Self Similar – self similar's personal gaming nonsense blog

Surviving Survival

Despite playing some relatively hardcore games, my partner had seemingly always been opposed to the concept of gaming on a computer. On one hand, I understand wanting to keep some kind of separation between work, school, and innumerable other “serious” activities you might use a computer for, and pure entertainment, like gaming. On the other hand, several of her favorite genres, city building and adjacent strategy games, for example, are quite PC-centric. It has also been a struggle to find good opportunities for “couch” cooperative play, regardless of genre, on consoles over the years, yet there is what seems like a constant drip of intriguing online co-op games being released on PC. At some point in the last year she had a total change of heart and decided she wanted me to build her a gaming PC for her birthday. Once completed, we almost immediately dove into the deep end with one of her other favorite genres, open world sandbox survival.

“Zombie horde, meet Iron Fireaxe!”

I’ve talked about 7 Days to Die a little bit on here before, as we’d played the Xbox One version of it split-screen years ago, but the console ports lagged behind the development of the PC version and were eventually entirely abandoned. Once we had our fill of that version, we left and never went back, though often lamented not being able to play the supposedly superior PC version. Playing it on PC promised a lot more content, better graphics and performance, and, as luck would have it, the ability for us to jump in with family who were already fans of the game for a much more lively 4 player romp. Did it deliver? Well, yes!

While I still can’t escape the slightly janky look and feel of 7 Days to Die, it’s undeniably a vastly superior experience all around on PC. One of our team was quite seasoned at the game, so with his guidance, we immediately found ourselves a home base and began gathering equipment and leveling up our characters via the game’s traders and their dynamic quests. We played at least two whole campaigns, and though the game doesn’t really have a true ending, we progressed through all of the quest, gear, and skill tiers in both. In fact, we spent so much time in the game that I think I’ve had my fill for a while. While there’s always fun to be had with the emergent quality of playing these types of open world games, especially with other people, survival games like this tend to be the most fun while first figuring them out, and maybe an additional time after you have a better understanding of the systems at play. After that, the best reason to jump back in is a big new patch that overhauls systems and adds new content, which thankfully 7 Days to Die does yearly or thereabouts. On top of the basic gameplay loop and systems therein becoming a known quantity, I found 7 Days to Die’s character and tech progression to be just a bit boring.

“Sniping zombies as they funnel into our compound during a Blood Moon.”

Moment to moment gameplay isn’t particularly exciting either, and although there’s always a bit of tension when exploring a new building to clear out a zombie infestation in order to complete a quest, for instance, it doesn’t quite pull off the same feel of desperate scavenging that made me love State of Decay so much. Where it does succeed magnificently is the “Blood Moon” horde night mechanic which the game is named after. That is, every 7th night a massive horde of zombies spawns, relentlessly focusing on the players. At first this usually plays out like the end of the grandfather of the entire zombie genre, Night of the Living Dead, wherein a ragtag group of survivors has to hole up in a loosely reinforced building and fend off a seemingly unending number of increasingly violent attacks with little to no resources, counting the minutes until the relative safety of sunrise. Later, you’ll have hopefully found (or built) a compound more capable of surviving such attacks, with multiple walls, trenches, tripwires and other traps, automatic turrets, sniper towers, and maybe even a safe room or emergency evacuation route if things totally go off the rails. In either case, thanks to the game dynamically adjusting the difficulty of these events as you progress, the stress of these chaotic nights is real, and the loop of preparing for, participating in, and recovering from them makes up for just about all of the game’s other shortcomings

“The locals sometimes get a little feisty.”

At around the same time that we were playing 7 Days to Die the most, I’d also hopped into a Valheim server some of my coworkers setup after the release of the Mistlands patch. While I had briefly checked out Valheim solo a few months prior, for all intents and purposes, this was my first time playing the game. It was fun to play these two games so close together, since they’re quite similar, but diverge in some very interesting ways, with Valheim coming across as having much more carefully designed, less punitive systems, seemingly in response to earlier titles in the genre. Most notably, Valheim is less focused on “surviving” which means the fiddly bits (and therefore much of the hassle) of things like eating and drinking, repairing your gear, watering crops, feeding animals, upkeep on buildings, etc. are mostly eliminated. That’s not to say they’re not there at all; the comfort awarded by a good warm, dry structure and a full belly come in the form of increasingly large buffs, and these buffs are as essential as upgraded gear as you get further into the game.

