Diablo IV is very good, but it also plays it very safe. For all its brash horror aesthetic, it never feels truly new or weird. Combat is fluid and crispy, but it soon stops surprising you. Enemy tactics vary, but eventually everything boils down to holding a few buttons and watching your character slice away at the horde around you.
It helps that it’s all so seamless. There’s next to no downtime between enemy encounters and community events. Any time your inventory gets encumbered with loot, you can create a wormhole to teleport instantly back to a vendor and sell it off. Joining someone for multiplayer is simple. It works so well that it all becomes automatic. It feels almost clinical, like it’s been perfectly manufactured for mindless mayhem. It’s easy to sit there and while away the hours in a sort of bored bloodlust.
Just as smoothly incorporated is Blizzard’s micro-economy. This is Diablo as a live service, birthed in an era of battle passes and endless microtransactions. On day one, there’s stuff you can buy for extra money. Blizzard has gotten into trouble with this kind of thing before, with many criticizing the company for stuffing its mobile Diablo Immortal with sometimes game-breaking microtransactions. The company has been very careful to point out that what’s locked behind microtransactions in Diablo IV are only cosmetic items that don’t affect gameplay. Still, the move has made some people bristle, since the whole Diablo franchise is built around trying to find cool loot. Sure, it is frustrating when games make you grind endlessly to get some cosmetic you want. (I’m looking at you, Destiny 2 cowboy hat.) But it’s also annoying to see a cool hat you can unlock for $24 right when a game launches, because clearly they could have just included the item in the main game.
There are many good games out right now. And sometimes it feels like there’s simply too much good game inside Diablo IV. I’ve played the game in a prerelease beta and server slam, and then splattered my way through a review copy. I’ve played for dozens of hours already, and I know Diablo IV is built to gleefully extract hundreds more. Faced with the prospect of starting anew, I can’t say I’m eager to grind my way back through hell.
Except that of course I’ll do it. I find myself picking the controller back up, eager to slog my way back through Sanctuary. Suddenly, hours have vanished. Now I feel very much like the woman in that cinematic. My eyes are wide, unblinking, staring off into the middle distance. I’ve lost track of what enemies I’m fighting, distracted by a dozen different events and thousands of loot drops. Still, my hands mash every button on the controller. The screen fills with blood. I am content.
