A Journey through Diablo IV

Words: 5954 Approximate Reading Time: 45-55 minutes

Back in the day I was a pretty big fan of the Diablo series. I’d played through the first game multiple times, and got caught up in the (incredibly dull) endgame grind of Diablo II. When Diablo III came out I had sort of lost my interest in the series, but there was always that little pull in the back of my brain. I’d played other games in the same genre such as Torchlight and found them lacking, so why not return to the game that had originally tickled my fancy? Relatively recently I picked up the third installment and played through it for a while, and then did a write-up on that.

All of that also means I missed the Diablo IV train when the game originally released. I had friends who got into it, but at the time I was trying to save money, and more Diablo didn’t seem a particularly wise investment. I went back and forth on the topic, but once I got some disposable income again and the game went on sale I decided to pick it up and play through it.

After hearing about my friends’ experiences, this ended up being less about revisiting a beloved series and more of an expedition. An attempt to examine the game and what it might have done well and poorly. To see what we can learn from this game about the genre it belongs to.

And so as I near the end of that expedition – something I had been sharing on my stream for multiple weeks – I decided that a more formal essay would help collect those thoughts in a single place that would be easier to share.

Before stepping in, it’s worth noting that this expedition is limited in a few ways. Firstly, games nowadays undergo significant changes over their lifetime. This is definitely true of “games as a service” (GaaS) products, of which Diablo IV is one. And indeed, I arrived at the turning point of just one of those major changes, which was a reworking of the game’s equipment systems.. But that also means I never experienced the game when it was properly new – with patches and balance fixes and so on, I did not play the exact same game that someone who first got into the game did.

Another key point of how Diablo IV works is through a seasonal pass system, just like many other GaaS products. The game was nearing the end of its third season when I created my character, and with how I limited my playtime to focus on showing as much as I could on-stream  I ended up never even touching that content before the season ended. So I am certainly missing out on content that for all I know could have been fun and rewarding. Or maybe it was terrible. I just don’t know.

Lastly is the fact that a core component of what people enjoy about this game is playing with the different character classes. The game definitely tries to facilitate that multiple character playstyle in various ways, but I didn’t really have an interest in it. I created my one character (a barbarian), and then focused on that. So how it feels to play the other characters is an unknown to me.

With that out of the way, let’s get to it.

What is Diablo?

It’s helpful to step back for just a moment and provide some information on the genre. The actual core content of Diablo as a series isn’t relevant. You run around killing demons. Whether you care about the core narrative and world is up to you. It’s mostly going to be a vehicle for the gameplay. That vehicle can help entice you to pick up the game and get into the series, but what you’re really engaging with is a set of mechanics.

We could put Diablo in a variety of boxes. Action RPG. Dungeon crawler. Looter. The game is built around a few key ideas.

One is character building. The game offers you a variety of skills as you grow stronger and different pieces of equipment that can synergize with those skills. Thinking about how you want to play, what meshes well with that playstyle, and what will be most effective in keeping you alive and killing enemies quickly becomes a pretty huge chunk of the game. Of course, much of this is done piecemeal. You get a skill point, you look at what skills you have, and you make a decision based on what you like. Maybe you re-allocate them at some point down the road, but to start at least it’s a series of small decisions.

Two is the looting system. You’re running around and killing enemies and opening chests with the hopes of getting a new piece of equipment that can help with building your character. It does more damage, it has better bonuses that mesh with your build, it has special characteristics that will help you kill more things or stay alive. Whatever the case may be, you’re hoping to find gear that will allow you get keep pushing through the game.

And finally there’s the action itself. This isn’t the tight character-action combat of a Bayonetta, nor the methodical give-and-take of a Dark Souls. In many ways, it can be mindless. You find a group of enemies, perform some basic attacks to build up your character’s special resource for using skills, and then use those skills to clear out the enemies. Your run-of-the-mill baddies will go down from a single hit or two, and clearing out a dozen or more enemies might be a matter of just a couple seconds. At certain points you might find yourself fighting more powerful bosses that could take more time, but certain builds might just as well result in taking down those bosses quickly as well. The game is mostly filled with this simpler system of clearing out huge numbers of weaker mobs, punctuated by more difficult battles now and then that require a bit more care.