As for gear, progression largely comes in the form of the typical material to tool to material loop, which is somewhat gated by individual biomes. That is, while you’re technically able to explore the entire map from the get go, and exploring is definitely compelling, each biome also has a “boss” which rewards you with items and abilities that will often be required for getting certain resources from the next biome. It’s a simple but clever progression mechanic. Likewise, enemies in each new biome serve as something of a soft gate as well. Heading into an area more than one above where you’ve progressed is likely a death sentence until you have better gear and better buffs. While it feels more natural than level-based “zones” of theme park style MMORPGs, it has a similar effect.

“Finishing off The Elder, the Black Forest’s boss.”

Construction, along with the systems and physics around it, is quite nice too. Like 7 Days to Die, Valheim has a voxel-esque engine which allows for fairly robust terrain deformation and reasonably free-form building (like Minecraft, to use my usual reference) and while It does have less realistic, far simpler graphics, it makes up for that by the use of a combination of a nice art style and quite few effects, resulting in a unique, cool aesthetic. Your home base will grow, especially in multiplayer games, into full on compounds, and these will need some defenses due to the denizens of whatever biome you’re in, and more importantly, enemy raid events which tier up along with your biome progression. These tend to be more of a minor annoyance than the session defining white-knuckle Blood Moons of 7 Days to Die, but I appreciate that they at least give me another reason to build new things and improve old ones.

On the other hand, building and crafting is where the game can get a little grindy. The more ambitious you are, the more material you need. Upgrading our little town from mostly wood to mostly stone wasn’t so bad, but when we decided to add stone basements to all of our buildings and connect them with a tunnel system, and then later build a massive wall and moat around the entire thing, we were suddenly spending a lot of time mining and hauling stone. The move to higher tier metals and other materials was even worse, with hours on end spent mining ore and rows of smelters cranking out ingots like some kind of Victorian factory.

It’s around that time that I fell off of Valheim. We made it as far as the mountain biome, and while there was definitely more to see, by then I felt like I had gotten to know what to expect from the gameplay loop. There’s a lot more I could talk about, like sailing, the cool fire propagation system, portals, the boss battles themselves, and the mini dungeon crawls, but in summary, Valheim was absolutely excellent, and I’d guess I’ll return to it as more content continues to be released for it.

“Meet Bruce. You’ll probably spend more time with him than your co-op partners…”

While playing 7 Days to Die, I wanted to start a game with my partner that we could play on our own time, separate from organizational constraints of playing with a larger group. I also wanted to play something a little more “chill” than 7 Days. We ended up settling on 2022’s Raft.

Raft is, well, it’s kind of all in the title. The basic premise is that you start on a tiny raft floating in a more or less endless ocean. You need to gather material from debris floating around you, on islands you’ll randomly encounter, and in the reefs around them, to expand and improve your raft, take care of your hunger and thirst, and of course, improve your gear. I almost immediately found the simplicity of most of the mechanics around gathering and crafting, as well as the amount of interesting tools and purely cosmetic items (furniture, etc.) to be quite fun, giving the game a really solid foundation that thankfully lasted throughout our entire playtime. Additionally, Raft has some great aesthetics. Likely thanks in large part to now classics like World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2, it seems like slightly cartoony, minimalist art styles are quite prevalent with sub AAA games these days, and ever since falling in love with Firewatch, I’ve been a big fan of this kind of look when it’s done competently.

“Home sweet home, near endgame.”

That all said, this game definitely isn’t quite as chill as I’d originally expected. From the get-go, you’re nearly constantly harassed by a huge great white shark who seems to have a personal vendetta against you. While you’ll need to stop it from taking chunks out of your raft fairly regularly, it’s at its most annoying when you’re diving for resources. There are also other aggressive animals, such as bears, on some of the islands, and both they and the shark seem to have fairly aggressive respawn timers to boot. Combat is really simple, and while it won’t blow anyone away, I didn’t find that it detracted much from the game either. Survival has even less chill, as with little in the way of tutorialization to go on, we found ourselves having to restart our first several games due to running out of food, losing our raft entirely, and one time being stranded in an area with next to no wind to sail by and broken oars – we’d run out of material to build new ones, and there wasn’t any floating debris in sight. Even once we had a pretty good grasp on what we were doing, it took us forever to discover the blueprints for the receiver and antenna, upon which your progress for the rest of the game depends. That was probably just a bit of bad luck with “RNJesus”, though.

