Diablo IV

More of the Same

by

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday the Diablo IV PR team dropped a video previewing the “endgame” activities that you will participate in after you hit the level cap. I had heard that it was getting more downvotes than likes, and as a result, I thought I might talk about my own feelings regarding what I saw in the video. I feel like it is important to cover some ground before I do so. I am a huge fan of ARPGs and if you sift through the last decade and a half of this blog you will see evidence of this scattered throughout its pages. Second I’ve played both very limited closed and open testing periods for Diablo IV but can only really reflect my thoughts on the open testing. It isn’t like the closed testing really gave me information that I did not gain through the open weekends, however. I’ve also already largely decided that Diablo IV is not a game being designed for me and the types of gameplay that I enjoy in ARPGs. You can read some of my comments on my experiences here, but I wanted to get this out of the way to explain that I am going to try and be balanced but I have my specific biases as does everyone talking about this game.

Let’s talk about what was outlined in the video while staring at my Beefcake Murder Hobo Barbarian from Open Beta. Essentially the video outlines a number of activities that will exist and will at least make up the early “endgame”. It also indicates that releases will be made on a semi-regular basis that will add additional “content” but we are uncertain exactly what any of that release schedule will entail. Diablo Immortal “launched” on July 7th of 2022 and has released a total of 11 “seasons” worth of content some with major changes and some with minor tweaks for an update roughly every 24 days. Diablo III has had a rather anemic release schedule going for long periods of time with no updates other than the rolling new season every 3-4 months… most of which only entail the release of a new cosmetic chase item. I expect that Diablo IV is going to land somewhere between these two with not nearly the frenetic schedule of a mobile game, but at least something dropping each quarter. How significant each drop is going to have not been explained yet. I also expect expansions that add the missing classes to the game like Crusader and potentially Witch Doctor.

I am going to start by Cataloging the Endgame Activities outlined in the video:

  • Four World Tiers
    • Open World
    • Events
    • World Bosses
    • Dungeons and Strongholds
  • Nightmare Dungeons
    • Requires consumable “Sigil” to unlock
  • Helltide Rifts (this one I am uncertain about)
  • Bounty Board in the form of an Angry Tree
  • PVP Areas

World Tiers

The video introduces the concept of World Tiers, and in the Open Beta, we immediately had access to two of these… Adventurer and Veteran. After completing the campaign moving to Nightmare sounds like it is gated by what they referred to as a “Capstone Dungeon”. Upon beating that dungeon you can set your world to the next difficulty which I would assume involves some grinding again and unlocking the next capstone dungeon and progressing forward. There is no clear indicator if you will need to progress through the story again at Nightmare difficulty, or if this just opens up the next Capstone Dungeon immediately. In Diablo III, the initial endgame was effectively just repeating the story over and over at different difficulties so I would hope that they do not make this critical mistake again.

It kinda feels bad that the different difficulties don’t just open up on their own. For example, in Diablo III the difficult tiers are level gated, and if you are absolutely Feeling your Wheaties you can run the entire initial campaign on Torment 1 if you so choose. This was absolutely a key mechanic before helping your friends catch up quickly to the endgame levels but zooming them through content and catchup experience is likely not going to be a thing in Diablo IV based on the limited testing I did with friends during the beta. Essentially higher world tiers feel like more of the same… same open-world areas, same events that reoccur on a schedule, and same world bosses.

It is really the World Bosses that concern me the most when it comes to Higher World Tiers. Essentially this template of keeping moving forward in World Tier is something that we experienced with Diablo Immortal. There if you fell behind the average level of your server, you simply did not have groups to do anything with. I simply could not get groups for the bosses at lower World Tiers, after taking a break from the game and seeing the majority of the server zoom ahead of me. This is probably going to be something that is rapidly a problem with this type of world design for Diablo IV unless all of the world tiers are blended together at the same time.

