31st March 2023
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: demons, sumo, and cryptics.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Diablo 4
Shortly after the Diablo 4 beta came to an end, Blizzard senior quest designer Harrison Pink took to Twitter to discuss one of the action role-playing game’s cool narrative moments. I won’t spoil it for you here, and I’ll link to the tweets rather than embed them. But there’s one thing Pink said about Diablo I wanted to dig into, having dug into the Diablo 4 beta myself last weekend.
“Humour in a game like Diablo is extremely difficult to get right without ruining the overall tone!”
Truly, Diablo 4 is not a game about making the player laugh (not intentionally, anyway). In fact quite the opposite. It’s a grimdark game about the folly of faith, the pain of existence and blood. Lots of blood.
Diablo 4 doubles down on this, no doubt a response by the developers at Blizzard to the divisive Diablo 3, with all its colour and campy creepy crawlies. Diablo 4 is intentionally dour, intentionally depressing, intentionally dark and dank. Everyone you meet is suffering, every enemy desperate to make everyone else suffer even more. Even the “good guys” cause suffering, albeit under the cover of faith. At least the demons are up front about it.