One thing that had initially really intrigued me about Raft was that, unlike the almost completely absent stories of 7 Days to Die and Valheim, it supposedly had an actual narrative. Unfortunately, I found that aspect of the game a little disappointing. There are “story islands” that you progress through linearly which are special handcrafted locations featuring puzzles, backstory in the form of audio and text logs, and sometimes special items and even boss fights. There is also a way to guide yourself from story island to story island (the aforementioned receiver and antennas) which hopefully means you’ll never get too far off the beaten path. While there’s definitely a bit of mystery there, like why the planet flooded or, hell, why our characters are floating around on a tiny raft with no supplies at the start of the game, I don’t feel like Raft capitalizes on it anywhere close to well enough. The whole thing, particularly the end, felt a little rushed. Was I the only one who found the repeated references to “Forward Scouts” on the last story island when I think that term had only been used once or twice prior in the entire rest of the game to be a bit jarring? Besides, how am I a “scout” when I don’t seem to have relayed any of the information I’ve gathered back to anyone, and who am I scouting for, exactly? It’s not distracting while playing, but upon further reflection, it just all feels just a little half-baked.

That all said, we did eventually beat Raft, and I think in the end, we both really enjoyed the experience.

“Stand aside insects, we have a huge quest list to complete.”

Once our 7 Days to Die crew reluctantly decided to move on, I urged them to check out Grounded. Grounded follows a lot of the same open world sandbox survival tropes as the other games in this list, but two things immediately made it stand out to me.

First, the theme. Grounded is essentially Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Set in the early 90s, you play as one of 4 teens shrunken down to the size of a bug, lost in a backyard. It’s a pretty damn cool concept for a game, especially to an old man like me who played countless “giant” deathmatch maps in Unreal Tournament. I’m sure it won’t appeal to everyone, but hopping across clover leaves, sawing down blades of grass like they’re towering trees, and battling huge stink bugs, it’s quite compelling to me, and it’s executed extremely well to boot. Unlike large parts of all three of the above games, the world in Grounded is completely handcrafted rather than procedurally generated, which means, while maybe it is a little less replayable, it’s full of interesting touches.

That’s actually the second thing. Grounded is developed by a studio that a lot of people reading this will be very familiar with, Obsidian Entertainment. I don’t mean to be disrespectful in any way to the developers of these other games, but Obsidian is in a different league, and thanks to their acquisition by Microsoft, one with a bigger budget too. Obviously this isn’t an automatic selling point for everyone, as Obsidian is mostly known for their CRPGs. That, and for putting out… ummm, quite often less than finished games. That said, while I’ve not played many of their more recent titles, Grounded is by far the most polished Obsidian game I’ve ever played. It looks fantastic, sporting a minimalist art style not unlike the sort I mentioned admiring in Raft. It also sounds great, the UI feels well designed, and the whole thing is responsive and smooth. Thanks to its Microsoft association, it’s also on Gamepass and supports crossplay with consoles to boot!

“Cornered by two massive, deadly spiders. Ugh!”

Like Raft, it also has a narrative. Thankfully, I think it succeeds a lot better than Raft on that front, taking an approach similar to many single player open world games, with cutscenes, info dumps, and new missions punctuating the completion of old ones. It has the obligatory text and audio logs too. Of course, like a lot of other open world games, you can tackle many missions in whatever order you want, but my crew quickly discovered that, as an example, you should maybe clear each of the science labs in order rather than attempting to clear out the last one first just because you happen to be near it. Speaking of having less than expected levels of chill (another trait it shares with Raft) I suspect the difficulty of Grounded is one of the main reasons the game isn’t more popular. Despite its cartoony graphics and kid-focused plot, this game is brutal as fuck! It wasn’t uncommon for some of us to get two-shotted by hostile insects early on in the game, and I had a particularly harrowing round of cascading drowning deaths as each subsequent attempt to recover my backpack from a long, dark, underwater tunnel failed spectacularly. Oh, and absolutely turn on that “arachnophobia safe mode” if you’re not down with spiders because, frankly, fuck those things! We narrowly avoided some rage quits and eventually learned a few tricks that really helped us out, and after that, quickly made progress.