Nightmare Dungeons

So based on the video, there are apparently “over” 120 dungeons in the game. Now I have talked about them before and how similar they felt… with it feeling a bit like the World of Warcraft cave problem of every single cave in the game having the same layout. That aside… there is apparently the chance of having a “sigil” drop that allows you to turn a dungeon into a “Nightmare Dungeon”. Doing so adds “affixes” to the dungeon that modifies the experience. If you have played World of Warcraft since the Legion expansion, you will know this system as Mythic Dungeons. Now it does not necessarily sound like keys upgrade in this system, but using a key to unlock a game mode that adds challenging modifiers to the dungeon… is basically the same thing as Mythic. This does nothing to disprove my hypothesis that Diablo IV is an MMORPG, but whatever people generally enjoy Mythic as a game mode.

It does concern me a bit because this absolutely sounds like a “bring your own group” type experience. I am hoping that the game offers some form of matchmaking other than just spamming chat and looking for a group.

Helltide Rifts

So this one I am completely uncertain about as to if it is an actual game mode or not. During the section talking about dungeons, Joseph Piepiora specifically calls out one of his favorite modifiers called Helltide Rifts. So that would lead me to believe that this is just a subsection of Nightmare Dungeons. However on Reddit folks are specifically listing this as a game mode, and further on in the video, there is footage making it seem like this is taking place in Open World areas as well. So I am utterly confused by this, but it sounds like Rifts shown above open up, and harder mobs that don’t necessarily exist normally in an area spawn forth. So other than that I legitimately have no clue what is going on here.

It does not strike me as anything close to the usage of the word “Rifts” from Diablo III, where they were instanced content that you ran through either on a timer or until you collected a specific number of orbs. The Open World footage reminded me a bit of the raid rifts from the game Rifts, so again I am clear as mud on what this even is… or if it is just a subsection of Nightmare dungeons. Maybe the footage I think looks like Open World is just dungeons that have a more open layout. Diablo Immortal definitely had dungeon areas that looked more like just an Open World map, so maybe Diablo IV does as well.

Bounty Boards / Bounty Tree

Apparently, there is a tree that is angry with us, and it wants us to do bounties for it to make it less mad at us. I mean that is what I got from the words that were said in the video. Mechanically what I understood it as… is that there is a tree somewhere in the world that serves as the new bounty board. In Diablo Immortal conveniently located in the town was a board… and you could accept mini-quests to kill some stuff, collect some monster giblets… or do something similarly menial. Doing bounties looks like it allows folks to purchase gear. I mean I am fine with bounties as a concept, and honestly, I enjoy doing them. They were probably part of Diablo Immortal that I enjoyed the most. However, generally speaking, these are less an objective in themselves and more something that you do while you are doing other objectives. I can’t really get excited very much about this feature.

PVP Areas

We knew there would be PVP in the game, but I have to tell you right now… this is very much not a game mode for me. I will never participate in it, because I don’t really do PVP in general. I do not care about flopping my virtual schlong on the table and measuring it against other players. I am not terribly competitive in nature, and the main reason why I enjoy WvW in Guild Wars 2, is that traditionally… there is a lot of killing of NPCs and capturing of objectives and very little actual fighting. From the sounds of what was described in the video… it seems like Diablo IV pvp is something akin to the Dark Zone from The Division. This has more collectively become known as “extraction mode” where you go into a dangerous area and are trying to get back out with a resource of some sort. In this case, it is some sort f shard that you need to purify inside the danger zone, and while doing that you are flagged on the map to all players in the vicinity so they can come to kill you and take your stuff.

Again… this is not a game mode I am ever going to engage in. They specifically call out spending these shards to buy cosmetics. I kinda hate when cosmetic appearances are locked behind specific systems that I have no interest in engaging with… but I lived with that in WoW with the cool PVP armor and mounts and I guess I can live with it in the Diablo MMORPG as well.

More of the Same

I’ve already told you my biases, but there is part of me that had held out hope that the endgame was going to blow me away. The leveling game in Path of Exile for example feels NOTHING like the variety and fun of the endgame. However, what it sounds like, at least based on this PR video… is the Diablo IV endgame is more of the same type of content that you have already experienced to that point. Since I was not really feeling the experience of playing Diablo the MMORPG, then I don’t think it is going to drastically change when I hit the level cap. I’m a bit disappointed and maybe this is going to be another situation like Diablo III and we have to wait until the expansion comes through before the game actually gets good.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Diablo IV is going to sell extremely well, and there are going to be a lot of players that play through the campaign and then uninstall the game never to be seen again. I do not think they have designed a compelling endgame experience that is going to target the ARPG audience in the way that Diablo III, Path of Exile, or Last Epoch have. I think there will likely be some World of Warcraft players that eat this game up, because legitimately as I have said before it is the Diablo MMORPG. I just don’t know if there are going to be enough players sticking around after the credits roll to make the endgame feel like it is thriving.

