Diablo 4
It’s happening on my timeline, it’s happening in real life. My feed is full of my usual slate of Destiny streamers, but dozens of them have converted, at least temporarily, to Diablo 4. They can’t stop playing, they say, even if it may be their first Diablo ever. “Should I try it?” one says, with a million replies saying yes. “Obsessed, addicted” he says a day later.
In real life, my friend is texting me at 7:30 AM to let me know a world boss is about to spawn in 15 minutes. We log on, we kill it, we start work. We take a break from work, kill more stuff. My other friend who rarely plays anything now is texting me almost every day to play co-op with him on PS5, and he’s playing loads the off-hours as well, as I can see in my Battle.net launcher.
I am no exception to this. I have a level 66 Barbarian and a level 50 Rogue, and am thinking about starting a Druid. This is after I beat the entire campaign and reached 50 on a Necromancer for my review build, a character who was sadly deleted after that build of the game went down.
This is Diablo 4 addiction, the sequel to Diablo 3 addiction, which was the sequel to Diablo 2 addiction. Veteran players are finding this scratches that old itch again because the game is not just good, it’s great. New players are finding themselves unable to stop.
I’ve previously written about my history with Diablo, the only series I can say I have been utterly, fully addicted to. Even as someone who has played several thousand hours of Destiny 1 and 2, I still can’t say it’s the same kind of thing. This was obsession, I had to play. And I’m starting to feel that again.
Diablo 4
Why? Why is Diablo like this? Somehow, some way, Blizzard has figured out essentially one of the most perfect reward loops in gaming, a combination of slowly leveling your character and in D4’s instance, building elaborate paragon boards to perfect your build and forever grow stronger.
But the loot. The loot. That sound of a legendary drop, and now, the image of that slightly lighter text of a unique drop. There’s nothing quite like it in gaming, even in other games that do have loot drops. Exotics in Destiny don’t compare. Maybe Pearlescents in Borderlands did, but even still, Diablo wins.
It’s the feeling of just one more thing. One more Baal run, which turned into one more Greater Rift, which has now turned into one more Nightmare Dungeon or Helltide or Legion event. Sure, individually these things can take anywhere from 2-15 minutes. But when you’ve “just one more-d” about 20 times, whoops, there goes your entire afternoon. Or evening. Or morning. Or it’s 2 AM and you are dead the next day. But hey, you got some good drops. 2% damage increase, baby!
It doesn’t end, especially now with Diablo 4 and it’s absurdly long level 1-100 grind. If you’re not being ultra-efficient, it’s probably at least 100 hours per character to get that high, and this is before any of the seasonal stuff has started, a process that asks you to start leveling a new, seasonal character from scratch again. God help you if you do hardcore and spend dozens of hours on a character that can be erased forever with one bad stun chain or a surprise Butcher appearance.
Diablo 4
My advice is…be careful. Past Diablo addiction caused a few rough times for me in college, and even in the years that followed. One time the only way I could force myself to stop playing Diablo 2 was to throw all my gear on the ground to be collected by some random stranger, and I quit, irreversibly losing everything I’d spent hundreds of hours getting.
Hopefully I won’t go fully down that road again. It’s been almost 20 years since I did that. I’m older, more mature, I have a one year-old.
But I’m still out here killing world bosses at 7:30 AM, aren’t I?
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