Beyond the typical open world survival game gathering and crafting loop, there’s something of a currency called “raw science”. RS is awarded for completing missions, discovering and analyzing new materials, killing certain larger enemies, and can even just found placed throughout the yard. RS can then be used to purchase sets of new crafting plans, recipes, and even mutations. Mutations are a form of character customization perk mostly found when completing certain milestones in the world, which you can then apply a couple of to grant your character special abilities and buffs. There’s also “milk molars” – big teeth you can find in the world and harvest, rewarding you with points you can use to upgrade your stats, including the ability to raise your active mutation count as high as 5. After we hit that aforementioned rough spot when trying to clear the labs, we spent a whole multi hour session farming molars in the world to give ourselves a bit of an edge.

“Surveying our WIP preparation for the final battle.”

As we progressed, the missions eventually focused into a more linear path, culminating in a huge final battle which was sort of a more hardcore version of the much smaller MIX.R wave defense side challenges scattered around the map. I suppose we never took those MIX.R challenges all too seriously, and we failed the final battle in an utterly humiliating fashion the first time around, despite thinking we had a winning strategy. This caused us to over prepare for the next attempt, spending quite a while grinding out more advanced (and stronger) material so that we could build multiple layers of fortifications, ultimately leading to a glorious victory the second time around. It was actually quite fun, looking back, though we were surprised to find the end cutscene representing something of a “bad” ending. It turns out, the bad ending is the normal one, and the better ending is only available to players who defeat some not-at-all signposted side objectives before the final fight. A slightly disappointing end to an otherwise excellent game.

That’s it for now. Next on the list: Enshrouded!

The First Four

Maybe it’s the holidays, but I was recently hit by a random streak of nostalgia around my family’s first ever computer, the Commodore VIC-20. I’m guessing it was sometime around 1985 or 1986 that my dad, almost certainly inspired by another family that we became friends with, the father being a huge Commodore 64 nerd, brought us home a VIC-20. We quickly amassed some game cartridges, a tape deck and a couple of tapes filled with demos and games, a joystick, and soon enough a Zenith ZVM-123 monochrome monitor so my brother and I weren’t tying up the family TV. I thought it would be fun to go back and revisit those first four cartridge-based games. This is where it all started for me!

“Fast Eddie plays exactly how you might imagine from this screen.”

Fast Eddie is a single screen side-perspective platformer similar to more well-known titles like Lode Runner, Jumpman, and Donkey Kong. Your objective is to avoid these little mushroom looking “Sneaker” dudes while you climb ladders up and down multiple levels collecting “prizes” that appear at random. There’s a really tall Sneaker on the top level (called the “High-Top”) who will shrink in height with each prize you collect, eventually getting short enough for Eddie to jump over, which completes the stage. It’s pretty simple, but even on the VIC-20 it feels reasonably fast and responsive. The challenge is in timing your movements with the fast moving Sneakers, which is easy to do, but the faster you try to clear a level, the more likely you are to make a mistake and lose a life. I also checked out the Commodore 64 version while I was at it, which despite being more colorful with higher resolution, well, everything, doesn’t have quite the same charm as the VIC-20 version to me. Still, the more responsive and smoother feeling controls make it the superior version.

Despite the fact that I recall liking Fast Eddie as a kid, it wasn’t my favorite, nor did it get a ton of playtime in my house. I think that’s likely because, like so many early arcade style games, the formula is almost immediately obvious and doesn’t deviate much from what is established at the start in anything but difficulty. Once you “figure it out” the only real drive to keep playing is to push yourself to further levels and higher scores. That said, it is fairly addictive, and when I replayed it for the first time in preparation for writing this article, I ended up playing it for a lot longer than originally planned. Not bad!

“Despite the clown car colors, killing Klingons is serious business.”

I never got into this next game as a kid, likely confused by its multiple perspectives and chaotic action, but I have fond memories of my brother camping out in front of this game for hours, filling little notepads up with diagrams and drawings. Having put a fair amount of time into the game while revisiting it for this post, I’m guessing these were simply sketches of ships and maybe a log of how far he made it and his scores, because an RPG or adventure game this is not; there’s really nothing to map nor clues to jot down.