I know that I will likely spend at least some time poking around in the game when it releases in June, but this video has done absolutely nothing to sell me on a vision for the type of gameplay experience I actually want. I didn’t even talk about the paragon board system in part because we really don’t know a ton about it. However, the footage from the video shows really boring options like what we consider “travel nodes” in Path of Exile that just reward flat stats. I still do not feel like this game is targeting me or the other players that regularly participate in seasons, ladders, and leagues. That said… I am still uncertain who the players are that are going to be sticking around and feeding Blizzard long-tailed transactional money to keep this game making money in the long term. I am glad that is not my problem to solve.

Necros and Pyre Golems

by

Good Morning Friends. This past weekend was the Open Beta for Diablo IV and since my friend Ace was going to give it a spin, I thought I would try out the Necromancer. That gameplay is something that I have enjoyed greatly in other games, so I figured it was worth a shot here as well. At this point, I have leveled Barbarian and Necromancer both to 25, and they were wildly different experiences. Necromancer felt pretty solid and honestly a bit on the grossly overpowered side, and Barbarian felt like I had made a mistake at the character selection screen. You would think that the Necromancer would have improved my opinions of Diablo IV, but in truth, it didn’t because there is something intangibly wrong with this game and it is almost impossible to put my finger on it.

I thought it was just me honestly. I thought maybe I was struggling to grasp the brilliance of this game. Then Ace played it and had some of the exact same comments. There was a side thread going on over slack about how they felt like the game just was wrong, that there was something not right with the combat, and that they could not put their finger on it either. I’ve tried to give you a close approximation over my several posts about Diablo IV… but none of them really explain the totality of the experience. The thing is… the game that is there seems to be what a lot of players wanted. I’m seeing quite a few comments showing up in my threads about how much they enjoyed the experience. I did not. I stopped playing a little way into Saturday because after hitting 25… I just felt like I didn’t care enough to keep playing. I had accomplished the ephemeral goal I had for the weekend which was maxing out the Necromancer and was largely done with the game after that.

I contemplated trying out the Druid, because that is another class I have liked quite a bit in the past and wished that Diablo 3 got. However, after watching this video from Wudijo… I decided against it. All signs point to the Druid feeling even worse than the Barbarian did. I think maybe my general takeaway is that much like Path of Exile… playing melee is arguably the wrong choice. The players that opted to play the Sorceror or the Necromancer had pretty good experiences. Playing a ranged rogue was fine, but was not really doing it for me in the way that the Demon Hunter did in Diablo III. Though honestly, it seems like a lot of people liked the sluggish gameplay because to them it felt more weighty and meaningful. For me, it just felt like a game from a different genre than the one I was wanting to play. I said this on the podcast but had I not been gifted a copy of Diablo IV, I would have absolutely made the decision to just pass this game up until a year or so after launch. I feel like there are more issues with the game than three months can solve.

Really stupid thing that pissed me off. This screen. When you exit the tutorial you are given a prompt to buy the game. When you finish the campaign… you are yet again given a prompt to buy the game. I own a copy of the game. In fact, I own the granddaddy super mega package for the game, because my benefactor was overly generous. I feel sort of awful not liking the game knowing how much they spent on it. Doesn’t Blizzard have the tech to be able to detect if someone owns a valid license to the game or not? Because that seems like a relatively trivial check. If I already own the game… stop showing me a billboard in the game.

Honestly, I think the problem really is me and my expectations. I am too ingrained in the culture of the ARPG game to accept this MMORPG as the next Diablo game. Had I been someone who played through Diablo III once, and then showed up to play this game… I probably would have been extremely happy with what I saw. It would have been a better-looking game that has the window dressing of a franchise that I remember fondly. However, I have expectations of what it should be based on what I have experienced from games that have moved on past Diablo and created honestly better experiences. So a key example of expectations biting me in the ass is with the World Boss. When you say that, I picture the deep mechanical feasts that are the world bosses and meta bosses of Guild Wars 2 that feature 50 players. What we got instead was a 10-player limited instance featuring a bag of hit points with three mechanics that all one-shot you if you failed any of them. It felt awful and was so much less than what I was expecting as the bare minimum.