All of these contribute to a game where you can easily fall into a routine. You run around, kill enemies, and hope that something cool drops. Once your inventory fills up, you get rid of the useless gear and then go out again.  More on all of this later.

Suffice to say it is something that is in many respects player-driven. While you have objectives in the form of the game’s story and sidequests and such, eventually you run out. And so it becomes a matter of you figuring out what you want from the game. Do you want to reach the max level with your character? Reach the max level with all classes? Kit one or all characters out in the best gear possible? The game only gives you so much direction about what it explicitly wants you to do. After a certain point, you get free rein.

The World

Diablo IV is unique among its predecessors in having a gigantic quasi-open world. In the first game, you descended a dungeon going floor-by-floor. Each floor was procedurally generated, meaning that one journey through the game wouldn’t be the same as another. The second and third games had you running through procedurally generated open areas, sometimes entering grottos and tombs (also procedurally generated) to grab extra loot or complete quests. But the open areas of these two games were still separated in many ways. Some sections would connect to one another, but others would be separated by those dungeons. And all of them would be separated into regions for the games’ respective chapters.

In contrast, Diablo IV has a large persistent world. The game is still split between chapters and regions, but those regions all connect directly. You can walk from one part of the map to any other, though it would take quite a while to get there. The world is dotted with towns and outposts that you can fast travel to at any point, which gives you these little hubs that you can use both for resting or loading off unwanted gear, and for exploring.

The change is interesting. In some sense the procedural generation of previous games felt a bit tired. Sure, technically speaking you’re not playing the exact same game each time, but it also creates a sense of tedium. The map is revealed as you play, so getting from one area to another is a matter of searching until you find the exit. When you’re starting out it can be fun, but the more knowledge you gain and the faster you want to play, the more it gets in the way.

But a static world also invites a new problem: familiarity. If you’re going to introduce a world that does not change, then once a player has been somewhere, why should they bother to go back?

To put it another way, a procedurally generated world always requires exploration. But a static world only needs to be explored once. So if the world doesn’t change, you need to provide players with a reason to continually return.

Diablo IV has a few things to try and accomplish this. Firstly, the game has you running around to complete quests. This process helps provide you with your first round of exploration. That exploration has the capability of yielding more side quests, strongholds (special areas where you perform an objective and then kill a boss, often to open up a new fast travel point), and dungeons (procedurally generated zones where you complete a few objectives to get special item upgrades). So there’s quite a number of things to locate and do your first time around.

The game also has a special collectible to find hidden throughout the map: statues of the main villain that provide permanent stat bonuses when located. There’s about 150 of these in the game, and they’re often tucked away into little corners of the map. In some sense, the point of hiding them in these places is to encourage you to run around and try to find them all, which then also allows you to complete other tasks and gain experience and find loot. Unfortunately, since there’s not an exact rhyme or reason for where many of these statues are placed, it becomes increasingly tedious to find them. You may well end up resorting to a guide just to get them all…and if you find yourself doing that, then that speaks to a problem of the underlying design.

Lastly there’s events. At various spots of the map are special challenges. You have a limited amount of time – generally a minute or two – to accomplish the task, such as killing waves of enemies, protecting NPCs, or staying within a designated circle. You get a reward even if you fail, but you get an even bigger reward for success. These rewards include a bunch of items, as well as a currency that can be used for buying other items. These events are decent ways to get more equipment, but do eventually become stale.

There’s a lot more that could be covered about the transition, and to some extent the difference is going to become an issue of personal preference. There’s something being sacrificed and something gained in each case. But whatever our feelings about the theory, the practice still leaves something to be desired. Diablo IV needs to encourage revisiting areas, and yet the actual mechanics of that revisiting not only become increasingly dull or annoying, but do so rather quickly.

And now imagine doing this four more times. At least. After all, the idea is that you create a new character each season and start fresh. The statues you find get carried over, but that in turn means you have less of a reason to explore, which doesn’t actually help with the core problem.