Despite its title, Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator is purely an arcade action game, but one that crams a fair amount of ingenuity into its simple concept. On the top left of the screen you have indicators showing your health, photon torpedoes, and warp power. On the top right, you see an overhead view of your ship and the space around it in a style very similar to Asteroids. On the bottom of the screen, you see a first person perspective from the viewscreen of your ship (I assume the USS Enterprise?) which is synchronized with the action in the top down view. Pretty nifty. You fly around these little “sectors” shooting Klingon battlecruisers who are either attacking you, or focused on attacking your starbases. You can fly to a starbase to get a small bump in health, torpedoes, and warp. Your normal attack is an unlimited, rapid fire blast that is supposed to represent your ship’s phasers, but you can also launch a torpedo which has a devastating area of effect, and warping is simply a speed boost which I actually never found all that much use for. Once you dispatch all of the enemies, hopefully saving your starbases in the process, your score is tallied up and you move to the next sector map. There are some simple boss stages every 4 or 5 sectors as well. All in all, it didn’t really hook me, but it was fun, and I can imagine some people really enjoying it.

I tried out the Commodore 64 port of the game as well, and as with most games that exist on both platforms, while the gameplay is more or less identical, the graphics and sound are greatly improved (you can actually tell what the ships are supposed to be!) and control is a little more responsive, although it’s not bad in the VIC-20 port. The experience was so much more enjoyable that I ended up playing for quite awhile, far surpassing my previous high score on the VIC-20 version. Interestingly, the original game both of these ports are based on is a 1982 Sega arcade game. The arcade game looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t think I ever played growing up. Boasting impressive hi-res vector graphics and some digitized sound samples, it looks damn cool, although the gameplay is basically the same as what is presented in the home computer versions.

“Frogger with a weird perspective and terrible controls? Sign me up!”

Out of the four of these games, there’s only one I had almost zero recollection of and that’s because, well, we barely played it, and we barely played it because it fucking sucked. Congo Bongo is a platformer that plays like a sloppy combination of Donkey Kong, Pitfall!, and Frogger, depending on which level you play. That is, the first level has much more of a Donkey Kong vibe, while the second brings in those Frogger elements. The key difference is that the levels are shown from something of a skewed isometric perspective. Different enough to keep the lawyers away, I guess. The wacky perspective, terrible, jumpy animations which make dodging coconuts and hopping onto moving platforms feel excruciatingly inaccurate, and the less than responsive joystick controls made a game that probably already relied a bit too much on memorization just one big bum out. I ended up beating the first stage (a feat I don’t recall if I ever managed as a kid) after about a billion tries but, running out of patience, abused TheC64’s save states to get through the second. That was it though, that’s the game! In theory, those two levels repeat with a higher difficulty 4 more times, but there’s no way I was going to go any further, at least not with this version.

This game was ported all over the place, however, and morbidly curious, I decided to check out the very similar Commodore 64 version of the game. I’m happy to report that while it looks quite close, it has more colors, better sprites, better animations, slightly better sound, and vastly superior controls. The monkeys even properly harass you in this version! Still only two levels though. Interestingly, the Commodore 64 actually had a second port released a couple of years later in 1985 which had much nicer graphics sporting a much better take on the arcade version’s isometric perspective, all 4 levels from arcade, and a lot of other original elements intact. Unfortunately the cracked dump I played glitched out on the last level so I couldn’t legitimately beat it, but hey, not too shabby! In either case, I’d have been a lot more satisfied with the Commodore 64 versions of the game than I was with this awful VIC-20 one. Honestly, the best part was the awesome box with its colorful cartoony characters and massive Sega logo.

Oh, and yes, believe it or not this game was based on an arcade game. The arcade Congo Bongo actually had beautiful graphics for the time and, while I’m sure it was still a quarter sucking kick in the balls, the gameplay looks a lot smoother. As a kid I had no idea it was ever in the arcade, and I didn’t know until researching the game for this replay that there’s actually an interesting story behind the game being something of a troll of Nintendo over a lawsuit related to Donkey Kong. I’ve never seen that event referenced before, but I wonder if that’s where the Sega and Nintendo beef all started?

“Actually, Spider City doesn’t look half bad.”

