that maybe but I was still looking at weeks of gameplay ahead of me a season's worth of content not a new story not a new experience just content as much content as I can gorge myself on until I absolutely burst the thing that makes slot machines and gambling so unappealing to so many people is that they are deliberately designed to provoke immoderate Behavior they aren't meant to be fun until a satisfying stopping point they are meant to be addictive until the point of extinguishing a person's Financial ability or personal willpower to play anymore neither Diablo Immortal nor Diablo I approach that extreme but they do both exist on the borderline of that amoral approach to game design while I can write off Diablo moral as being a cynical cash grab Diablo 4 comes across as being cynical for even less of a direct purpose it is a good game a truly excellent and amazing game that becomes less and less of itself the deeper you get it does not want to end even when it has exhausted itself at which point it will exhaust the player instead until the player simply quits it is fun and exciting to live within the machine Zone everyone who has ever loved a video game has enjoyed this sensation and most of us have come to Crave it but the machine zone is not itself art it is a trance a hallucination a compulsion meaning still has to be made out of the experience same as just having a psychedelic trip won't transform your life simply because you saw weird shapes and felt funny the seasonal lives service elements of Diablo I Coes a player to continue playing past the point where the meaning is deepest past the threshold of where the point of play is Joy or curiosity to replay Diablo I over and over past that threshold is to experience the most Rank and basic kind of escapism escapism that brings no resolution because it has no resolution escapism that offers no meaning because it has no point it is the play of boredom and compulsion and it only satisfies as much as it does because so much of Modern Life is awful and vague and taxing and these cheap escapes fit into the amorphous voids of Our Lives if Diablo 4 solved these problems or filled these voids we would not return to It season after season there is no center of the Toots poop that's why it cannot be reached by design it is a bottomless pit that acts as a mirror to the pit of our own unfulfillment disguised by sugar and color another one of the psychological experiments covered in Lauren Slater's book is Bruce Alexander's rat Park experiments Alexander challenged addiction theory that was based on addiction rates in laboratory rats by pointing out that the laboratory is stressful and horrible for rats they lead awful lives and long for escape so of course sugar laced heroin water was deeply popular among these prisoner rats Alexander created a rat Utopia where a colony of rats had enough food water space and socialization opportunities to live their best possible Little Lives Slater writes of the rats quote the the cramped and isolated cage laboratory rats loved the morphine laced water right from its subtle sugary start slurping it up and I imagine falling down dazed their pink eyes stoned their minuscule whisen feet waving slowly in the air the rat Park residents however resisted drinking their narcotic solution no matter how sweet the researchers made it this rather stunning finding shows perhaps most clearly of all how rats when in a friendly place will actually avoid anything heroin included that interrupts their normal social behavior Alexander found that addiction rates seem to grow not as drug availability increases but as human dislocation the inevitable result of a free market Society becomes common place is Theory a free market Society treats its people as products to be uprooted moved altered according to economic need writing at the end of the 20th century for rich and poor alike jobs disappear on short notice communities are weak and unstable people routinely change families occupation technical skills languages nationalities software in ideologies as their lives progress prices and incomes are no more stable than social life even the continued viability of crucial economic systems is in question for rich and poor alike dislocation plays havoc with the delicate interpenetrations of people Society the physical world and spiritual values that are needed to sustain psychosocial integration in the absence of these things says Alexander we like rats and cages turn to substitutes not because the substitutes are alluring in and of themselves but because our circumstances are deficient we without our Gods end quote when things are at their most stressful when my circumstances are at their most deficient this is when I derive the most pleasure from a game like Diablo I I do not want to think I do not want to perceive the cage or the laboratory I want to click the button and receive my little treats what is most predatory about the monetization schemes of Diablo is that they are designed to meet a person right exactly there at the moment where they are at their lowest the moment that they crave that little treat the most maybe this is cynical but it's what I've come to understand about the game by playing the game nothing more nothing less Roger Ebert in a 2008 article called critic is a four-letter word offered a defense of such cynicism that I feel an incredible amount of Sympathy For he wrote quote it is not important to be right or wrong it is important to know why you hold an opinion understand how it emerged from the universe of all your opinions and help others form their own opinion opinions there is no correct answer there is simply the correct process too many simply absorb they are depositories for input they can hardly be expected to be critical of their own tastes can they well of course they can it is not enough to Simply Be A Cubs fan although I confess I am one it is necessary to feel the philosophy the history and even the poetry about the activity called baseball it is helpful to step outside a little and see that sports teams are surrogates for our own desires to conquer and expressions of our xenophobia for some they are even the best way ever invented to drink beer Outdoors if you are only a Cubs fan you are a willing automaton and a business venture join me in being a Cubs fan but know why you do it end quote if I have been pessimistic in trying to make sense of the Diablo franchise it is because I am such a huge fan of it in the first place every time a new Diablo game comes out I too am a willing automaton in an enormous business venture the only thing I've really been able to accomplish the past few hours is getting to the heart of why I personally keep playing title after title loop after loop as for the original question how many clicks does it take to get to the center of Diablo [ __ ] it man the world may never know thanks for watching the warmth of life has entered my tomb prepare yourself mortal to serve my master for eternity [Music] I nothing this you see that enemy over there let us it from this land see what for I am overburdened my bag is full I need Mana I need Mana you think yourself a challenge more energy I don't have enough energy need to get have you nothing else fight her it's it's only making it worth ready I can control chain are Elias is gone now and I remain I don't have to be afraid or ashamed this is what I am but I can still choose my path

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 425,806

Keywords: Diablo, Diablo 2, Diablo 3, Diablo 4, Diablo Immortal, Diablo 2 Resurrected, Review, Critique, Analysis, Retrospective, Blizzard

Id: R3v-7Rndd8M

Length: 245min 31sec (14731 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024