![]() ![]() I can’t tell you the name of a single person in Kyovashad. And from the small town where I’d held a glimmer of hope we’d spend the entire game, we’re rushed off to the first capital city of Kyovashad. Rather than trusting us with metaphor and miniature, Diablo IV has to show us an entire world at stake, as though we won’t believe that it’s there if it doesn’t. Diablo IV plays at subverting the town, only to blow apart the premise by giving us an expansive world littered with towns, encampments, and cities. It fucking rules, until it doesn’t.ĭespite all its grand setup with a tense cinematic featuring the blood and tissue arrival of Mephisto’s daughter Lilith, the emergence of a weird pale Sith Lord-looking motherfucker to a town corrupted and hostile, Diablo IV can’t hold onto the promise of either its narrative and thematic setup, or its history as a franchise. And then it immediately kicks the chair out from under us with bloodthirsty cultists. We enter Tristram as an outsider, and come to see it as a refuge, a bulwark, and ultimately doomed despite our best efforts.ĭiablo IV presents us with that town, offering us warmth and salvation in a blizzard. ![]() It’s a vision of the fortitude and precarity of civilization. Tristram was a triumph in that regard, elevating a bog standard solo adventure from a grim fantasy dungeon loop into a tidy, compact cosmic horror story about a backwater town and the primeval doom just below its surface, and all the weirdos that lived there. ![]() Whether it’s Wizardry (the progenitor of Dragon Quest, et al.) or The Dungeons of Moria (which directly ties into the creation of Diablo), my takeaway from a lifetime of dungeon crawlers is this: a dungeon is only as good as the town it menaces. From the earliest tabletop adventures to the most recent Final Fantasy, in my mind, the best dungeon crawlers always have towns. Towns have a long history in dungeon crawling. I'm playing Diablo 4 as if it's an offline game, but I'm glad it isn't.Diablo always begins in a town, whether it’s Tristram, the Rogue Encampment, or New Tristram (conveniently located on the outskirts of a largely obliterated Old Tristram). I'm never going to be a die-hard Diablo fan who grinds out each class, but I'm finding the online quirks more charming than frustrating. It makes me want to take all the CS:GO players by the hand as we wander through Dalish ruins in Dragon Age Inquisition, then watch them gasp in horror as I explain the reason we're doing it is 'to read some lore'. If I'm to believe this shop really exists in this world I wander through, why would it only sell two items which change not via an in-game event like the sunset or upon completion of a related mission, but thanks to an arbitrary clock? Why did no kindly villager tell me about the pillars of blood that I must kill things near in order to break them? Why must I do that in the first place? Why are these skeletons attacking me after I paused the game? Okay, that last one is quite annoying and I'd prefer if pausing were still possible, but for the rest of them, it's like seeing how the other half live. In a regular single-player game, these sorts of immersion breaking annoyances would derail the experience. Sometimes playing a game the wrong way is the most fun you can have, like the time I thought of Cyberpunk 2077 as an extravagant fashion simulator with optional stabbing people to death. By playing Diablo this way, I can still get the online events, switch to public and maybe even team up with a friend to hang out, then go back to my own missions. I would never play Call of Duty as a walking sim just because I admire the maps, and then demand there be a pacifist offline setting. Related: Now That The Diablo Race Is Over, Can We Admit How Much It Sucked? This is a little different as Diablo is PvE rather than PvP, meaning the structure would be the same offline, but it would still seem hollow. When online shooters have offline mode, this tends to be a full campaign, not just the online maps filled with bots. It would mean taking out features and replacing them with nothing. Just Diablo 4, exactly as it is, but in an offline mode would feel weird. It's an online game with in-game events and co-op and all the other bells and whistles that mean it is designed as an online experience. I could have written that Diablo 4 needs an offline mode, and while I'd gladly take one, I'm not sure it does. I'm aware that I'm doing it the 'wrong' way here. ![]()
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