So instead of playing any more of Diablo IV after I finished up with Ace on Saturday afternoon… I went back to Last Epoch a game that is making me extremely happy. I’ve since moved on to the level 80 monolith after fighting my way through the annoying revamp of Lagon at the end of the level 75 monolith. Ace is far enough ahead of me to now be on empowered monoliths, so I am trying to catch up. Slowly bit by bit I am replacing gear that I had held onto for far too long, and that is making me feel more powerful as a result.

When I got to the level 75 Monolith I started saving all of my level 75 chest pieces and then using the stockpile of runes that turn an item into a random unique for that slot. There is a new unique chest that went in with the 0.9 patches called Aaron’s Will, named after the content creator behind the Action RPG channel on youtube. Essentially it makes it so you can no longer summon Skeletal Warriors/Archers and instead for every 4 warriors you can summon, it gives you an additional full sized full strength Bone Golem.

So now I am running around with two giant Pyre Bone Golems, that do stupid amounts of AOE fire damage… and the game feels amazing. Like it felt good before now, but after swapping things out it feels dumb in the best of ways. It also meant that I dropped Skeletons since that didn’t really do me much good and let me pick back up Dread Shade again. I had a blast last night chipping away at the level 80 monolith. I ended up killing the Shade of Orobyss without realizing what I was doing… and now have +5% corruption on all of my maps. I think I am stepping away from Diablo IV and the rhetoric surrounding it because clearly, it was not making me happy. Instead, I am focusing on the things that are making me happy and just moving on with life. If you enjoyed Diablo IV, then awesome. I hope it has a very smooth launch. I hope the next few months turn it into exactly the game you want it to be. For me, I think it is too far off the mark to really salvage.

Why Diablo IV Is an MMORPG

by

Good Morning Friends! First I wanted to start off with a quick notice that if you have the Battle.net client, you can begin preloading the Diablo IV Open Beta now. Technically you could begin preloading yesterday afternoon, but suffice it to say by the time you read this post it will still be available for loading. The Open Beta itself begins tomorrow at 9 am PDT, and I fully expect that the servers are going to be wildly overloaded again. I would not take off work to play in this beta, because more than likely the first 24 hours are going to be unplayable. However, I do suggest that if you have been interested in Diablo and ARPGs in general, you give this game a spin to determine if it works for you personally. I definitely do not hate this game, but when I shared my thoughts earlier this week I largely shared that it just was not the game I was expecting it to be. Since it is a rather expensive purchase and since the refund policy on Battle.net is not as clear and hands-off as it is on Steam, you might as well try it while it is free.

Sometimes content lands in your lap. This happened to me last night when my good friend Wininoid asked me why exactly I thought Diablo IV was more of an MMORPG than an ARPG. This caused me to really clarify that stance, and I thought this morning I would share some of those thoughts with you. You can of course just read the short-form response, but you can only cram so much nuance in a 500-word reply.

The Character Creator

A fairly robust character creator

I guess first let’s start with the character creator. This is not exactly something that I associate with an ARPG, though I would dearly love them to offer more options. Please note that none of the things that I am going to highlight in this post are necessarily bad things, just what I would consider trappings of an MMORPG. In MMORPGs, I absolutely expect to have a pretty robust character creator, and the Diablo IV options would align to the bare minimum that I would expect for that sort of game. I created a “beefcake murder hobo” as I called it but one that aligned well enough with my sensibilities. Black hair and a beard, and has some sort of nonsense going on over the left eye… which is effectively the minimum requirement for being a “Belghast”. ARPGs would be so much better if they offered character creation options, but given that most do not… and even more, have gender-locked character classes… I am going to throw this in the bucket for MMORPG traits.

