Diablo IV Impressions (And How it Compares to Diablo II / DII Remastered)

[A Black Falcon]

The point about seasonal content going away forever after each season is a good one, I hate that kind of thing.  The first season isn't anything amazing, it adds some new items enemies drop that you can equip to stuff, a new quest line with a not all that deep story, and such, but it is something and it'd be too bad if it was entirely removed when the season ends.

Anyway though, I did keep playing Diablo IV and I finished the story around when the current season started, which was July 21.  The ending was highly disappointing, I can tell that Blizzard tried with this story but it doesn't work well at all.  I could complain at length about the story if I wanted... maybe I will in a spoiler post. The ending is a sequel hook too, stuff happens right at the end which I'm sure will not be mentioned again until the first expansion.  That was kind of annoying, and stupid because what happens is so ludicrously implausible given everything that had happened in the story up to that point.  But anyway.

With the story done, I took a break from the game.  Recently I decided to try the seasonal content, which means making a new character because Blizzard does not allow regular characters to play the seasonal content for absolutely no imaginable reason.  This is a major design flaw with the game, maybe the worst overall honestly.  There is less than zero reason for your regular characters to be blocked out from the seasonal content; quite the opposite, it happens after the end of the story so unless you want to speedrun the game you're going to create a new 'starting with the story finished' character, which is an option that unlocks after you finish the game.  This starts you with a level 1 character but with the story all done.  That's what I did, and I tried a new class, a Druid this time.  It's alright.  When making a character this way you keep all of the map you've unlocked, which is nice, but do need to travel to the warp points again before you can use them.  It's nice that you don't totally need to start over with the map, though it does highlight the fact that unlike the first two Diablo games this game has a predesigned world that is the same each time, which, again, is both good and bad.  But I covered that already.

Overall, I know that Blizzard wants people to keep playing this game after finishing the story.  There are multiple tiers of things to do after finishing, including this season with its fairly minor but extant content, the nightmare dungeons and higher difficulty tiers to unlock and play, etc... but I've never been one to really get into that kind of stuff.  In Diablo II I finished the game once and then mostly stopped playing, for example.  I have might have already played more Diablo IV than I ever did II, some of that because this game takes longer to finish than that one did and some because of all of the added stuff, including harder dungeons and all.  I do think II is a better game overall though, but this game is definitely good.  Diablo IV has plenty of issues but I'm still interested enough to keep coming back some, the combat is very well designed and fun and the game looks and sounds fantastic.

Sorry, but I no longer care about Blizzard's games any more.  The company has gone so far off the deep end no commentary about the "artistry of their games" can save them.

Blizzard certainly messed up a lot of things, and continue to with how badly they are mismanaging Overwatch 2 (that's such a sad story, the first Overwatch was amazing!  Why did they ruin it?), but Diablo IV is mostly very good.