My favorite of these games as a kid was Spider City, AKA Flash Gordon. Spider City was a side-scrolling shooter, likely influenced by the arcade classic Defender. On the top half of the screen is a view of your ship, and on the bottom a sort of mini-map showing you the tunnel system you’re navigating. The map was crucial for locating your objective, the hordes of hatching spider warriors you needed to murder. Of course, you also need to avoid debris, patrol ships, and other hazards, as well as rescue captured spacemen. I remember thinking the game looked good as a kid, but… eh? Still, of these four games it does the most with the VIC’s meager sound capabilities by a longshot.

In retrospect, dazzling graphics aside, I don’t know why it appealed to me quite so much back then, other than I remember wanting to ape my brother’s deep fascination with Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator by diving deep into and mastering a game of my own. That said, like Star Trek: SOS, there wasn’t actually all that much to master. Fly through the map avoiding and/or shooting everything on the screen (except for spacemen, which you could fly over to rescue) and seek out the hatching pods, mow down the hatching spiders which would hopefully grant your ship a temporary shield, then rinse and repeat until the entire map is clear. There were also these “disruptor” zones which moved around the map and would fill your screen with debris when you entered one, though you could shoot the generator inside of them to freeze them temporarily if you couldn’t simply avoid them. Of course, all of these details are fairly obtuse and unintuitive, and I’m mostly only able to talk about them clearly because I read the manual.

Unlike the rest of these games, Spider City didn’t have a Commodore 64 port. In fact, the only other place it appeared was the Atari 8-bit computers. Odd, given that it’s actually fairly fun.

These days I think I probably prefer Fast Eddie to Spider City, but I still have to give Spider City major credit for being the first video game I ever loved. Additional takeaways? While I’m endlessly grateful to my dad for bringing home my first ever personal computer, I mean, I have multiple hobbies and a career to thank for my interest in computers, I definitely wish it was a Commodore 64 instead of a VIC-20. Oh well. As an aside, I’d love to make a part two to this if I can ever figure out exactly what those cassette tapes I mentioned having were. I have no idea if they were commercial releases or otherwise widely distributed, or if some dude at whatever local computer shop my dad got this stuff from cobbled them together himself. A mystery for another day. *shrug*

Apologies for the poor quality pictures – there are some major color inaccuracies, for instance. These were photos from my TV (usually at night, even) rather than actual screenshots. Box art stolen from LaunchBox’s games database.

Diabolic

While StarCraft: Remastered seems to be pretty well regarded, not all of Blizzard’s efforts to rejuvenate their older games have been so successful. With that in mind, I was highly skeptical of Diablo II: Resurrected. It was only after hearing great things about the title from some trusted podcasters that I decided to check it out, and even then it was kind of a random, impulsive install. Regardless, I found myself getting hooked by the gameplay and story despite having played through it so many times before.

“Playing a fire build was a good choice with this new lighting engine.”

In short, this remastered version looks, sounds, and plays exactly how you probably remember it from back in 2000 and 2001, but the ability to dynamically toggle the graphics between the old and the new really shows just how faulty our memories can be. Knowing that the game was remastered had me engaged, trying to spot little changes and differences, and likely mistaking a lot of things I’d simply long forgotten as enhancements. I got so hooked, I ended up buying it for my Xbox Series X as well to give playing with with a controller a spin, utilizing the cross-save feature to swap between platforms whenever my mood demanded it. I didn’t play much further than the first act, but I was very impressed by the craftsmanship put into this new version, and while most of the potential to modernize some of the more dated features was skipped in favor of staying faithful to the original game, it’s hard to fault that. I’ll return to Diablo II: Resurrected one of these days, but the main reason I bailed so early was because I knew more exciting things were on the horizon.

I didn’t pay much attention to Diablo IV until relatively close to its release, when I started hearing positive things from those lucky enough to try the game during preview events. Blizzard had a couple of “server slam” stress test weekends a few months before release, and I managed to get into the very last one and try the game out for a few hours myself. I preordered the game shortly after that. That’s how much I enjoyed it.

“Fending off a horde of skeletons.”

