With a click of the right-mouse button, my musclebound barbarian sinks his axe into the ground behind him, sweeps it forward and creates a shock wave that obliterates everything in its path. Ahead, a horde of undead creatures is repulsed by the blast, zombies flayed by the force of the air, skeletons scattered across the ground, wraiths dissipating into spectral dust. The room’s furnishing fly with them, chairs, candlesticks and barrels smashing into the far wall. The ground itself is scarred by the attack, a conical depression left in the floor as if struck by a meteorite airburst.
I’ve performed this attack countless times over the last weekend, and it never fails to light up my brain like Blackpool in September. The Diablo series represents video gaming in its purest and perhaps most reductive form and has exploited these feedback loops to enormous success in the last 25 years, reworking the complex rulesets of role-playing games into something less cerebral and more sensory. While there’s an argument to be had about how intellectually nourishing these games may be, Diablo 4 has a lot of seductive power. Clicking monsters to death in this game feels dangerously good.
Yet having spent 48 hours with the game during its beta phase, it’s clear there’s more to this than mindless monster-bashing. Diablo 4 sees the series return from a long hiatus after a third game that proved controversial in more ways than one. Partly because of this, it looks both backward and forward, addressing some criticisms of Diablo 3 while striving to compete in a world that has changed dramatically since 2012.
After a mixed reception to the colourful visuals of Diablo 3, Diablo 4 returns to being the moody goth kid of its RPG social group: pale-faced, clad in black and obsessed with death. The opening area, named Fractured Peaks, is an oppressive place where muddy, monster-ravaged villages cling to the edges of a snowy mountain range, with warrens of caves and dungeons concealed beneath the frozen surface. Said dungeons revel in their own dinginess. Painted in abundant dark shades, much like FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, the blackened walls and floors are slick with decaying viscera and often writhe with strange tendrils that grasp at you from the stonework.
Diablo 4’s appeal to the past isn’t purely stylistic. As your character accrues power across the game’s dark fantasy adventure, you must choose how to channel that power, picking skills and abilities that complement one another to make your chosen warrior an unstoppable destructive force. Diablo 4 ditches the previous game’s overly streamlined approach, returning to a more traditional skill tree that shows your character’s entire power trip at a glance.
I tested two of the five available character classes in the open beta – the barbarian and the sorcerer. What became obvious during my time with them is how intuitive character progression is. My sorceress, for example, offered an array of elemental powers to choose from. I could have made her an incandescent pyromancer, or a weaponised Elsa who froze her enemies to death. Instead, I focused on electrical abilities, Emperor Palpatine-ing my way through dungeons by zapping demons with bouncing bolts of lightning. This wasn’t the limit of my options, either. Diablo 4 let me further tailor these attacks to produce a collectible item known as “Crackling Energy”. As I plucked these orbs of static electricity from fallen foes, they’d discharge automatically when approaching new enemies. Hence, my sorceress could fry whole groups of demons before casting her first spell – a delightful sensation.
Structurally, Diablo 4 is different, as players now carve their way through a huge open world. For the beta, only the Fractured Peaks area was available to explore, but this nonetheless represents a sizeable and impressively freeform area. Although there is a central story to follow, it’s easy to get side-tracked into some offshoot adventure, helping a villager find her missing husband in some shadowy forest or delving into optional dungeons with foreboding names such as the Black Asylum. These secondary activities are tied together by “Renown”, a currency that, when accrued, periodically rewards players with extra gold, skill points, and other bonuses.
The looser structure creates a more coherent world, but it doesn’t radically change how Diablo plays. Instead, the open world exists mainly to facilitate Diablo 4’s new status as a persistent online game. Diablo 4 has extensive multiplayer features, with other players wandering freely around the game world able to periodically fight together as they explore individually, or actively join clans and embark on quests together. This ever-present multiplayer element could prove controversial, but interaction with other players isn’t mandatory, and you can happily plunder dungeons and pursue the central storyline solo.
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While the story has always been a part of Diablo, its role is small compared with other RPGs – largely an excuse for players to mash monsters by the million. But Diablo 4 makes a more concerted effort to grab the player’s attention, breaking up the action with more elaborate cutscenes and dialogue that dwell on individual characters, and takes more time to explore the game’s pseudo-Christian lore. These sequences bring with them all the flair you’d expect from Blizzard, and an impressive cast that includes veteran voice actors such as Troy Baker and Jennifer Hale, alongside Hollywood names like Ralph Ineson.
Broadly, it’s a typical fantasy adventure, a grand battle between good and evil. There are cults. There are prophecies. There are more helpless villagers than you can shake a pitchfork at. But there is also an attempt at more nuanced characterisation. The main antagonist – the demonic goddess Lilith – is not wholly villainous, while the fallen angel Inarius, a central figure in the religion of the game’s longsuffering humans, is not wholly good. There’s enough of interest to be audible above the sound of battle, and it helps that the game takes itself seriously, avoiding the temptation to lace the narrative with knowing side-glances and ironic gags.
Some questions remain. While Diablo’s character progression is slick and intuitive, will it offer the same level of flexibility as other ARPGs, most notably Path of Exile, which stepped in during Diablo’s long absence? Moreover, what does this new multiplayer structure mean for Blizzard’s long-term monetisation plans – will we eventually be asked to pay for a subscription? It appears inevitable it will continue to evolve after launch, and the question is what form will that evolution take. This is a game that could change shape substantially in the coming years. In its current form at least, Diablo 4 seems like a worthy ascendant to the throne of destruction.