Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful.
I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's obviously been really successful for them, but I have absolutely no want or need to play through the game again. It's a slog, running across the map, equipment with so many stats that I don't know what's actually better or worse, fighting monsters on the surface and in dungeons that all feel the same. There's hardly any time journeying into the depths of hell, or into deep, deep dungeons, but a lot of the plot instead revolves around the jungle for some reason and how the "jungle gives and takes". A big focus on builds and grinding as opposed to fun. It's been sacrificed on the altar of "live service" and, unlike Diablo 1, you won't be able to play it in 25 years, nor will you really want to.
I love Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, I don't care much for what the genre has become though (Diablo 3/4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, etc). The genre of loot focused ARPGs really took after the worst aspects of Diablo 2 LOD end game. An extreme focus on grinding and optimizing builds to maximize your ability to grind, so you can get gear to beat end game content that is otherwise impossible, to repeat the process. The genre took this and ran with the concept and brought it up, but also kind of killed the simple parts of the game. A lot of older 90s / early 2000s games had this game first, that then maybe had this end game aspect which some communities played towards. But now the industry plays towards the end game aspect, and neglects the person that just wants to sit down and fight into the dungeon for a while.
I'm in the same boat. I loved Diablo 1 and 3, but Diablo 3 is just meh and I haven't even bothered with 4. The first two games it could be fun going through loot you'd found and try to optimize your character. There were only a few dimensions to each piece of equipment so finding the "best" a relatively easy. Even if you didn't have the absolute best stuff you could still play the game. The character optimization was an emergent part of the game, not the core focus of the game.
Diablo 3, especially with real money used to buy equipment, turned the CharOp into a core aspect of the game. If you didn't pay attention to that aspect the game could be mercilessly hard. So I couldn't just mindlessly play, I had to pause half way through the dungeon to go further tune all my gear across a dozen different dimensions.
The extra cognitive load means there's more steps between me sitting down and engaging something fun. If I have an hour to play a game having to spend ten minutes out of that time dealing with loot is just a tax on fun. It's bad enough that unless I play every day I have to wait some unbounded amount of time waiting for updates because of the forced online component.
I think the loop that hooked me on game such as Diablo 1, Valheim, Subnautica, etc, is that cycle of safe place -> adventure -> "safe place, recharge, upgrade". The grindey aspect of Diablo 4 totally turned me off and if I buy the game it'll only be for the couch coop aspect.
Just an fyi - the couch coop for Diablo 4 is a little more work to get going than Diablo 3. Requires that the second player sign into their own PSN/XBL account and have that account tied to a Battle.net account:
I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's obviously been really successful for them, but I have absolutely no want or need to play through the game again. It's a slog, running across the map, equipment with so many stats that I don't know what's actually better or worse, fighting monsters on the surface and in dungeons that all feel the same. There's hardly any time journeying into the depths of hell, or into deep, deep dungeons, but a lot of the plot instead revolves around the jungle for some reason and how the "jungle gives and takes". A big focus on builds and grinding as opposed to fun. It's been sacrificed on the altar of "live service" and, unlike Diablo 1, you won't be able to play it in 25 years, nor will you really want to.