Why the joy of wanton slaughter works for Diablo

By Matthew Rossi

Why do I love Diablo 3 and keep coming back to it? Why did I decide with less than a week left in Season 12 that I should roll yet another Barbarian? And why did I level to 70 and begin grinding away at Greater Rifts to complete the Season journey and get the full Immortal King set? Ultimately, because I enjoyed it.

There’s more, of course. There’s a visceral thrill to Diablo that I don’t get in other games. The thrill of watching hordes of enemies come at you and launching yourself into them. Of being eager to see thirty or more slavering demons descend upon you. Now, I love World of Warcraft and I’m even playing it right now, leveling a Highmountain, and that’s great. But WoWapproaches high level play very differently. If I’m after the hardest content and the best gear WoW has to offer, I need a raid team. Or at the very least, I need to pull a group of friends together.

In Diablo, I can go solo and grind my way up to Greater Rifts at whatever difficulty I can handle. Or I can play with my wife. Together, the two of us transform into a trash talking competitive army that utterly destroys everything we look at. When we hit a wall, we can go back and grind until we find the right combination of gear and strategy to solve it.

Face it, sometimes a game needs a big “You Have Died’ screen to taunt you into coming back harder.

But while Diablo is fun, there’s room for improvement.

Keep the game going with more story

There are certainly things I’d improve in the Diablo franchise. For one thing, while I’m on board with the story we get, I’d like more of it. More characters, more story elements, more specific story based on the class you’re playing. I really felt like playing a Barbarian should have made going to Bastion’s Keep deliver more oomph. You’re fighting to protect the place built as part of an invasion effort of your homeland. Playing a Necromancer in Tristram should get you some sketchy looks. Maybe you should even get a quest to stop some evil cultists in town, to show the people there you’re on the level.

I definitely hope Diablo 4 does more with its story. I’d like it to go deeper and broader and have class-specific quests.

Let us play everything with more classes

I also hope Diablo 4 has more classes to start. I’ll be up front, between Diablo 2 and 3 I’m just unwilling to play a Diablo game that doesn’t have Barbarians. I do play other classes — Paladins, Druids, Monks, and Crusaders for example. But the class I love most and play over and over again is the humble Barb. But I’d love to see a Diablo game that let you play as every class that’s ever existed in the Diablo setting.

Some of the classes merge well. The Sorcerer from Diablo and the Sorceress from Diablo 2 for example are both subsumed well into the Wizard. But I’d like to see Druids, Crusaders, Witch Doctors, Paladins, and Necromancers. I want to see Amazons, Rogues, Monks, and Barbarians. I’d love to see Wizards, Assassins, and even the Bard that never made it into the Hellfire pack. I want to see them all make an appearance as playable characters.

Loot is the heart of the game, but there should be more of it

Finally, more gear. I know there’s a lot of gear in Diablo 3, but I also know at this point I have seen every single mighty weapon there is, every single shield, every flail, every sword and axe and mace legendary that can possibly drop. There should always be more. More rings, more amulets, more armor pieces, more more more.

More sets, and sets with competitive lower tier bonuses so you’re tempted to break up a set and wear two different ones instead of always slapping on a full set. And more sets that are smaller, so that their greatest bonus is 3/3 or 4/4 for the same reason. Just more stuff, because loot is the heart of this franchise and there should always be more.

Diablo needs keep the grind

The one thing you absolutely can’t mess with is the grind at the heart of the Diablo franchise. As crazy as it sounds, you cannot do anything to the loot tornado. You absolutely must not put in a Real Money Auction House, or even a In-Game Gold Auction House. Loot and gold must be solely personal and nobody but the player should see them. Trade between friends who were both there for the kill is fine, but no system of loot trading to players who weren’t there for it.

Because if history has shown us anything, the entire game is set up around the randomness of the loot drop system and the increasing chance of good loot at higher difficulty settings. Tamper with the loot tornado at your peril.

Why Diablo’s wanton slaughter works

The reason this works for Diablo and not, say, World of Warcraft is because you can sit there and play Diablo by yourself for as much or as little time as you like. None of the gear in this game is locked behind a raid or otherwise requires you to do anything you’re not already doing. The best Ancient Legendary gear available is ultimately available to the player on Torment IV or IX, it just takes longer to drop for the IV player. The best gear in WoW drops in Mythic raids, and you’re not going to get it if you don’t raid in Mythic difficulty, with a team of well-geared compatriots who know raid strategies by heart. Having alternative loot sources — like World Quests and purchasable Relinquished gear — can alleviate some of the pressure of that kind of gear elitism, even if it won’t give you the best gear in the game.

Diablo doesn’t need those systems because the method to accrue better gear is simply to keep playing, solo or in a group, until you can turn up the difficulty. You get gear, turn up the difficulty, get better gear, hit a wall where you can’t survive so you farm the level you’re at until you can. Do Greater Rift 20 enough times and you should be geared enough for 21, then 22, rinse and repeat.

There’s a level of monotony to Diablo that isn’t for everyone

But it’s also exhilarating the first time you clear a new difficulty on a rift and see yourself standing victorious at the end over the corpse of the Rift Guardian, loot and gold fountaining out of its broken body. Diablo is built on this feeling. It’s the foundation that should never be tampered with, no matter what improvements are made to the game.