The Numbers Game

Building a character involves a confluence of several factors. Firstly, there’s leveling. As you kill enemies, you get experience, which gives you skill points. You then invest those points in skills unique to each character class to try and create a powerful character that can take down the strongest enemies. You only get a limited number of these, so you need to think fairly carefully about how you’re playing and what each skill will add to your damage or defense. Though you can re-allocate them all if you need to.

Second, there’s gear. Gear involves two components. There’s the raw stats on the gear – how much damage does this weapon deal, how much defense does this armor give me – and there’s the secondary boosts. These boosts might increase your maximum life, or refill your life automatically, or boost certain types of damage or defense, or activate a special bonus. The rarer the equipment, the more of these boosts they get.

And lastly along with leveling is a “paragon” system. Once you reach a certain level, you stop accumulating skill points and start accumulating “paragon points.” These points are then used on a board that provides small bonuses to your attributes (such as strength or intelligence, which can impact your damage and defense), with special nodes that activate bigger bonuses. The paragon board gets a bit complex overall, but suffice to say it gives you a great deal of freedom about how to construct your character in the late game.

Now one of the core bits about building your character is figuring out how all of these elements interact. If you are trying to build around using a specific skill, you want your gear to supplement that skill in various ways. Maybe you increase the amount of damage that skill does, or reduce the cost of using it, or give it a special buff. So the game is about more than just the raw stats.

This is where we get to a point of frustration, though. Because the game also does become about those raw stats.

For much of the game, you go through the following cycle. You progress through the story and kill enemies. Enemies drop loot, you pick up the loot, and then you go into your inventory to see if any of that loot is stronger than what you currently have equipped. If you see green numbers, that means it’s stronger and you should go ahead and equip it.

Why? Because enemies are getting progressively stronger as you level. Rather than a world where enemy strength is tied to the region, enemy strength is tied to your character’s level. As you run around enemies will usually be the same level as you, maybe one or two below. Some harder zones will be a few levels higher. You’ll occasionally find some content that is much more difficult, but eventually you’ll be able to catch up.

What this all means is that those numbers matter. The damage you can do and the damage you can take is impacted by the actual stats on your gear. You want to make sure you have the strongest weapons and armor you can be wielding at the time. Otherwise you’re handicapping yourself.

There ends up being a few problems with this, though. One, just from a purely mechanical level, is that gear never really keeps up with you like enemies do. When playing through the main game, gear will generally be anywhere from 6-10 levels weaker than your character is. This gives you the feeling that you’re constantly just a bit underpowered compared to your opponents. As you progress into the post-game, you’ll be able to activate a harder difficulty where gear will start dropping at the “appropriate” level…up to level 60. Then it will cap out until you can activate the next level of difficulty at level 70. You can see where this is going…

Since enemy difficulty is specifically being tied to your character level, but your gear is not really keeping pace, you find yourself bouncing around different relations to your gear. This leads to our second problem. When you start, gear is disposable and is checked entirely for the numbers. The secondary boosts are nice if they mesh with what you have, but you can’t care too much about them. Once you hit that gear cap at level 60, the likelihood of finding better gear is tiny, which means you can now focus on upgrading the gear that you have on hand (which you can do in a few ways). So now you’ve shifted to thinking about how gear fits into a build, and not just as a number. And at the same time, loot becomes worthless, because it’s pretty much all going to be worse than what you have now. And then you get to clear that cap, and things start all over again.

It’s an annoyance for various reasons. But not least of which is that the game doesn’t really have a good sense of what the loot should be to the player. You get so much of it, and yet you care about so little of it. And equipment falls into this problem of becoming disposable, and thus everything shifts to being about numbers for huge chunks of the game. You can spend the resources to build the perfect piece of equipment, but there’s no reason to get attached to it unless you’re literally at the maximum level, because at some point you’re going to find another piece of gear that outclasses it. In which case, why bother with the upgrading system before then?

I describe all of this because it also gives this weird sense of the player’s own strength. Throughout the main game you feel weak. Then the game is supposed to get harder, but because of how the gear system shifts you feel significantly stronger. Then you hit the cap and start to feel progressively weaker. It is a strange sensation because it feels almost as though the lesson is to not play – if you continue, the game will only get harder to play without any corollary growth on your part.

