When will Diablo IV be finished?
Can Blizzard's modern ARPG ever truly escape the shadows and sins of its past?
My guest for this issue of Multiplier is Zachariah Kelly. Zac is currently a staff writer over at TechRadar. Prior to that, he was penning pieces over at Gizmodo Australia and Canstar. These days, you can find and follow them on Bluesky.
Fergus: Diablo isn’t so much as a game you play through as one that you indulge yourself with. Hitting the credits for the first time is easy. Resisting the call to run that gauntlet yet again is hard. Those first two games in the franchise loom large in my memory as some of the first PC games I played when I was a kid and I’d consider Diablo III something of a modern classic. If Blizzard had made even half as many expansion packs for any of these games as they have for World of Warcraft, I doubt it would have been enough to satisfy my appetite for more.
One of the most enticing aspects of Diablo IV is that it promises to deliver on that demand with yearly expansion packs. The first of these – Vessel of Hatred – dropped back in October 2024. While I’ve had a great time with it I couldn’t help but be dogged by the sense that Blizzard have spent so much time reworking what Diablo 4 was at launch into something that fans are happier with when they could be using that time and effort to do something new or more ambitious with a series that’s probably due for a shake-up.
Even if it was largely redeemed by Reaper of Souls, Diablo III was never entirely able to outrun the reputation of its more vibrant aesthetic among some fans. The original sin of the overdue follow-up was that it zigged where its predecessor zagged. In both feel and structure, there’s a case to be made that Diablo IV launched as something that was closer to the likes of Diablo Immortal than any other installment in the franchise.
Vessel of Hatred (and a year of seasonal system reworks) puts that era of the game in the rear-view mirror. Still, if live service titles like Destiny are any indication, you’re only as good as your last major update. You have to wonder if Diablo IV will ever truly be considered finished or fixed in the same way that Diablo III was or will it remain trapped in a hell of its own making?
Zac: There’s so much to say about Diablo IV as a game that can’t escape the legacy of previous title. Blizzard is, much more than other companies, a company of eras, and Diablo encapsulates them better than other Blizzard game.
Diablo 1 was so separate from the ‘Craft’ games because it was wrenched into the world of Blizzard as an outsider idea from an isolated studio, which fully paid off in Diablo 2 once Blizzard entered its era of universal critical acclaim (in good company with Warcraft 3 and later Starcraft 2).
You can pin 3 and Immortal on the ‘Activision-Blizzard’ era, and while you might want to casualise this as Kotick bag-chasing, there’s something formidable to be said for Diablo 3 being initially built as a game for a more casual market and later consoles (but, yes, bag chasing is inescapable when you remember the auction house). Obviously Immortal encapsulates an easy-going audience moreso as a mobile title, but we can’t ignore Immortal’s importance as a game for Blizzard in the Chinese market (even if this is coming to an end) – an interesting test for Blizzard more than an out of season April Fools joke.
Though Diablo IV released pre-Microsoft acquisition, what happens with these ongoing updates will represent a new era of gameplay intention for Blizzard. Jason Schreier’s Play Nice (a brilliant book that you should read if you love videogames) indicates that, even in the wake of layoffs, the chokehold of profits before player experience has somewhat lifted, but I doubt we’ll see updates and expansions as dramatic as those for World of Warcraft in Diablo, for the lack of a monthly subscription, though the massive gameplay overhauls very much needed to happen to lay groundwork necessary for an extremely critical fanbase.
It’s a new day for Diablo IV, a game that already broke heavily from the series by virtue of being an MMO, and the current development team seems to be well-attuned to the desires of a casual-meets-stats building audience. You can play this game from beginning to end with the most meatwagon build, but the clickiness remains fun at all levels and the art style is uniquely grim.
I don’t think you can escape comparisons to Path of Exile with the kind of player base Blizzard is trying to foster, and yet it feels more approachable, most likely down to its Blizzard name and polish. It’s a good position to be in because, in my opinion, the storm clouds of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 will never fade, but the likeness of Diablo 3 surely will, as it transforms into the black sheep of the franchise.
Fergus: Will it though? It feels like Diablo Immortal is going to have that niche on-lock for a long time still.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s something in the idea that the first Diablo game you play is always going to be your favorite. This sentiment (sometimes referred to as Alpha Theory) comes up a lot in relation to Bethesda Game Studios’ open world RPGs like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I think it also applies to Diablo. After revisiting the original Diablo last year, I’ve little doubt that the first game in the series still holds a place in my heart. Even in 2024’s crowded landscape of action RPGs, it’s still got the juice and I can only imagine it's a matter of time before Diablo IV revisits those qualities in a future expansion.
Perhaps what we’re talking about is not a prison of nostalgia but one made of success. One of the big themes I took away from Play Nice was the sense that Blizzard built its entire identity and reputation on the idea that they could only ever deliver critically acclaimed megahits. With that mindset, perhaps the only future left for Diablo is to become a serpent eating its own tail. Put another way: give it long enough and I am sure that there will be just as many people clamoring for a Diablo game that cashes in on their fond memories of the third game in the series as there were the second.
Zac: Just quickly on Diablo Immortal, I got my wires crossed, forgot it's already been banned in China for quite some time! I definitely agree that Immortal is catering to an appreciative niche, and in its own mobile way, it seems to have had a similar trajectory to both III and IV in terms of legacy and development. Truly the compact Diablo experience!
Alpha Theory absolutely applies to Diablo, but in this era of remasters, remakes and re-releases, I think it's an inescapable desire of consumers in the games industry. No game exists today without comparison to another; and those comparisons often enthusiastically hark back to critically acclaimed classics.
I absolutely agree with the notion that Blizzard has created a trap for itself with its own success; too different, and it's not Diablo. Too similar, and I may as well play Diablo II. Even as the team embraces MMO live-service design, keeping the game in a stable, minimalistically changed way from update to update would likely keep players bored year-on-year (Blizzard had this problem when bridging the gap between Overwatch and Overwatch 2, with sparse new content being developed).
Blizzard's current approach, in which it silos Diablo players through a variety of filters to determine their gameplay intention (World Tier, opt-in and out of seasonal events, and hugely scaling nightmare dungeons) seems to be the best the developers could hope for to minimise the above problems. The challenges, new content and, if so willing, more casual experience are there for you, but you have to opt-in for them. A more critical view of this is that Blizzard isn't sufficiently confident that it could (major rebalancing and tweaks aside) apply a blanket update across everybody's experience - maybe that's a good assessment; they've worked hard to claw back dedicated fans and wouldn't want to risk rocking the boat too much.
No doubt in my mind that a new generation of fans will feel nostalgia for Diablo IV; it's a really good game. The fans ravenous for more Diablo 1 and Diablo II may become enthusiastic about huge Diablo IV overhauls, hoping that a new game will feel more like an old game, but you can't recreate a memory. There may be throws to previous titles, and I indeed want to play as a Crusader in IV more than anything, but it would be too compromising to make the game feel so much like any of the first three.
There's definitely a great chance that we'll get a 'Diablo IV remastered' at some point, in some way - whether it's released as a standalone game like World of Warcraft Classic, or contained within the main game like Overwatch: Classic, remains to be seen, but will be interesting regardless.