Slamming the Diablo.

That title sounds more like a beer ad. I dunno. I’m going with it.

My history with the Diablo series goes way back to the first one. I’ve been a big roguelike player since, well, Rogue, and the first Diablo was all that roguelike goodness without having to play an ‘@’-sign battling the deadliest letters of the alphabet. Diablo was the game I’d been waiting for. I played it lots.

Diablo IV is just about as far from that as you can possibly get. That’s not a bad thing, really. The series rapidly evolved from a dungeon crawler to a dungeon brawler, where you raced through the world killing vast armies of the undead as an avenging angel of death, pausing only occasionally to show some hapless demon or devil the sharp side of your axe.

The dungeon brawler aspect reached its peak with Diablo III. Diablo IV evolves the series a little bit more into a dungeon maller. Like, the world is a mall where you hang out and meet friends and then go shopping, or something. This occurred to me as I sat with a group of players I did not know at the Ashara spawn point, unaware that the demon was no longer going to spawn at the appointed time. Diablo IV… is an MMO now.

It really is. You start in a solo instance until you reach the first large town, at which time you spawn on a server with other players running around, living their own lives. You pick up the quests, then roam around the overworld, exploring. Public quests pop up on the map, and players filter in to take them on. World bosses spawn, and people gather for them. You may come across abandoned mines, churches, and full-on dungeons, and these are not shared. These are just for you. This is when D4 gets back to its roots.

The screenshot above shows that my character is in the Eternal Realm — this is her server. The world tier is 1 — Adventurer, which is the challenge rating. Adventure and Veteran are unlocked to begin with, and Nightmare and one other may be unlocked later. You can change world tier when you like, and everyone in your party shares that same challenge rating.

My kids are both avid Diablo players. My son hopped in for the server slam as well, leveling up both rogue and druid, and my daughter will be there when the full game drops. The game handles multiple players well. There’s no requirement that everyone be on the same screen (I am not sure that has ever been a requirement, now that I think about it. That’s more of a Neverwinter thing.) With more than just me, I made a clan — The Hallowed, a pun on my real-life family name, chose a logo and so on. We both played on PS5s, which worked fine. I really prefer driving my character around with a controller instead of having to click everywhere all the time, so for me, consoles are the way to play.

At the end of the server slam, my son was convinced that D4 would be taking the place of his beloved Call of Duty when it goes live. Me, I’m looking forward to seeing if Team Spode might want to give it a shot.

One of the downsides is that the game is incredibly expensive. It starts out at US$80 for the standard edition, and tops out at over $100 if you want to get a lot of cosmetic items for WoW, Diablo III and Diablo Immortal. Since this is the first Diablo game where you are likely to encounter people who might be impressed that you have shiny mounts, it’s clear that D4 will be leaning heavily into cosmetic items.

Signs of this are everywhere. They have a transmog system, the Wardrobe, where you can tune your look. (In Diablo and Diablo II, your character was too small to really see. Diablo III and IV pump up the sprite size so that you can see what you’re wearing outside the character selection screen). Loot that you find will let you know if salvaging the gear instead of selling it will unlock a new possibility in the Wardrobe. D4’s endgame, like that of most other MMOs these days, is FashionQuest.

I am not immune. Actually, I love dressing up my characters. So I’m not calling this a bad thing — just another sign of the MMO-ization of the franchise.

The plot is typical Diablo. This world of Sanctuary was created at some point jointly by the demon Lilith and the angel Inarius, Mom and Pop to all life. They have both returned to Sanctuary to battle once more for the souls of all who live there, and Inarius is likely to be as much a danger to the player as Lilith who, in the first act, only seems overtly hostile to the priests of Inarius’ Church of Light. Diablo IV players will more likely find themselves being an independent faction rather than explicitly joining the angelic hordes, as in D2 and D3.

Leveling was fast, loot dropped both fast and furious, there were plenty of upgrades, and the skill tree is pretty phenomenal, allowing far more potential builds than either D2 or D3. I built my necromancer with a focus on pets and an eye toward the Ashara fight (that I missed), but I could have made her a nuker, crowd control, condition applier, or even melee. Respeccing is cheap and easy. I don’t remember seeing if there was a way to save specs, but I imagine there is or soon will be, as it’s very cool.

I had a lot of fun with Diablo III, and Blizzard has done a great job adding MMO elements to the series without losing the button mashing goodness that made Diablo great.

I’m very much looking forward to playing it when it goes live. Just… watch out for the cash shop.