The Endgame

An action RPG like Diablo honestly lives and dies on its endgame. This is true for several reasons. One, it’s a game that is designed to be played for a long time. You make multiple characters, you grind out events for better gear, and so on and so on. Players within this genre are often willing to do insanely repetitive tasks for rewards that might not make sense (such as trying to get a piece of gear to drop that they can’t even use), but there are also certain limitations.

Diablo IV breaks down its difficulty into four “tiers.” From the start you can pick between tiers 1 and 2 – equivalent to Normal and Hard. There’s a bonus for playing on Hard Mode, but you can progress as you wish in either. Once you beat the game and reach level 50, you’ll unlock tier 3. This provides some additional stuff you can do, and changes the way the gear relates to your character level. In particular, gear will become much stronger. Once you hit level 70, you can unlock tier 4, which further increases both the reward and threat from enemies.

But of course, getting to level 50 or level 70 requires time and effort. You need stuff to do between those things. Setting aside sidequests, here’s the content that is available for the player once the main game has ended:

1. Events – These are always present throughout the game’s open world, but serve as a decent way to get gear. As you run around you’ll notice a goldish circle on your minimap that points to an event, which you can complete for a reward.
2. Legions – These are also something you can do from fairly early on, though you’re unlikely to succeed until you’ve built up your character a good deal. Every few hours an event will pop up on the map where huge numbers of enemies will spawn. You are tasked with eliminating all of those enemies within a short time window. If you can do that, then a miniboss will spawn. If you can get through three cycles successfully and defeat all the minibosses, then a legion boss will spawn for you to kill. You then get rewarded depending on how much of the event you were able to complete. This event absolutely requires multiple players, though luckily other random people will usually join in.
3. Tree of Whispers – One of the NPCs you encounter in the main story is called the Tree of Whispers. Accomplishing specific tasks that are marked on the map (killing a certain number of a specific type of enemy, clearing out a dungeon, etc.) will earn you points. With every 10 points you can go to the tree to get a bunch of goodies, as well as a special sigil. These sigils are used to upgrade the various dungeons of the game into Nightmare Dungeons, which…
4. Nightmare Dungeons – These are stronger versions of the basic dungeons that you go through. The stronger the sigil you use, the more powerful the enemies will be. The reward for completing these dungeons is the ability to upgrade a special item you can place on your paragon boards.
5. The Pit – Each Nightmare Dungeon has a tier tied to the strength of the enemies, and once you complete a certain tier you unlock the Pit. It’s basically just running through and killing enemies as fast as you can to unlock and defeat a boss. If you win within the time limit, you can get some materials to upgrade your equipment just a bit more. These also have tiers, and the higher the tier the stronger the enemies get. You need to keep going up in tier levels in order to get all the stuff needed to fully upgrade your gear.
6. Helltides – Added in Season 4, a couple regions of the world will randomly be invaded for a period of time. Enemies will spawn more frequently, and will drop special items that you can use to open up chests for more gear. The longer you remain in the Helltide, the tougher it will get. And dying in the Helltide will cause you to drop some of those items that you’ve been collecting, so you need to be careful. Helltides have a few tasks you can perform within them. First, as you kill more enemies they begin spawning more aggressively until you finally summon a boss. Second, you can collect items from those special chests to summon a different boss. Third, there’s another boss that roams around the region. These all drop gear and some special items.
7. World Boss – Every few hours an enormous boss monster shows up at one of several points on the map. These are large enemies with bigger health bars that generally require a few players to tackle (although it is possible to take them out on your own with the right build and equipment). Killing them provides materials to summon “uber-bosses” as well as some gear.
8. Uber-boss – A handful of special bosses (including some story bosses) can be refought at an extremely high power level. These bosses deal high amounts of damage and have large health pools, demanding well-constructed builds. They have increased chances of dropping powerful unique gear.

There’s a fair bit of content here. If you add back in sidequests and dungeons and searching for those statues, there’s a pretty decent amount to do. But the above eight tasks are your primarily repeated content. The problem is that so much of this content starts to become redundant pretty fast.

Most of the reward for these tasks is gear. But as noted in the previous section, gear is usually going to be trashed. Sure, you might get something good now and then, but the chances are low, at least after you hit those gear caps. So instead you might be seeking out something to help you level up quickly for the next world tier, and the content is just a vehicle for getting experience quickly.