Diablo IV feels, in many ways, like a love letter to Diablo II. Something of a “what if” scenario where Diablo III never happened, and the team that made Diablo II and Lord of Destruction immediately dove into developing a sequel, only after the entire studio was somehow transported 20 years into the future. This has positive and negative connotations. On the positive side, the game is an absolute return to the dark, moody tone of Diablo II. While maybe slightly less bleak, it pulls no punches in terms of showing the grim and gory world of a Sanctuary under the influence of evil: you’ll find far more corpses laying around randomly, piled in stacks, hanging from trees, and impaled on spikes than living NPCs, for example. This is also reflected in the graphical style, which resembles the 2D pixel art of Diablo II far more than the more stylized, simpler 3D models of Diablo III. The series’ sound design and particularly its music has always been consistent with what was established with the original Diablo, and Diablo IV feels continues this trend with a lot of direct throwbacks to those classic sound effects and compositions.

While I have seen the odd accusation of the game looking dated, I suspect that this is largely a side effect of trying to translate Diablo II’s look into 3D. I’m a fan. Besides the underwhelming character creator, my only nitpick is that I wish I could zoom the camera out just a tiny bit more, and we know it’s possible as many of the game’s cool in-engine cutscenes play with the camera, sometimes leaving it zoomed out further than normal. The prerendered cutscenes are absolutely amazing too, but we expect nothing less from Blizzard at this point. The aforementioned sound and especially music are masterfully executed as well. One of my telltale signs that a game has good music is when I actually notice it and stop to enjoy it, which I did more than once during my playthrough of Diablo IV’s campaign. So, that’s all good then, what about the story?

“I admit it, I kind of love Lilith.”

As a random wanderer, your character stumbles across a village that has been recently taken over by the influence of the demon Lilith. You soon meet up with some allies and the investigation of Lilith’s plot, with the eventual goal of stopping her entirely, guides the rest of your adventure. Lilith is very interesting antagonist in that, unlike your usual demonic invaders, while sure, there’s definitely an evil corruption at play, her charisma and the dogma she imparts seems to do just as much of the heavy lifting as she builds a following of humans rather than the usual shtick of simply wanting to wipe them out. In fact, she claims to want to save Sanctuary from further destruction by the machinations of and conflict between Heaven and Hell. Of course, that would mean her coming out on top, and who knows at what cost, so perhaps she’s actually just full of shit, but I like that she always comes across as a little sympathetic, and her true nature is always left at least a little ambiguous. I also loved the concept of the angel Inarius, banished to Sanctuary where a religion forms around him. In a twist to fans of the previous games, Inarius is not really an ally to your character in any real sense, and while he’s an important part of the story (particularly the backstory) he’s barely featured. Neat stuff, though the way it all wraps up comes about as close to begging for an expansion or at least a proper sequel as you can get without the story feeling unfinished.

Diablo IV also all but pretends that many of the revelations that came from Diablo III’s story didn’t happen. I don’t believe there was a single mention of Nephalem, for instance. In fact, the only real connections I picked up on (although, it has been quite a few years since playing Diablo III) were the now rather old Horadrim Lorath, and the fact that the Horadrim (and Sanctuary at large) feels particularly devastated, which makes sense after the events of Diablo III’s Reaper of Souls expansion. I could imagine this confusing if not disappointing a lot of Diablo III fans, though I for one prefer the much more serious tone of Diablo II and Diablo IV to the more fantastical, and at times flat out silly, writing of Diablo III.

“Lightning Sorcs can make quite a mess.”

Mechanically, Diablo IV does very little to build off of the systems that appeared in Diablo III, feeling in some ways like a bit of a step backwards. Your character feels a bit weaker and the action tends to feel a bit slower than the utter murder fests that fights in Diablo III would turn into. Skill progression is similarly old school, as you pick a number of abilities, both active and passive, from a fairly large tree, versus Diablo III’s much more stripped down progression system where you’d pick from a small selection of active abilities and apply a single modifier to them. The endgame “paragon” system does make a return from Diablo III, but is similarly much more complex. Naturally, some people will prefer Diablo III after so many years of live iteration, and some will be taken aback by Diablo IV’s slightly regressive mechanics. Personally, thanks to giving us just enough quality of life enhancements and overall polish, I think it works well. My only real gripe is that progression tends to be a bit front loaded, and by the time you near level 50, you’ll mostly be spending all of your points on relatively boring passive abilities, and after that you’ll progress to the aforementioned similarly boring and definitely more than a little convoluted paragon system.

