Diablo 4 is almost exactly two years old, having launched on June 5, 2023. The sequel to one of the industry’s most beloved and most nostalgic genre-defining games was long, long awaited, and the base game remains an incredibly fun adventure through the gothic Sanctuary.
However, the game’s post-launch live service has been an incredibly mixed bag. Every season, it feels almost as though Diablo 4 takes one step forward, then one step backward, as its seasonal experiments either fall flat or produce unfavorable interactions with the game’s other design layers.
The latest season, “Belial’s Return,” offered some entertaining exposition and a variety of new boss activities, but the main new open world activity is perhaps its most boring yet — and the season journey forces you to engage with it a lot.
As much as I love Blizzard and Diablo, increasingly it seems like Blizzard doesn’t understand its own game, nor what makes it fun (or unfun). The game’s open world, always-online, dynamic multiplayer systems seem to fight against the systems Blizzard often tries to implement in these seasonal events, and the rewards for participating are as minimalistic as they come.
Belial’s incursions are an absolute chore, but it’s not entirely their fault
Diablo seasons revolve around something called “the Journey”, which typically only offers leveling resources until its final tiers. It’s essentially rewards for going through the entire endgame, giving you tasks to kill certain bosses or collect certain amounts of resources as you play.
This season, much of the journey is interwoven with the new Belial storyline, in which the famed Lord of Lies of Diablo lore rears his ugly head to cause a few minor problems, before we punch him back down into Hell again.
In the mini storyline for this season, there is some fleeting intrigue and clever moments, but I can’t help but feel like Belial deserved a larger role than to feature in some recolored Legion event and vanishingly brief boss battle.
Gauging difficulty is tough in Diablo because, obviously, you can adjust the difficulty on the fly using the Torment tiers. Belial in Torment 1 was absolutely far too easy, and Belial in Torment 2 would one-hit-kill me with any attack I failed to avoid even with capped armor. Either way, in both, I felt like he didn’t have enough hit points and died too quickly, but that might simply be a symptom of using a glass canon style build.
Either way, I found the boss to be anti-climactic, which is not really something I would expect they’d want Belial to be.
Once you’ve completed the mini quest, you’re essentially left to grind these Belial Apparition Incursions, which layer copy-and-pasted assets on top of each other.
First of all, these are simply Legion events (which were already lame), with a mildly Belial-esque flavor. Secondly, the bosses that spawn mid-way through are “apparitions” from Belial, but in reality are just green versions of mini bosses we’ve all already slayed a billion times.
Much like Legion events, these Incursions just feel like an arbitrary chore, where your main source of engagement is interacting with the UI to pick up loot rather than combat. They take place in the open world, where anywhere up to a dozen players will descend and incessantly spam area of effect abilities, turning your display into a disco.
In essence, there’s no need for you to participate here either. A mini Belial spawns at the end of these events, and he dies before he can even finish his dialogue line.
You’re given resources to co-opt some of the game’s boss powers and take them into yourself to do activities like the incursions. It’s a nifty idea, but the borrowed power systems are getting a bit stale every season.
It doesn’t help that the road to getting these powers is paved with boredom. The fact that in these incursions everything dies in mere seconds just makes it feel like an arbitrary chore, with pretty graphics.
It wouldn’t be an issue if you could just ignore them, but the season journey is tied to grinding out the resources from them. And the rewards for completing the season journey simply aren’t good enough to incentivize all but the most die-hard players — and even they seem pretty unhappy with Diablo’s direction so far.
Perhaps Diablo 4’s business model just doesn’t lend itself well to what players want and need
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Diablo 4, being a photorealistic game, means that creating art assets is expensive. All of the most compelling rewards that you’ll retain on your account season over season are purchased almost entirely for real money from the game’s store. As a result, the incentives to actually play the game are sorely lacking.
There are no new armor styles (often called transmogs) from killing bosses or playing the game, generally speaking, and the Reliquary system offers a single armor set with a neutral appearance designed to fit every class. I’m not sure what new armor there is to get in Dark Citadel because literally nobody runs it.
I’ve played in several (but not all) Diablo 4 seasons so far, and I can’t remember a single time the battle passes excited me. The base game armor sets are still the best-looking, which is a huge problem for a game that relies on loot as its primary reward system.
For me, the best and only item worth chasing from Belial’s Return was a pet cat with cool eyes on it — but the journey to get there forces you to grind miserably through those grim incursions, which simply aren’t fun from any angle as explained above.
The power fantasy is lost completely in the open world when everyone else around you is so overpowered that every boss evaporates in less than a second. As such, Diablo 4 tends to work better in small party play at most. Every time Blizzard opts for open-world activities in Diablo 4, it just shines a spotlight on the fact that the game’s always-online, always-connected dynamic multiplayer was a tragic mistake.
The fact that player abilities lose animation quality when there are multiple on-screen just feels like a testament to the fact that the game wasn’t really designed to be played with more than four people at a time. Although your stash is supposed to save loot you’ve missed, this season I’ve noticed that loot evaporates completely when there are too many players in your phase, and too much loot left lying on the ground. I’m not sure if this is a new bug, but if I’ve missed any mythics this way, I’d be pretty livid.
Sometimes I worry Blizzard just doesn’t care too much for feedback around Diablo 4. Like I mentioned, I couldn’t find a group for the Dark Citadel raid because nobody runs it anymore, and Blizzard refuses to make it solo-able despite the amount of strong feedback. Nobody runs it because the effort-to-reward ratio is minimal to non-existent. All of these things feel like a bit of an indictment of how Diablo 4 is being handled overall.
It is still fun to smash Tormented lair bosses, complete Infernal Hordes, and commit to other indoor activities with friends — where the headache-inducing spam of open world player abilities can’t chase you.
The underlying game is still strong. It’s just endlessly frustrating that Blizzard chooses to focus on the wrong things for some of its seasons. The lack of permanent account-wide rewards and progression, the monotony of forced open-world zergfests, abandoned dusty features, and the absence of truly new activities betray Diablo 4’s infinite potential.
And this article only covers a few frustrations across what is honestly a litany of issues, from class balance to meta-progression and the price of microtransactions. Each could have its own separate analysis.
But, really, I’m worried — is Diablo 4 being run on a shoestring budget? Is all the focus going into next year’s big expansion? I’m not sure. But what I do know is, unless something big changes about the endgame philosophy, I’m done for now.