I did mention that Nightmare Dungeons provide a special bonus of allowing you to upgrade a specific item. But those upgrades end up being small, and the amount of “experience” you get to upgrade those special items is maybe enough to bump it up one level. In comparison, you get a big bonus to a single token when you upgrade it to level 15. So that means at bare minimum 14 runs through one of these dungeons just to get that extra bonus. And the max level is 21, so that’s 20 runs. Per item that you want to use – usually something like 4-6 of these per character (and that’s a minimum, assuming that you aren’t leveling up a wide range of these for different potential builds). At a certain point you’ll generally be able to make this go a bit faster, but we are still missing that the underlying content here isn’t terribly engaging.

And it should be noted that the ability to tackle any of this depends upon your character’s level and gear. As you progress from levels 50-60 in tier 3, you find yourself growing along with the enemies. So much of this endgame content will feel doable. But as you go from 60-70, you hit a standstill while enemies get progressively stronger. Which means your ability to contribute to group activities or clear content on your own decreases. Particularly tough battles that might be doable at level 60 may then become impossible at level 65, because you’re too outclassed by tougher enemies. Indeed, a moment of intense frustration came in trying to complete the event that would unlock tier 4, when my level 70 character with level 60 gear was trying to kill a level 70 boss that could wreck me within a fraction of a second if I got hit by the wrong attack.

The endgame ultimately has stuff there, but it leaves an open question about why the player should bother. Which is honestly a tough question to answer. These games being largely player-driven, it feels almost weird to ask, in fact. But as the content gets more repetitive, you need the player to feel some sense of reward or even a promise of reward to keep them going. Whatever that reward might be.

Combat Fatigue

It is also worth noting that a core problem of Diablo IV’s endgame is its…sameyness. The more you play the easier to becomes to notice. When running through the story and tackling much of this content the first time around you may well feel that the novelty of the experience is enough. But that novelty wears off.

The only thing you have to do in Diablo IV is fight. You kill enemies, and then those enemies drop gear, you usually end up selling or dismantling that gear, and then you repeat. Sometimes you may find a piece of gear that you use, but that part of the process gets less and less frequent over time. And even then, all it does is help you kill enemies marginally better.

Every piece of content I described above relates to killing enemies in some way. Sometimes you need to kill a lot of enemies. Sometimes enemies are in your way while you try to accomplish a task. Sometimes the enemy you need to kill is a boss. Sometimes a big boss. Whatever the case, you’re running around and killing stuff. Over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Theoretically this could be fine, but there needs to be something about the gameplay loop to help distract you from the encroaching boredom of killing enemies. To make each task feel different and unique. And Diablo IV doesn’t really offer that. Admittedly, neither did its predecessors.

Two main possibilities stick out.

One is to add in some different content to the rotation. Give players the ability to do something other than kill stuff. Solve puzzles, test the player’s knowledge of the world or lore, or just give players some structured tasks to help them feel like they’ve accomplished something (like with the story missions). When you have a variety of different tasks, each individual task can feel a bit unique. When you have a dozen tasks that all boil down to the same thing, though, it creates this weight of monotony.

Many games that rely on similar loops have adopted these kinds of systems. Destiny has its raids which combine combat, puzzle solving, stealth, platforming, and so on. And that variety of mechanics means a wider array of different objectives for the player. Of course, Diablo in many ways is built around this much simpler mechanic of killing enemies and getting loot. Perhaps adding in more mechanics would detract from a simplicity that makes the series appealing. But that same simplicity marks a weakness that makes the game hard to sustain the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of playtime it effectively demands.

The other possibility would be to lean into the idea of building a character. In particular, the idea that there could be multiple possible pathways to creating a single character that might depend on personal preference or tackling a specific problem. So perhaps you have a character with multiple different skills, and some of the skills are better suited to particular tasks, and need other skills to properly synergize. Players could then be faced with challenges that demand they step back and assess their build and perhaps even start over from scratch to make something that will be successful. To experiment with different possibilities until they find something that works.

