I will strive to keep nostalgia from coloring what I am about to write. After all, I am going to write about the only game in a series of four that I have played multiple times. Certainly, I have more hours in sequels to Diablo than I probably have in a single run of the 1997 original, possibly in all of my cumulative runs of the grisly little hack-n-slash. We’ll get to that, of course – I think that the run time of these games is part of the conversation I want to have, but it’s a lower-tier criticism I have to lay at the foot of the later Diablo titles. Additionally, I have to admit some hypocrisy on my part. And that’s where I really want to start.
I Bought and Have Been Playing Diablo 4
And that is why I’m a hypocrite. From day one, I said that I wasn’t going to give Activision Blizzard any money for something that seem designed to pull money away from the player. A ten dollar copy of Gamestop later, and I’ve made myself a liar. Curiosity got the better of me. I’m sorry.
I’m a few hours deep into the run, still exploring the first area in the game. The snowy expanses surrounding Kyovashad stretch infinitely around me to different questing areas, and I’ve slaughtered hundreds of foes on my climb to level twenty. It’s a Diablo game, for certain.
Though, it’s definitely a different beast than Diablo III, which I had a scattered opinion of. What strikes me strange about DIV is how far the frame of the experience has shifted from the first three games. There are extensive cut scenes, the player character is voice acted beyond short voice barks in the midst of gameplay. The game stops far more often to tell the story than in previous games. I’m not disinterested in the story about Lilith, so I’m not going to claim its to the game’s detriment. It’s just different, and that’s not a criticism I’m here to make.
The various little MMO features that spot the game, however, make the experience itch more than I like. While I haven’t felt the game hit me up for Activision Fun Bucks, the layers of hidden menus with various rewards, reminders of things I could get from a season pass, progress reminders, all ticking on screen at all times. I spent a few minutes at the end of my session last night looking over all of it, and just wondering if any of the moneymen who ask for these things think that legacy Diablo players want to waste their time with these things when the game is still stuffed with loot pinatas. Said loot pinatas now feel…predictable? I think that’s the word I want to use here.
My experience with Diablo IV isn’t long lived enough to write a review on the totality of the run, but it has had enough strange texture to have me reminiscing about the rest of the series. I’ve finished a run of each of the three games, done some post game stuff in DIII, and – as previously mentioned – taken multiple trips through Diablo I. To say that I was less than thrilled by changes made from Diablo II going to DIII would also be accurate, but those were more rooted in a disappointment over the general visual design of the game.
Like many people, I thought it looked too much like World of Warcraft, and not like the grisly grit of the first two games. It should also be noted that I’d never gotten past Act II of Diablo II at that time. My opinion of the art didn’t change, but I recognize that that’s not a salient critique of the game – the problems weren’t in the art design anyway.
Besides – after finally finishing Diablo II, I found that I still consider the first game my favorite of the series anyway. With that admission, I might have lost you, kind reader. And that’s okay – I’m not an online player, so my experience of the series is never going to align with the general audience. That’s fine.
A Church, a Catacomb, a Path to Hell
Diablo works quick – a cut scene about the evil that has befallen the world, and the player is dumped in Tristram only to be given their mission by a corpse outside of the church at the back of the small town. There are shops, sure, but you won’t have the money to buy anything meaningful for a while.
So on you go, into the church, and begin exploring. Every few floors, you’ll get a new shortcut back to Tristram, a new biome to click through. But the setting is window dressing for the one thing that stuck with the series as it progressed – clicking through hordes of the damned in order to collect money and loot. It’s a short, tight gameplay loop that dumps dopamine into the player’s brain.
I’m not here to argue the merits of building a game around collecting loot. I’m not going to sit here and make defenses that could be used to defend Borderlands as quickly as Diablo. I don’t think that Diablo succeeds entirely on the merit of its combat.
In fact, I would make the faintest argument that Diablo sits alone in the series for how the series left so much of the texture of the experience in the first game in lieu of developing further on the central gameplay loop.
Now, before I continue to make an ass of myself, I do want to note that these are not criticisms of the game design of DII-DIV. Instead, I am exploring the question that I’ve been sitting on while playing Diablo IV:
Why do I expect Diablo games to iterate on what I loved about Diablo when the series progressed off of the template of its immediate sequel instead?
So what is Diablo outside of its combat? Certainly, there is the grimy aesthetic, an illustration of what I’m sure my mom thought a Dungeons and Dragons session looked like when I was twelve, but that’s simplifying it far too much.
Diablo is direct. It’s blunt. It’s the instantaneous launch from the stepping into Tristram to wandering into the dungeon on a single directive. It’s the evolution of Gauntlet woven into the simplicity of the experience. It’s the source of the spice in the combat. It’s why the first three games waste no time getting the player entrenched in the slaughter. It’s the element that withered away the slowest across the four games. DIV spends far more time talking than any of the previous games, and DIII is overwritten in an entirely different way. DII is still more concise, but even that one spends more time on trying to build a narrative than Diablo did. Amongst others in the RPG genre, it’s fairly unique. By the time of its release, the genre was known for telling the biggest stories in games. Diablo was an RPG, but it’s heart is arcade. It’s a studded war hammer hanging in a gallery of ornate rapiers and golden bastard swords.
