Well, friends… I think I am starting to wind down Diablo IV Season 2. I’ve hit level 73 and swapped out all of my gear… and while mechanically the game is still enjoyable there isn’t a lot of reason to keep grinding for 100. This morning’s post is going to seem negative, and to some extent, it will be… but before I go down that path let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that I had a heck of a lot of fun. According to the unofficial D4 Armory, at the time of writing this post, I have had around 38 hours worth of enjoyment out of this season. This has been nothing short of a remarkable turnaround in the trajectory of this game and I actually look forward to popping back in for Season 3. The team did a great job of picking up a completely derailed game and getting it back on the tracks.
To say that Diablo IV has no endgame is a bit disingenuous. However, I can fully state that it does not have an endgame that I feel is worth grinding for. Nightmare Dungeons are not good and are the sort of byproduct that you end up with when someone attempts to transplant Mythic Plus from World of Warcraft into an Action RPG. It just does not feel good and compounds the problems with the Dungeon system as a whole, only further serving to suck any remaining joy from them by adding mechanics that make them even less enjoyable. Mechanics like Drifting Shadows, Blood Blisters, and Lightning Storm are not difficult but are the definition of something that sounds good on paper but feels completely “unfun” when you experience them in practice.
The Blood Harvest zones and the recent changes to Legion prove that the team can design content that feels good to complete, so it gives me hope that at some point there might be something enjoyable to do once you have hit World Tier IV and sorted out your gear. Right now getting an arbitrary number to 100 doesn’t feel like good enough motivation to keep going when I am out of meaningful goals. I am not saying I will stop playing the game entirely, I might grind out some more of the battle pass but for the moment… a lot of the joy and focus are gone for me. When I completed the last keystone dungeon and started working on World Tier IV, it felt like I arrived at the top floor. I’ve never been a massive completionist and I am largely unmotivated by trying to get a “platinum” trophy in every game.
I am hoping that they can rework dungeons completely at some point because the spackle that they applied with this patch helped them out… but I am not sure there is enough good there to salvage without a top-down redesign. The joy of an ARPG is reaching a flow state as you tear through packs of monsters while getting the occasional dopamine hit of a loot explosion. Dungeons break this flow up constantly by having to focus on some arbitrary objective rather than steamrolling your way to the boss and breaking open the loot pinata. This is made worse by the Nightmare Dungeon mechanics that serve to slow you down further. The dungeon art is top-notch, which I think is why they have been so hesitant to trash the system completely. I am not sure how it can be saved without simply removing ALL objective-focused gameplay.
Another system that needs completely redone is the Helltide. The Blood Harvest “Bloodtide” zones have proven to be a massively superior gameplay experience. Going forward they should really make Helltides work exactly like the Bloodtide where there are a few objectives that spawn in… no loss of embers on death… and available at all times with them rotating between locations every hour. The team has shown us that they understand what went wrong with the Helltide, and we will always lament the “Bloodtide” zones as a far better experience. I’ve been to the Helltide a few times and there are never any other players out there… but every time I do the green Blood Harvest zones they are fairly packed. This has to be something reflected in the total numbers on the backend and should provide some interesting metrics that hopefully they can track.
The other system that I would love to see burned down and rebuilt is the Paragon system. It is just not interesting. While the Path of Exile passive tree is lamented as being far too obtuse for the average player, I also feel like I am only ever one or two points away from some interesting choices that often reframe what I am doing with my build. Most of the Paragon tree is filled with boring stat nodes that you have to take in order to make the fun nodes on the tree not actively suck. Even the “fun” nodes don’t really modify how my character plays. Truthfully that is a larger problem both with the design of Legendary items and Paragon points, in that nothing I am doing seems to make significant changes to the way I am approaching my build. I’m playing Upheaval and there is a similar ability in Last Epoch but in the talent tree associated with that ability I can configure it to fire off when I leap slam or turn it into a self-firing totem… or apply buffs to my minions. None of that sort of freedom of movement within a single ability exists in Diablo IV, which honestly feels like a step backward from even Diablo III.
So I realize that this morning’s post has been me rattling off a litany of problems than the game has. That is only because I now care about the game. I actually feel for the first time that there is a game here worth trying to save. I don’t want Diablo IV to die in infamy… I want it to have a No Man’s Sky style comeback story and keep proving to players that it is putting in the hard work to bring itself back from the brink of oblivion. There is a good game here and there are some strong fundamentals now. That is a shocking change from the burning dumpster fire of a game that I felt existed at launch. My concern now is that most of what I am interacting with are seasonal mechanics that are very likely to go away in January.
What we need are some long-tailed progression systems that will keep the player coming back even after they have capped a character out. Path of Exile does this through the varied forms of endgame content harvested from their version of seasons called “Leagues” and the Atlas of Worlds which allows you to tailor your endgame experience to focus on exactly the kind of content that you want to spend time experiencing. The Blood Harvest while cool, doesn’t really fit a pattern of being content that can remain evergreen and neither does the Malignant Hearts. Diablo IV is going to start needing to design content expansions that can stick around for longer than a three-month period because it needs to keep fleshing out what it means to reach the endgame.
Diablo IV is in a state where it can provide one really fun week of gameplay, but it needs to give us a reason to keep coming back for more. Granted a more casual player will likely be able to stretch that week into a month… but no matter your pace you are going to reach a point where the path forward just isn’t really worth walking down. I have a glimmer of hope though for what the future might bring a year or two from now. So if anyone on the team happens to read this… you’ve already beat my expectations. I thought the game was dead in the water and was saddled with a generally “unfun” game design. You’ve had a massive turn around and I applaud all of the hard work. There are still a lot of difficult choices ahead of you, which are going to mean cutting some content that just isn’t working or at least drastically modifying it. I hope the company as a whole gives you the time to turn this game around completely because I feel like at some point Diablo IV can be a massive success story.