Diablo IV – Zero Punctuation

On the other hand, “massive open world” to me implies spectacle. And it’s very hard for the scenery to be spectacular in top-down perspective land. That’s why Diablo IV has these occasional lookout points where you can press a button to make the camera pan up for a bit and show you a nice vista as if to say “Hey, here’s the kind of scenery you could be enjoying all the time if you weren’t constantly staring at your knobbing shoes like a scolded schoolboy. Not that there’s much to look at very often. Diablo IV explores every imaginable flavour of “washed out depopulated hellscape.” In fact, it’s quite instructive how many ways the location names can rephrase “very miserable place.” The Forlorn Tread. The Barren Steeps. The Defiled Grove. The Anemic Falls. Anemic Falls? Yeah, my grandma had a lot of those before we fitted the stairlift. Anyway, the plot is, with the world of Sanctuary having gone to shit over the course of the last three games and with all the powerful gods and demons having been duffed up by nameless protagonist types, a big evil demon lady swoops in to make her play.

I say “evil.” One of the first things she does is show up to some fire and brimstone preacher’s boring self-righteous sermon and say “Hey, don’t listen to this old fuddy duddy who’s trying to make you feel guilty for being alive, let’s have a party in the sun and responsibly take drugs.” I mean, she’s trying to bewitch the minds of mankind to destroy and recreate the world in line with her vision, but considering that the world is a place where the moment you set foot out of town you get beset on all sides by a horde of demons, bandits and rabid wolves like a K-pop singer venturing into a suburban mall, and where half the areas are named things like the Meadow of Stabbing, I can’t imagine her vision for it being that much sodding worse. Yes, she was summoned in a nightmarish ritual of blood and tearing flesh, but pff, aren’t we all? No no no, she’s a demon and therefore bad. There’s something about having three foot mottled horns sprouting out of your bonce that makes people come over all judgey. So in typical Diablo fashion we pick our character from a range of classes, and I went with Necromancer. Because with the intention of playing strictly solo, the place I generally wanted to be was behind an unyielding wall of skeleton warriors.

Also, I had a feeling the plot was going to involve a lot of standing around in churches being tasked to combat the unnatural forces of evil and chaos, and an entourage of reanimated skeletons standing behind me nodding in agreement throughout felt like a funny image. So the gameplay of Diablo is usually pretty straightforward, keep clicking on things until you’re at the place where the map icon says to be and if anything tries to stop you then click on them to death. Then you click around all the random shit you picked up and if anything’s got better stats you click it into your equip slots and if not you click them into a bin. It’s like they wanted a gameplay model specifically designed to annoy bats. But the gameplay of Diablo IV feels a bit stripped down even for Diablo, if you can believe that, so look elsewhere if you need a particularly large quantity of bats annoyed. There’s not a whole lot of imagination on display, especially in the non-critical path; raided one random torture basement named like the designer had the thesaurus.com page for “miserable” permanently open in the other window, raided ’em all. Still, the boss fights could be challenging, especially after they’ve crunched through my protective vest of skeletons like bread rolls at the steakhouse and there aren’t any minion corpses for me to knit into a new one.

There was one lad around the halfway point who was giving me trouble so I figured “Hey, it’s debatably an MMO now, open ended, craft the experience YOU want, player, as long as it heavily involves skeletons, let’s just go somewhere else and grind up levels for a bit.” But when I went back the boss had apparently spent all his off screen time doing press ups and that’s how I learned Diablo IV scales everything up to your current level. So I was, in academic terms, buggered right up the drainpipe. I ended up dropping the game difficulty for that one bit, which is both immersion breaking and humiliating, to have to duck backstage at the ghost train and ask the actors to put on less scary outfits. Not that levelling wouldn’t have made ANY difference, because not long after I unlocked a golem minion and the ability to use my Ultimate to respawn my entire horde, and after that I had the opposite problem; shit got so easy I was scooting through the game on my bum cheeks. Which further inflated the question mark hanging over why I would want to do any of the sodding side quests and indeed the purpose of the always online thing. ‘Cos all I’d need another player for at that point would be to bring me fresh pairs of underpants.

Still, if all you want is a zone-out game that you can put on while listening to podcasts and annoying all the bats in your house then you could do worse, and I was enjoying it on that level, ‘cos I like podcasts and hate bats, but then it was annoying to have to alt-tab out and mute the podcast whenever I was at a story bit. Because against all odds I liked the story of Diablo IV. It’s got all these well established characters and shit, with human problems and flaws, and the villain is interesting and effective, apparently all the time we’ve wasted comparing trouser numbers she’s managed to go out and corrupt basically every authority figure in the world in some interesting bespoke manner, and that just adds excellent time management skills to her list of positive qualities. Thing is, though, while the story’s engaging with this dismal, weighty tone full of horror and blood and guts, and generally seems like the writers were putting in the effort, as an accompaniment to mindless low-effort gameplay about two notches above Cookie Clicker, it feels a bit misplaced. It’s like getting the expensive china out to eat popcorn by yourself. It’s like putting a chandelier in the spare toilet. Or indeed several dozen boxes of classified military intel. Ooh, that closing gag won’t age well, will it.