But an RPG it was. And probably the only game in the series that seriously adhered to those traditions.
And there goes another wave of people who are opting out of my opining on a thirty year old game. Fair enough.
Upon leveling up in Diablo I, the player is given a few points to drop into their stats. That’s it. Everything else is either tied to class, or learned from the spell books discovered in the labyrinth. Or purchased in the stores. The gold accrued from the grind could be given to the witch in town to get spells. And all three classes could learn the bulk of the spells in the game, so you could support your sword swinging with a bit of extra fire. Or more importantly, replace buying town portal scrolls with a book to learn the spell.
There’s a lot of agency given to the player in how they prepare to face off against the Lord of Terror. The player has to sculpt their avatar in game entirely against what they find or purchase in the game. As a result, there’s a texture to the experience that isn’t present in any of the three sequels. You are in control of what your character can do, and you can not respec at the eleventh hour. This also means that it’s hard to completely break a run. I’ve never had a failed run at Diablo because there’s always a path forward.
Diablo II, on the other hand, decided that I wasn’t allowed to defeat the final boss of the expansion because I didn’t follow a specific series of instructions on how to setup my druid. Again, I’m a solo player, so there wasn’t much I could do but respec. It still feels bad years later. Diablo III went down incredibly smooth. DIV seems to be taking the same cues, providing a skill tree to develop inside of a menu instead of stat upgrades and the hunting of spell books.
As a result, the ongoing string of player choices made in reaction to the trip down to hell leaves me feeling that Diablo was the only game to really sell the role playing part of being an RPG. Such a thing isn’t entirely tied up in attaching better numbers to a character.
It’s an appealing combination, one as old as the role playing video game itself. The player is the hero, facing impossible odds. They explore, fight, improve, and understand every step on the path to power and success. It’s tangible in every step of the journey.
But then it ends with a massive, glowing stone right to the head.
The Lord of Terror Goes North
Before I wax pretentious about the end of Diablo, I think it’s important to note that the game ends. No post game is waiting for players who venture into the heart of hell itself to defeat the Lord of Terror. It’s a concise game. I honestly think that is why it’s so easy to go back and take the ride again – which is not something I can say about the sequels, which only get longer and longer with each new installment, complete with expansive post game dungeon crawls.
The final cut scene of Diablo sees the player character slam the Soulstone into their head. It is revealed in Diablo II that they have been possessed by the Lord of Terror, and a new journey begins to truly defeat this evil once and for all. This time, the Soulstone is also destroyed.
Which, theoretically, means that the entity known as Diablo should be defeated, and any sequels shouldn’t follow the narrative conceits of the first two games. Unfortunately, video games are a multi-billion dollar business, and brand familiarity will win every damned time.
Without wasting time on details, I’ll simply say that the story in Diablo III left me cold with its fan service derivations on the first two games framed in an epic narrative that was about as fulfilling as a Little Debbie cake. Certainly I enjoyed playing the game, but nothing really sticks in my mind about that experience beyond the flat enjoyment of it. As I said earlier, it went down entirely smooth, and since I didn’t care about the story, there wasn’t anything else to latch onto.
Diablo III only draws on the reputation of Diablo II for the short loop of fight-loot-sell-fight again gameplay, and relies on the library of lore to sell the rest of the experience. A variety of class specific skills means that the directness of the combat requires more dexterous inputs than in the previous games, at least as far as my experience of them is concerned (note, I have never been good at video games). Or perhaps just more inputs than the click-click-click-click-click-click of the earliest titles.
More noticeably, the world expands further with each game. It’s natural that sequels seek to have a wider scope than their predecessors. I just lament what is lost with the expansion.
In a sense, I am disappointed that there are – in the sense of what I most enjoyed from Diablo – no sequels to the original game after Diablo II. No games are iterating on the original, that focused journey through a specific setting and series of challenges. It’s not a problem for the series – it has only become more commercially successful over time. Aside from the disgusting efforts to monetize the series, it hasn’t effectively detracted from the overall experience either. Modern Diablo is still very much a fun game to play.
I’m just not getting that specific flavor back. And I can’t even suggest that I should have ever expected a studio to do such a thing. Sequels have to iterate and expand or they are criticized for never stepping away from the origin of the series – see the first five Tomb Raider games and their decline in critical and commercial notoriety. The massive leap in scope from the first Diablo to the second cemented the series place in the history of the video games in multiple contexts. Diablo II is still a game people play, having also been remastered in 2021, complete with the first ever console ports of the game. Blizzard has left Diablo I as a seasonal even in DIII. I don’t know that it will ever be rereleased outside of the release on GOG…which I really need to play since it has Hellfire included, and I’ve never played Hellfire!
Maybe that’s what I should do instead of pontificating on what might have been, as I am so frequently inclined to do. If anything, I hope I have sparked some curiosity for the oft forgotten original game in a series I enjoy. If you want to spice up your revisit, maybe even check out the PS1 port of the original – it’s honestly great.
Time does strange things to games, especially popular ones. We’re honestly lucky that Diablo, as compromised as it is by publisher demands, gets to be as true to itself as it really is. I may have issues with Diablo IV, but it’s still a Diablo game…even if it’s more Diablo II than Diablo I.
WordsThing 