Open World and Passive Player Interaction

Other players in the world with me, with no ability to play solo

Next up we are going to flow into a “twofer” in that this game features an Open World with at least theoretical seamless shifts between towns and the surrounding areas. More than this however when you are out in the open world, you are surrounded by other players who are also taking part in content alongside you. The game features permissive tagging, in that you can help fight creatures and you will both get credit for the kill and your own copies of any rewards that come from those fights. Of note what I mean is that without formal grouping, you can actively participate in content with other players and there is no way to turn this off that I am aware of. You cannot venture forth into the world completely alone and you will always be at least indirectly impacted by the actions of other players and be competing at least passively for kills.

This is not something that I associate with ARPGs. Occasionally there are shared hub environments like the cities in Path of Exile, but once you start venturing forth you are doing so only with your party. Passive interaction with other players is a tenant of the MMORPG genre, so I am throwing this trait in that column both for the big open world with seamless zoning and the forced existence of other players in your world. Of note I consider Lost Ark to be an MMORPG, not an ARPG because it also has all of these traits and there have been folks calling Diablo IV a Lost Ark clone.

Respawning Mobs and Events

An event that respawns on a regular interval

Here come another two traits that are connected. In an ARPG you generally clear maps from one side to the other and the only time you ever see something respawn is when it is directly connected to some sort of a ring event. In Diablo IV while you are venturing into the open world, everything respawns. If you stand still in an area long enough, the same static spawns will keep popping back up. This has led players to just hang out in the location that a named mob spawns, and farm it over and over. This is absolutely a trait that I associate with an MMORPG because traditionally an ARPG is more map-based with its own population of spawns and you can clear from one side to the other without seeing any of it repopulate. Sure there are ways to FORCE a respawn in an ARPG, but these generally are centered around discarding your current map and forcing an entirely new map with all of its spawns to appear, not just single packs.

The other piece of this is that Diablo IV has zone events that happen in fixed locations and on a reoccurring schedule. In the above screenshot, there is an event centered around filling the pillar with blood by killing monsters on top of specific pads. If I roam around that same area long enough, I will keep encountering the same event. Again if there are players in that area you all can participate in that same event or even stand around and farm it over and over. This again is a behavior that I associate with an MMORPG and not an ARPG.

Hub and Spoke Side Quests

A side quest asking me to go to a location and kill something

This one gets a little hazy to be honest because it isn’t like I’ve not encountered this behavior in ARPGs before but it is more the totality of the features rather than a single trait in particular. Diablo IV progresses in a hub and spoke model when it comes to questing. The central quest will lead you to various areas of the map, and once appearing in a town a bunch of blue exclamation marks will show up offering you side quests that continue to force exploration of the surrounding area. These quests align with the central tropes of an MMORPG such as:

  • Kill X Monsters
  • Collect X Drops
  • Go to Location and Kill Specific Monster
  • Go to Location and Collect Specific Thing
  • Take Item from Point A to Point B

In truth, MOST quests in any game align with that model, but again it is the totality of traits and not any single trait. The same could be said for The Witcher 3, because its questing also feels very MMORPG at times.

Predictable Equivalent Loot

Loot drops from a named monster, that effectively aligns with the same types of drops every time.

This one is probably a little esoteric but hopefully, you can follow me. When you kill named monsters and open chests in Diablo IV, you seem to get roughly the same loot quantity every single time. For example, every time I killed this monster I got an amount of coin, two yellows, two blues, two whites, and the potential for a single legendary item. Chests similarly drop roughly the same items every time and the only real difference is based on what type of chest you are looting. Fixed loot tables and the regularity of loot drops absolutely tick the MMORPG checkbox for me.

A sequence of lucky drops in Path of Exile

In a traditional ARPG, it is a complete crapshoot that you are going to get on any given map. The potential for drops is more tied to a specific zone and less to specific encounters… apart from intended zone bosses. Drops are very feast or famine and you live for those big loot explosions. I’m sharing an example of a very lucky explosion of loot from Path of Exile for reference, but I saw something like this maybe once in every ten maps… rather than something that was predictable on every single outing. Sure it is mostly just a difference in methodology because it isn’t like I am getting MORE loot… I am just getting it all at once rather than rationed out in equidistant drops. I definitely associate predictable loot as an MMORPG trait.

