Diablo 4

Blizzard

My sabbatical from Diablo 4 has ended, as I have not kept up with the game’s seasons much since its Vessel of Hatred expansion. But, if nothing else, I will always show up for a new, significant Diablo launch, and well, Hatred’s back. Mephisto’s back. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

This is Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, where once again, we are taking on Mephisto, who has been effectively the main villain of the entirety of Diablo 4, despite another Prime Evil getting his name in lights. After playing Lord of Hatred, it’s easy to see how this tale works as a trilogy, of sorts, though what, if any, storyline continues from here is unknown, given the conclusive nature of this plotline.

There are two halves to this, the campaign and of course, the main show: the endgame and gear grind within it. I promise I did my best, but despite maxing both new classes, it is hard to get miles deep into an endgame of something as sprawling as Diablo in a limited review period. But I did play a lot of the new additions, even if they were at Torment levels that would make my old characters sneer.

I’ve said previously that I thought Diablo 4 had the best narrative I’d ever seen in the series. That was not an especially high bar, but this was mostly due to Caroline Faber’s Lilith as the big bad, probably the best character we’ve seen in Diablo, and joined by the dulcet tones of Ralph Ineson as Lorath. Well, guess what? Those two are leading things this time around, which I would argue is an upgrade from Neyrelle spearheading the Vessel of Hatred expansion, which now feels like something of a stopgap, though I did like that as well.

It is hard to get into the story here without significant spoilers, but I’ll try. We, surprise, have to stop Mephisto “for good” this time, though, as learned from Vessel of Hatred, he has now occupied the body of the beloved Akarat, acting as a sort of antichrist figure on the Amazon Isles of Skovos where he becomes worshipped in short order. Lilith is back…in some capacity, but you can figure out how. The game also features some extremely major developments in terms of character additions and subtractions that you can experience once you play. It’s an excellent campaign, a rarity in this genre. At around six hours to get through it, depending on your distraction level, it also feels meaty enough.

I played through the campaign with the newest class, Warlock, given that the Paladin was available earlier ahead of the expansion (though this new one has upgrades). The Warlock is unique enough from sibling classes like Sorcerer and Necromancer not to feel like a retread. The name of the game is summoning lot of things from hell, be they ethereal chains or demons. You summon a lot of demons, though for the most part, they will not trail you around like Necromancer buds. My build involved shooting razor-sharp ghost hands at people, summoning static eyeball blast demon towers, locking people down in AOE chain cages and then unleashing a piranha-like frenzy of swarming demons to chew through mobs and bosses alike. Also, a giant ghost worm follows me around and occasionally eats things whole.

What you can do then is pick up another class and skip straight to the endgame, which is what I did with Paladin. You can blast through leveling a second character without any sort of repetitive location farm given that the game dumps XP on you, and I hit level 70 and got a few dozen points into the paragon board within half a day or so. My current Paladin build is a bunch of auras and a ricocheting shield, but I will have to give the old spinning hammers a try at some point here. He’s a lot of fun, and I may like him better than Warlock, but I need to try a bunch more builds for each. I simply did not have time to assemble the legendaries and uniques you’d need to make something truly nuts.

One of the bigger changes coming to the game across all levels and characters is the diversified skill tree. There are no tiny passive nodes anymore, those are saved for the paragon board. Rather, each skill now has three branches of upgrades with three options each. Two are somewhat minor, the third one is a pretty major shift in how the skill functions. In the Warlock’s case, this can involve changing over the entire type and function of a move, ie. going from a Demonology to Hellfire skill, meaning you could make an entire Hellfire build not using any baseline Hellfire skills at all.

One odd issue here is that while all these options are neat and will result in interesting builds, the vast majority of your skill points are sort of a wash. Picking those little nodes are three points each. So you will have dozens and dozens left over, where we’re talking 50+ skill points sunk into your main skills to take them to level 15 each, up from the old max of 5. Builds feel fine, but it’s weird, like they didn’t know what to do with the leftover bucket of points with the node select changes.

Paragon boards I simply have not been able to get too deep into. There are further upgrades than we saw before, but I’ll report back with a few hundred points when I have a chance to really go for it there.

One new addition is the Talisman system, a new page on your character that lets you attach different charms to a central seal, giving you bonus stats or affixes, and there are some set charms that when combined, have upgraded effects. While I am guessing these get more interesting over time, they have exclusively been pretty flat benefits to this point. My completed set currently gives me damage/damage reduction from elites when maxed out. Hooray. The whole thing feels like it sort of exists just for its own sake and comes off as superfluous. At least for now it feels like some extra paragon tiles in a hexagon.

The more interesting addition is the return of the Horadric Cube, which ranges from assembling new charms and runes to heavily modifying your existing gear. I’ve tried to avoid mentioning Path of Exile to this point, the game I’ve sunk probably 300 hours into since Vessel of Hatred, but it delivers at least some level of the complexity of customization that game has over and beyond the previous D4 additions that were made to the old vendors. But it’s a whole lot of new currencies to keep track of. I’m looking forward to the inevitable “secret” recipes that will be found in this thing.

The main thrust of the endgame now is something called War Plans, a station where you pick through a number of previous endgame experiences from Nightmare Dungeons to The Pit to Undercity to Infernal Hordes to even just farming Helltide. Here, however, you can target specific types of rewards (gems, XP, armor) as you go, and once you complete the 3-5 of them in a row, end with a huge pile of earnings, in addition to whatever you got along the way.

The idea gets more interesting with the new “skill tree” system for each activity. Play enough of each, and you will earn points to modify whatever mode to make it both harder and more rewarding. For instance, I can take my Nightmare Dungeon down the road of getting the ability to have bosses instantly respawn for double rewards, extra treasure goblins dropping treasure-infused keys and goblin land portals, bonus completion chests, elite-spawning shrines and a Butcher summoning altar, among others.

This is certainly better than hopping between endgame activities individually, one drops this item used in this other one and so on, as it gives you a diverse path to take, more targeted rewards, and a lot more rewards overall, if you do it this way. Though I would not say that this feels truly “transformed” based on what I’ve experienced, and some could view this as the current endgame just shuffled around a bit and given some extra pep. I imagine, however, that over time, more and more newly introduced modes in seasons and such will be inserted in here and made permanent as well. There is also some new ultra high-end, extremely rare, extremely profitable event that can appear in the game, but Blizzard warned us that we probably wouldn’t even see it in this review period. I didn’t.

I don’t know if Lord of Hatred is enough to get me hopelessly addicted to Diablo 4 again like I was at the start, but I was impressed with the campaign storyline, similarly to the original one, and I like both these new zones and the classes compared to their equivalents in Echo of Hatred. I’m not sure how transformational some of these updates truly are, and the Cube seems like the most useful, I suppose. It feels like we are stretching the limits of power creep here a bit, but that’s what new Torment Levels are for, I suppose, going above and beyond the old ones. Needless to say, I didn’t make it there yet.

Give me another hundred hours (which I will probably play), and I will give you a full breakdown of the endgame, but for now, I’m liking the package overall, and it’s enough to make me return for a while, to be sure.

Score: 8.5/10

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