Gear progression is in a similar boat. Diablo IV’s legendary items have “aspects” which can often have a major impact on the behavior of core class abilities, but I find myself missing some of Diablo III’s wacky, sometimes overpowered legendary weapon effects. There are a thousand other differences, as well as some Diablo II mechanics that didn’t make it in (like runes and rune words, despite there being a gem socketing system) but I suspect there’s a good chance of many of them showing up in the inevitable expansion. Not being one of those hardcore players who has sunk thousands of hours into the endgames of previous Diablo games, I don’t think I want to go too much more in-depth about the mechanics. That is to say, there are definitely better qualified people than me to provide this kind of analysis.

“Welcome to the Burning Hells.”

Perhaps the biggest change a casual player will notice is that Diablo’s world map is now completely open, sprawling, and filled with side content. The size and openness of the world doesn’t actually impact things too much, as the campaign questline will inevitably lead you through various regions and some of their sub-zones in a similar, albeit less linear fashion as the previous games did, and traveling isn’t too much of a chore thanks to the all too familiar system of waypoints (and when you get a horse later on, even less so.) No, the biggest issue I have with the open-world is the huge amount of side quests, dungeons, and other distractions you’ll run into in your journey. On one hand, I appreciate the content, but on the other hand, trying to complete every quest you come across and clear every dungeon you see is going to seriously derail your campaign progress. I started playing the campaign at the same time as a few colleagues of mine, and even when our playtimes were similar, I noticed I was well behind them in the campaign. It was the damn side quests! Once I started totally ignoring them and focusing exclusively on campaign quests, the game stopped feeling like so much of a slog, and I was able to dig myself out of the burnout that was setting in.

I should make a quick mention of another major change while talking about Diablo IV’s more open-world nature. The game is now something of an MMO in that you’ll run across other players in the world while playing. If you’re asocial, you shouldn’t let this concern you, as I rarely ran across anyone outside of the major cities, and even when I did, we’d almost always ignore each other and go our separate ways. There are “events” across the map (more or less the “public quest” system introduced in Warhammer Online) which work best when tackled cooperatively, but these are the only times I really played with random players. Even still though, I personally enjoy seeing other players in the world, and the opportunity for casual co-op play, random chat, and the like is pretty cool, never mind being able to fairly seamlessly play with your actual friends when you want to. I just wish this was an optional feature for those who’d rather (or can’t) always play online.

“Lorath and I unloading.”

I’ve personally never been even a little enamored by Diablo’s endgame. In the original game, it was grinding for better items, sometimes with friends, and of course PKing and otherwise griefing other players. In Diablo II, it meant running through the campaign multiple times with increasing difficulty until focusing on that brutally repetitive Act V item grind, trying to find the best unique equipment, set items, and runes. Diablo III did a good job of trying to make this less of a repetitive grind by introducing “Adventure Mode” which would give players random quests to go slap a series of enemies, and rifts, which were randomly generated dungeons. Diablo IV leverages its open-world for its endgame. Since enemies are always scaled, all of that content you may have skimmed over while playing the campaign is available to grind through, as are the Tree of Whispers random quests, Helltide events, world bosses, and a number of other challenges and collect-a-thons. There’s a lot to do, although it’s a tiny bit of a bummer that so much less of the game is randomized now given that it was such a notable element of Diablo’s roguelike origins. Regardless, at the end of the day, all of these iterations come down to one thing: fairly pointless grinding. No offense to anyone who enjoys it, of course, but It’s amazing to me that Blizzard would focus so much on an endgame which is going to be so unappealing to most people. *shrug*

That’s worth mentioning, because it seems that certain types of games are judged largely by a hardcore, vocal minority of endgame players, and yet I can really like a World of Warcraft expansion, for example, based solely on its campaign and the gameplay changes I experienced therein, regardless of the raiding community thinking it’s the worst expansion to date. Diablo IV’s endgame is just one of the many popular topics that commonly pops up in criticisms of the game. It’s bizarre to me how divisive of a title Diablo IV is. Some of it, like the ridiculous cosmetics store, ham-fisted nerfs around the season 1 patch, and how slow Blizzard has been to address certain things, is legitimate, but pop into any comment or discussion thread about the game, and you’ll see a lot of people spouting absolutely ludicrous, objectively untrue nonsense about it. I guess there are tons of people always primed and ready to hate on anything Blizzard produces these days. Shame that, because while I certainly don’t believe it succeeds in taking Diablo II’s crown, I really did enjoy my time with it and will definitely be dusting it off again in the future.