No Map Overlay

Map Overlay Shown in Last Epoch

Now this one is more of something that it is lacking and less something that it features. I have come to associate ARPGs with playing with my map up at all times so that I know where I am going. This is more a case that the individual combat interactions are less important than the totality of clearing a map or finding a specific exit. When I am playing Path of Exile, Last Epoch, or Diablo II… I am essentially playing with the map overlay at all times. My eyes are sort of fuzzed out a bit watching what is happening with the actual encounters but also the lay of the land at the same time.

A More Hand Drawn an Immersive RPG style map in Diablo IV

This is not something that you can do with Diablo IV. When you bring up the map you get the traditional MMORPG opaque “hand-drawn” feeling map with fog of war for areas that you have not discovered yet similar to World of Warcraft. This sort of map is absolutely something that I associate with MMORPGs because while helpful, it is nowhere near as mechanically functional as the overlay. ARPGs tend to be more about mechanics and combat interactions than immersion and roleplaying… and Diablo IV absolutely seems to be trying to focus on immersion and story over raw mechanics. Again these are things that I chiefly associate with the MMORPG more than I do with the ARPG.

Factions Grind and Alternative Currency

The Purveyor of Curiosities Vendor allows you to spend “Obols” gained through events and quests.

Every region of the game has a faction associated with it. Completing quests and events in the area rewards you with a currency called Obols and standing with that faction. Over time you gain benefits by raising your ranks with that faction at specific predetermined break points. The currency is used to buy items from a gambling merchant located in each area called the “Purveyor of Curiosities”. While this maps pretty closely to Kadala and Blood Shards from Diablo III, the gaining of factions with groups of NPCs and the collection of alternate currencies are absolutely things that I primarily associate with MMORPGs. Faction grinds in general… are not something that I generally see in ARPGs. Instead, I am more used to trying to keep doing harder and harder content for better rewards, rather than accumulating an amount of renown to unlock something.

None of this is Necessarily Bad

Completing a Stronghold with Other Players

Again I am not necessarily saying any of this is a bad thing. However, these are the reasons why I have said this is more akin to an MMORPG like World of Warcraft than an ARPG like Path of Exile. We also have no clue at this point what the end game for Diablo IV is going to look like. I am not thinking it will really scratch the itch for the folks who live by the schedule of the Diablo II Ladders, Diablo III Seasons, Path of Exile leagues, and eventually Last Epoch Cycles. I might be completely wrong however and there may be systems within systems that we have yet to see. What I see is an MMORPG masquerading as an ARPG, just like Lost Ark is doing the same thing. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have World of Warcraft redone in the Diablo universe… and in truth, I guess we now have that answer. To be fair Diablo Immortal did most of these things so I legitimately should have set my expectations accordingly.

Completing some of the story content in Diablo IV

I don’t even think that Diablo IV is a bad game. There were absolutely some parts of it that I really enjoyed. However as I said at the start of this post, sometimes content falls in your lap. After getting the question from my friend I decided to further expand upon why I think Diablo IV is an MMORPG, and I think at this point I have done so. I would have liked to have seen something that more directly continued the lineage of Diablo and created a product that could compete with the current king of ARPGs… Path of Exile. Ultimately I am getting that in the form of Last Epoch, but I wanted to see what Blizzard had to offer in that genre as well.

I highly suggest that you don’t take my word for any sense of finality. This weekend you have your chance to get into the game free and try it out. Maybe it clicks in ways that I did not expound upon, and I would love to hear your thoughts after having played it yourself. I am likely going to be playing some more of it myself. I suggest you save the rush and preload it today. I think I am probably in the minority with the amount of side-eye I am throwing at the game, because for the most part everyone seems to be enjoying it.

Goodbye Merigold

by

I have this weird superstition when it comes to computers. I will never name the same build the same thing twice. It is almost as though each machine that gets a fresh install is its own “being”, because yes I suffer from the personification of machinery. Generally speaking, the machine gets named after something that I am engaged with at the time. My current gaming desktop is named NormandySR2 and my laptop is named NightCity. My gaming desktop before that was named Serenity, and when I rebuilt the gaming desktop before that into a Plex Server I named it Merigold as I was playing through Witcher 2 and 3 at the time and Triss is legitimately the correct choice. Over the weekend that machine gave up the ghost, and while I could potentially resurrect it with a new system build… I’ve decided to move on. Another proud tradition of mine is to turn my previous gaming desktop into my new “fuck around and find out” system. Merigold was my old AMD FX-6300-based system and when I upgraded to my current i7-10700K-based system a few years ago, I left my previous x99-based i7-5820k system largely sitting there dormant.