Doing this would let players lean into the potential fun of theorizing about builds, and also let players learn about those processes more fully so they can engage. But to do this, redoing a character’s skills would be to be both easy and free (or at least very cheap). And especially easy. A factor which Diablo IV’s systems – especially the paragon board with over 200 points you need to allocate across somewhere between 1,000-2,000 different spaces. The game as it exists could not really sustain a constant experimentation, as it would become insanely tedious after the first or second reconfiguration.

And encouraging players to engage in this on their own is useful because it prevents them from just looking up builds online. Once you’ve constructed a powerful build, the only content that will pose a challenge is the most difficult stuff – the bits where enemies can be twenty, thirty, or fifty levels stronger. Most of the game will be a cakewalk, making it feel rather boring after a while. You want to be offering players a challenge that allows them to tweak their playstyle or their character, and also gives them the tools to figure out those tweaks.

Why Do People Play This?

Based on what I’ve described above, one might reasonably ask why anyone would want to play this game in the first place. I’ve likely made the game seem rather dull and repetitive. In fact, it seems almost like the point is for the player to play dull and repetitive content over and over again. And that doesn’t sound appealing.

So it’s useful to step back for a moment and ask why we should care. Even if you could improve the baseline experience of Diablo IV, wouldn’t the core still be this incredibly repetitive experience with minimal amounts of real challenge? Why would anyone want to play that?

These kinds of dungeon crawling action RPGs rely on a few different factors. We might as well start with the power fantasy. While just about every game is going to have the player character taking on and defeating multiple enemies, a game like Diablo relies in part on the joy of mowing down large groups of enemies quickly. Much like a “Musou” genre game such as Dynasty Warriors, the fun is in the feeling of raw power.

Add to that the freedom of character creation. These games offer a wide variety of builds that can mesh with different playstyles, and the ability of the player to experiment with these different builds is paramount. The choice provides the player with a feeling of autonomy and uniqueness – not only do you get to exercise choice in making your character, but your character gets to feel like your character.

And despite the power fantasy aspect to it, there’s still supposed to be some level of challenge, which dovetails back with the character creation. As you start hitting harder content, you may find that your build needs to be optimized. So this pushes to the process of thinking about how skills and gear work together, effectively creating a puzzle for you to solve. And once it is solved, you feel a rush of endorphins in overcoming something that previously held you back.

But that arguably only gets you through the main game, assuming the story is enough to keep you going. Why keep playing afterwards?

One core component is collecting. These games generally offer various special items that a player can gather randomly or from specific bosses. These items may be extremely powerful, might be for other character classes, and may not even end up being used. The point is less to have the item to use, but to have the item simply to have it. In this sense, there is a combination of collecting and gambling. The process of filling out your collection creates a clear goal to pursue. The randomness and the rarity of finding certain items means that when one drops, you feel a sense of elation.

And we should not ignore the potential social aspect. While I played the game on my own, many of these games today are built around playing with others. And where the content can get a bit mindless, that allows players to interact without worry. They can joke and chat and not have to think too hard about the game itself. And at the end of whatever they’re doing, they’ll have made progress together.

So while much of Diablo IV’s content is repetitive and even boring from an outside perspective, it offers potential. Not potential for everyone. But potential for a number of people. Potential to be a game to hang out with others in. Potential for a power fantasy mixed with an intricate character creation system. Potential for pushing yourself further and further.

And unfortunately it feels like some of the game’s potential got wasted.

Concluding Remarks

I spent a little under 70 hours to gather all of this information. To play the game, get to level 100, complete the story, complete the various side quests, go through the world tiers, play through the different pieces of endgame content. It’s a lot of time, and I won’t say I hated it, per se.

Indeed, there were a few points where I was really having fun. When I felt like I was doing well without being held back. When I felt challenged without being weak. When the game seemed to have promise. But those moments did not last long. If I played for about 70 hours, I feel like maybe 10 of them were hours I enjoyed.

And again, that doesn’t mean the 60 remaining hours were awful. They were fine. But “fine” isn’t really enough. It shouldn’t be enough. “Fine” does not make me want to start up a new character and do it all over again.

And it feels like for a game this big. For a game with this much stuff in it. For a game with so much money behind it…the end product should be more than “fine.”