Diablo 4 is depressing.
I don’t mean that the game depresses me when I play it, but that it exudes an overwhelming air of sadness. The world is dark and, in open areas, cold. And the more time I spent in the dark, cold, dark world of Blizzard during my weekend preview of next year’s biggest action RPG, the more I felt a distinct sense of belonging – something that I had never felt in a Diablo game before.
Diablo 4 take a familiar, Diablo 3-approaches gameplay but infuses it with a deep sense of sadness and hardship. I may be the one risking my life to kill demons in the cold, but the poor townspeople don’t seem much better off. No one is well in this world, and that is clearly reflected in the game’s opening hours.
In an interview with Joe Piepiora, Diablo 4de, and Naz Hartoonian, associate producer of the game, Piepiora told me that Sanctuary was Diablo 4the new character. If you haven’t played the game, that kind of statement probably makes you roll your eyes. But after more than 15 hours with the weekend preview, I couldn’t help but agree.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo 4 begins with a cutscene that should look familiar to those who watched the game’s reveal at BlizzCon 2019. (If you didn’t, all you need to know is that it’s filled with shadows , guts and blood – a far cry from the brighter, happier art style of Diablo 3).
When I first took control of my character, I was alone in a frozen cave, sheltered from a storm and the howls of wargs. During the first steps, the world was almost entirely devoid of other life. Then I saw a deer running through the snow before being attacked by a giant wolf. Time was raging as I finally entered a shoddy little town paved in mud. People were on board, and when I finally found them, they were comforting a delirious man who muttered to himself on the floor. The small collection of slums might seem safe – and they are in literal gameplay terms – but there are clearly dangers lurking outside, biting the villagers as they try to get on with their lives.
After receiving a quest from the townspeople and going to encounter this madness, I couldn’t help but think how familiar the game was to play, but it made me feel different while playing it. I never stopped thinking about NPCs in a Diablo game, let alone their living conditions.
Blizzard has talked a lot about wanting to bring that “darkness” back to the Diablo franchise. When I first heard this, I was worried the studio was over-correcting with comically edgy, over-the-top acting. But rather, Diablo 4 feels dark and medieval in a realistic, almost heartbreaking way that probably has everything to do with Blizzard’s reference material.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
“When we started, what really interested me was this idea of, like, medieval fantasy and what makes dark medieval fantasy cool,” Diablo 4 art director John Mueller told Polygon in an interview at BlizzCon 2019. “It’s really rooted in our own history… the angels and the demons and the humanity in between, it’s not a new thing. In fact, when we started [the project], we were looking at a lot of medieval paintings and old master paintings, because that’s what we wanted to highlight. We didn’t watch other video games, we didn’t watch other movies. We were looking at, like, Rembrandt and we were looking at, like, you know, old religious paintings.
Indeed, there are key moments in Diablo 4in the opening hours of where it feels like we’re making our way through an old religious painting, playing the warrior crushed between the forces of heaven and hell. But it’s one thing to mimic the look of a board and another thing to entirely mimic how a board makes you feel – so far, Blizzard has managed to do both.
Being immersed in the world of a Diablo game is such an unfamiliar feeling after so much time with it. Diablo 3 during the last decade. When I jump in Diablo 3 version of Sanctuary, I no longer see the colored demons or the backgrounds, I just see The Matrix. I swirl with death and destruction, my enemies are balloons filled with confetti. Success means their health drops while mine continues to stay stable. when i play Diablo 3I don’t think about where I am or the world around me, I just think about the numbers going up.
I’ve never been sucked into the Diablo setting like I am with other AAA narrative games. It was never a problem; that’s not why I come to the series. In Diablo 4However, as I trudged through the freezing expanses of Sanctuary only to be drugged and kidnapped by the same villagers I thought were my allies, I was engrossed in the world around me and eager to see how the story progressed alongside it. to my character’s progress.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Now, if you’re a Nephalim looking for a ranking and all this talk about mood and story has you worried: don’t be. Diablo 4 is still the Diablo you know and know well. It is filled with explosive abilities and demons popping up all around you. Legendary skills bolster your abilities, and each class’s unique mechanics help you defeat demons as effectively as before. The main difference with Diablo 4 That’s how I started paying attention to more than the enemies around me. My brain never separated what I was seeing and what I was doing so I could just focus on slaying demons like I do when pushing Rifts into a Diablo 3 season.
After my preview, I’m extremely excited about the world of Diablo 4, and I can’t believe I’m here to write to you about how thrilled I am to see how a Diablo game’s story unfolds. However, it must be said that this was only a taste, and that I only spent 15 hours at Diablo 4 against thousands in its predecessor. After a hundred hours, it’s easy to see how a game’s sense of place could fade and be forgotten. So maybe around this time next year once I’ve overcome Diablo 4I will only be able to see The Matrix in this game as well.
But for now, as we get closer to Diablo 4, I’m excited to do more than just smash big horned baddies in new and creative ways. I want to see the world not just to meet new demons to smash, but to feel the vibe in the air. There is a quality to Diablo 4 it seems unnecessary, in a way. All I needed was an updated version of my favorite ARPG to be happy. But with just a taste of Diablo 4I already feel like Blizzard gave me something I didn’t know I wanted.