The plan is to build this into a Linux Mint based system. Why that distro? Largely it is a case of comfort and familiarity. I’ve built up a few past laptops using it and felt good about it. In theory, I could just run a more server-ly distribution on it, but I often like to use this machine as a secondary desktop. I’ve always built my second machine as a Windows machine, so this is going to be a bit of a first for me. This is going to mean that I will be using Linux a heck of a lot more than I normally do. For decades I’ve had a Linux box as a “toy” machine, that I fiddle with for a few days and then forget about it… and by the time I need it again, I often burn it down and start from scratch. The fediverse however has immersed me more into open source culture… and I am thinking it might be time to test drive actually running one of my primary machines as Linux. I mean I will still likely run Plex on it, but I am also really interested in trying to figure out the best use of it as a remote machine given that I never actually use my second machine with a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse. Previously I had used Parsec as my remote tool of choice, but there is no Linux hosting option for that sadly. In the short term, I will probably use VNC, which I have never loved… but it is functional and easy enough to set up.

I popped in for a little bit yesterday before Diablo IV Beta came to a close and finished leveling to 25, the level cap for that test. I am still a bit “up in my feels” about what I really think about that game. I was honestly not expecting “Blizzard Does Lost Ark” and since I bounced so phenomenally hard from that game I guess I understand the dissonance that I am going through regarding that. Diablo Immortal is also somewhat of a version of that experience, and I liked it just fine because I entered into that with very low expectations. Diablo IV however had been a game I had whether or not I wanted to… been pinning my hopes on as the last chance for Blizzard to really grab me. I’ve always cared far more about the Diablo franchise than anything else that the company has put out, and slowly over the years, I have peeled away from the other franchises. I did not really want to also feel like I had moved on past Diablo as well. I mean I have a copy of it now, so I might sit and watch and see what it evolves into over time.

The experience of the Diablo IV Beta has had the effect of causing me to pour my heart and soul back into Last Epoch. This is honestly the sort of experience I was hoping Diablo IV was going to be. For all of the talk of a return to Diablo 2 from the devs… I sort of expected something that would straddle the gap between Path of Exile and Diablo 3. That is ultimately what Last Epoch feels like, a happy medium between those two games. I got my Sentinel/Paladin up to fairly high levels and while I enjoy it… I also was not really feeling it. So instead this weekend I started pushing up my Necromancer and have now almost gotten up to the same levels that I was sitting at on my Paladin. I’ve not started the Monoliths yet but am working my way through the final chapter of content that is currently in the game. I think I have effectively a fully fleshed-out “kit” at this point and it is just a matter of getting levels and getting better gear.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in Guild Wars 2. Here is one of those Legendary bosses that I compared Diablo IV bosses to. I legitimately hate the Legendary rogues that spawn after you have defeated a Champion rogue. I largely stick around to help fight them because they are such pains in the butt… and I know they can wipe an entire field’s worth of unsuspecting open-world players. It always feels like I spend most of my time resurrecting other players. It is more a case that I don’t want to damn anyone to do this horrible encounter alone, as opposed to actually wanting to fight it myself. That is the weird thing about Guild Wars 2… it makes me want to take action to help other players because it seems like it is the right and proper thing to do. I have a post in me about how Guild Wars 2 is the best game that the mainstream isn’t taking seriously… but that is going to have to wait for another day. The annoying thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is so good… that it turns players into evangelists for it… which only ends up pissing off the unindoctrinated.

So the goal for today is to finish the installation of whatever I end up naming the new box. I spent most of yesterday furiously copying files from a machine that I have not touched in two years… and probably didn’t actually need anything from… but felt like I had to back up “just in case”. I’m currently running it off the bootable image and am just about ready to do the proper install. Linux “live” images are really a godsend, especially given that they just sort of “work” now to let you copy files off an otherwise dead system. That whole world has evolved so far since the first time I installed RedHat in the late 90s.