Good Morning Folks. I am naming my blog post this because I want to make sure that everyone is clear that I am going to talk about some deep spoilers regarding the Diablo IV storyline in this post. You have been warned. Also if you are really vibing with the storyline you might want to just check out of this blog post, and potentially any of my Diablo IV posts until Season 7. I did not blog yesterday because I was angry at the game, so much so that I had essentially ragequit out Wednesday night after getting a crash in the middle of a long drawn out quest chain… that had zero checkpointing… requiring me to start back at the start of the previous thirty minutes. The game continues to be weirdly buggy and perform poorly, and it isn’t just me… I’m hearing similar comments from friends playing.
We are not going to talk about poor performance today. Instead, we are going to talk about the hamfisted nature of Blizzard and storytelling. One of the problems that I have had with Blizzard over the last decade is that they seem to desire to tell stories with deep emotional payload, but are unwilling to put in the legwork required to give the players those feelings legitimately. So you have the problem that I had with the Star Wars Prequels where you are told about the deep friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin… but are given no evidence of this in the actual runtime of any of the movies. You don’t get any of that supplemental material until years later during the Clone Wars cartoon series. Blizzard has this problem with telling us as the player what we are supposed to be feeling, without creating the scenarios leading up to that which would produce those actual feelings.
Let’s take for example the character of Neyrelle. Playing through the very short campaign in the initial release of Diablo IV, I viewed her as largely this bratty kid hanger-on, that was helpful to the quest but made some poor decisions. I felt bad for what she went through and for what ultimately happened to her at the end of the story… but I did not necessarily feel some deep emotional connection to the character. We zoom forward to the expansion content and it is being presented like Neyrelle was our best friend, and that we had this deep emotional connection and the entirety of this mission is to “save her”. I will be honest… my entire mission is because she fucked up and I have to make sure that Mephisto is really taken care of since she ran the fuck off and decided to do this dumb shit on her own. I am being TOLD by Blizzard that I feel a specific way about this character that I do not feel in the least.
Let’s contrast this with Yshtola, a character that I genuinely care about, and any time something happens to her it is like a punch in the gut. Why do I feel so differently about this character? We’ve had face time together for a decade and gone through what feels like hundreds of different adventures. As a Lominsan, she was literally the first Scion that I met and Square has put in the groundwork to build her up and flesh her out as a character that we genuinely care about. I am not saying that Neyrelle is a bad character, just a character that we barely know. We’ve only been together for what feels like a half dozen quests at the end of the release content, and now we are supposedly motivated to chase her to the ends of the earth because we care about her. That is an unearned emotional that they did not do any of the legwork to genuinely evoke, and it feels awkward as fuck to have a game telling me why and how I should feel about them.
Then there is the Jesus problem. I warned you ahead of time that this is a deep spoiler post. So as we have interacted with Akarat, which we are seeing for the very first time in this game after decades of hearing about him in other games, he is represented as this golden lion with three eyes. That is not necessarily unique imagery to Christianity, so I thought nothing about it. We are in a realm with Spirit Beasts so it made sense that we had one representing the side of good wearing the guise of a Lion. However, I started having “oh god please don’t do this” vibes when we arrived at this tomb and there was a lily-white blonde dude with long hair wearing a diaper laying on a bench essentially the avatar of the American Christian ideal of what Jesus “looks like”. In the final battle, Akarat sacrifices himself to save us which if it stopped there… would have been fine. Sure there was a bit of weird pseudo-Christian mixed messages going on, but I could have forgiven it.
They could not leave it there. Instead, we are treated to this cutscene of what happened with the body of the NotChrist that was stolen by another character we are supposed to be emotionally connected to but also just met. Mephisto resurrects the body of NotChrist using nameless black ooze at which point it begins to levitate about melting disciples forming a literal crown of thorns. Wtf yall? Like I am not a Christian in the least, and even I find this some fucked up imagery. I grew up Catholic and am very familiar with weird usages of Jesus, but this one just is bizarre. Like I know that Diablo has long played with Christian imagery of Angels and Demons, but I always felt like it took those roots and made its own thing out of this. This time around it felt like the team thought “Well, we’ve never had a Jesus in Diablo” and decided it was a good idea to go there.
Then there is the third sin. After all of this nonsense… we don’t even get to fight Mephisto. Instead, we fight a fragment of Mephisto and are told that our princess is in another castle. The initial release already played the “betrayed by a friend” card with Neyrelle and it feels super fucking annoying that they had to lean on that trope once again with Eru. However, the fact that we did not even get to take down a big bad at all, in any part of this expansion… just feels like a slap in the face. I mean shit you can say whatever you want about the Reaper of Souls expansion for Diablo 3, but we fought Urzael, Adria, and Malthael and it felt satisfying to down each of them. This entire expansion feels like it could have just been a seasonal storyline for all the resolutions that we got from it.
All of this said, there were some really cool visuals in the game, and for the most part, I like the Nahantu region. I am also enjoying the Spiritborn way more than I thought I would. Mechanically Diablo IV is in a pretty good state. I have problems with some of the mechanics. I still hate tempering and think it should be fixed to just be bench crafting from Path of Exile… but I can overlook that. I am nearing level 60 and I am interested to see what the actual endgame feels like. I am thoroughly annoyed at the Main Story Quest, but then again… I have come to realize that I should not expect much from the current state of Blizzard. They are still trying to tell the same stories they were always telling in the 90s… it is just that the art form of game creation and game storytelling has grown up and evolved and they have not.
I am not entirely certain how long I will stick around. For now, I am pushing forward and will be trying to sort out my gear and work on progressing through the endgame systems. I know there are some things that Ace and I want to try out when they push into the endgame this evening. As I said at the top of this post, if you love Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred more power to you. You should never let the ramblings of a jaded asshole like myself impact your joy. I did not love it, I did not find joy in it. However, my opinion really does not matter much when thrown up against your own happiness. I am sure I will find something else that brings me joy again on the near horizon. I hate being the bitter blogger, but sometimes you just have to commit your truth to the page.
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