The allure of acquiring new skills kept me grinding down the skill tree and every new piece of Legendary gear that dropped felt like a monumental occurrence. At first, things went about how you’d expect. For most of my time with the campaign, I played as a Rogue. So far as that goes, Diablo 4’s leveling process can be a matter of notable extremes. A few setpiece moments flirt with memorability, though they too often pass and leave you with the real star of the campaign: working your way to the endgame. Seemingly major moments come and go with little emotional impact. For the most part, though, the story is just…there. If anything, I found it to be one of the more solid overall Diablo narratives. It’s not that Diablo 4’s story is worse than what we’ve seen from the franchise before. The specifics would likely matter most to those willing and able to keep up with the series’ sometimes superfluous mythology up until this point. Though I can’t really go into the specifics of what happens from there beyond what we saw in the beta and the game’s promotional material, that’s honestly not a huge deal. Lilith, daughter of Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, has returned, and your created character seems destined to stop her. That statement unfortunately extends to the game’s story. There’s very little in the Diablo 4 campaign that will surprise you so far as that goes. You’ve been down this road before regardless of whether you’ve played a Diablo game or not. Pick a class, complete main quests (and the occasional side quest), and level up along the way. Structurally, there’s not much to the Diablo 4 campaign you won’t find in other games.

It’s an odd dynamic that often left me wondering how responsible it is to praise a live service game for executing the concept so well at a time when live service games are often responsible for some of the worst aspects of modern gaming. So after finally getting to play the (mostly) full version of Diablo 4, it’s my strange duty to report that Diablo 4’s best qualities often work because of the game’s live service nature rather than in spite of them. Just look at what happened to Diablo Immortal. Microtransactions, content gating, the exhaustion of keeping up with a game that never ends…you don’t have to dive too deep into hypotheticals to see how it could all go wrong. What worried me most about Diablo 4 was the game’s live-service structure and all of the things that typically go along with that business model. Through ups and downs, the Diablo games have long been fundamentally enjoyable to play.

It was easy to lose hours (even days) to Diablo 4’s betas. I never really had any doubt that Diablo 4 would be a fun game.

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