Blizzard has been a real hard company to feel ok about financially contributing to for a pretty long time. The last thing I paid them for was Overwatch at launch. Granted, that only means I skipped like three non-WoW SKUS, but that was like a 10 year period! I tried!

Diablo IV was pretty inscrutable until very late in development. After the absolutely disastrous launch of Diablo Immortal I thought I had a pretty good chance to pass on this one and keep my streak alive, but, alas, the game owns.

D4 feels like a sequel to Diablo 2 more than anything. Tonally, stylistically and design-wise, Diablo 3 was a huge shift. It was way more “gamey” than D1/D2, far less crunchy/grognard-y, and had a far more streamlined approach to skills. I thought these were all pretty refreshing . . but it also launched with unstable servers, an abhorrent real-money-auction-house, and miscellaneous game systems that would take years of rework to get feeling good.

D4 rejects basically all of that. Everything is far more mechanically complicated than D3, the world is darker, the story takes itself seriously, and the world is truly immense. The only things it seems they learned from D3 are that uniform sizes in your inventory is Fine and extracting legendary aspects is Cool and Good.

Gear in the game is heavily focused on finding legendaries and harvesting them for their traits, but instead of just having them as passives like The Book in D3, you have to pick what random gear you want to legendary-ify. This is a huge improvement because you’re not just re-rolling gear forever, you can still get “natural” upgrades out in the world, and can customize that gear as you see fit.

It’s also great because separating legendary aspects and base gear rolls means you have two parallel ways you can upgrade gear – you can either find a new better base item, or find an aspect you want. It also means if you decide you want to respec into a totally different build, you don’t need to go find completely new gear, you just have to apply a different set of legendary aspects and your gear will complement your build.

Skills, the Skill Tree and Paragon Boards are . . daunting. Instead of Diablo 3’s “just unlock everything until you have everything” and in contrast to Path of Exile’s 8 dimensional sphere grid garbage, D4 went with something definitely crunchy but not completely impenetrable. Skill trees are based around four or five “core” nodes, which each have clusters of skill options around them. You start off with a selection of generators, then a selection of primary consumers, then core skills, ults, and sprinkled throughout are passives. It’s impossible to get everything, it’s not even a good idea to max out most skills, you really need some professional Diablo Grognard to tell you what’s viable because it’s incredibly easy to screw it up. Good news if you screw it up just respec.

The world is more reminiscent of an MMO than a Diablo game. . . but that’s good? The world is completely open, even the acts can sorta be tackled largely out of order. There’s secrets, sidequests, dungeons, mini-dungeons, towns, etc, all over the world that takes place on one massive contiguous map. . . but it’s all sorta samey. There are only really three kinds of environments “cold”, “sand”, and “swamp”, Towns are all sort of interchangeable, and none of it really matters. That said, the overworld taking place in a shared environment is sorta neat, and public events with randos is great.

I played through as a Summoner Necromancer and had a great time. I made some minor build adjustments around L50 to get me over the hump to World Tier 4, but now I’m in a weird gap difficulty-wise. I’m well leveled (or possibly a little over-leveled) for WT3, but don’t get any gear upgrades there, but I’m under-leveled for WT4. All that’s really left for me is grinding endgame to make number go up, and I’m not sure how much more I want to do for now. I may have just done Enough before Season 1 starts in earnest.

I’ve enjoyed my time so far, and compared to past releases there’s not really much objectively wrong with the game at launch, which is really truly shocking. There’s no real controversy, it’s just a good game, and if you like Diablo-style ARPGs you’ll probably enjoy Diablo IV.