Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe

Holy fuck, the story. I can't even. I don't know how to process what I just saw. I mean, Blizzard is making

jayrebb said:

Hearing it's reminiscent of the base game story in terms of conclusion/climax. Not sure how true that is.

Some are calling it anti-climatic and another cliffhanger with minimal plot resolution.

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Holy Fuck, the story. I can't believe/am having trouble processing what I just saw; I still haven't finished it (nearing the end) but was told I would hate it and in preparation watched a summary and the cinematics. Did Blizzard really do that? I am not sure how that is not more controversial.


What would lead them to write a story like this for a Billion dollar franchise? It would have been easy enough to make changes so you aren't using the Bible as a direct reference. Forget the fact that they would never do this for or to any other world religion, the story is deeply unsatisfying on a huge number of other fronts. You've now had a Diablo game without Diablo and an xpac without a fight involving a Prime Evil at all. Neyrelle and Eru are terrible characters and the story is a slog, for as short as it is, even without the issues I describe above.

Aazrael said:

More like Rasputin!

The ending should have been the halfway point, then continue towards a Mephisto battle. If they were to add story content between "expansions" it would feel a little better. A hook to make people come back each season.

But I have no idea what their plan is. Now that the game is in decent place loot and mechanics wise they should be able to make some improvment into season/story content.

The jump to T4 is quite a leap. I tried Grigoire on T4 and that took a while to kill. Had to do mechanics even!

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It feels like this is the halfway point. I can see some Gen Z writer talking about their ESB moment if they know what the OT is. I was thinking they were going to play this off as Mephisto's plan the whole time but upon further reflection, and reading more about the story, I don't know if its that deep. From https://www.pcgamesn.com/diablo-4/vessel-of-hatred-urivar-ending:

"I ask Rivera-Colon about this, and whether or not she’s concerned players will feel like everything was a bit of a wasted effort. “It’s funny you say that, because even throughout the campaign, our side quests, and all of the storyline, we were like ‘is there too much hope in this?" There is a lot of hope, and I think that’s why [the ending feels so hopeless]; there are a lot of little wins that we give the characters. That’s the balance.

“We always have more demons, and there’s always going to be bigger things; there’s always going to be something that’s happening in Sanctuary. [The ending] sets that up and gives us a chance to explore what that might be while keeping this dark tone. There is always going to be something.”

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That they literally inverted the Resurrection in their game doesn't seem to have registered with anyone. Death Metal in the 1970s seeking to inflame and shock people would have loved this but never dared go this far; now this happens in a AAA video game beat for beat and no one bats an eye. I haven't seen anyone even mention it. The author of the article was concerned that they wasted Urviar as a villain, which they did completely but why worry about continuing to attack the Church/religion analogue when you are going to make the analogue of the real world focus of worship the embodiment of Evil on Sanctuary? This is some next level ideological BS happening at Blizzard.

I don't see/can't find anyone else as upset by it/drawing the same conclusions as I am. I don't know if I am going to keep playing.

This feels worse than Starfield. Starfield was just creative bankruptcy and not thinking through the ramifications of their narrative decision that allowed them to have a cool gameplay feature;

This feels like more something more insidious and deliberate; maybe its just to give the world a more horror feel but there are lots of ways to achieve that effect without going here, or anywhere they have with the some of the narrative/creative decisions for Diablo 4.

Chris said:

It's funny that people are simultaneously upset about the woke girlboss victory and an inverted resurrection.

Just goes to show that some of you would be all for censorship and cancelling if you were in power.

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Who is calling for censorship and cancelling? That's kind of the point: No one is calling for anything. No one noticed.

And I am not just pearl-clutching; One of my favorite guilty-pleasure horror movies back in the day was John Carperter's "Prince of Darkness", the plot of which revolved around the idea that the Catholic Church was hiding a cylinder of fluid that was the corporeal embodiment of Satan, and Jesus was an alien warning that Satan was trying to bring over his "Father" the Anti-God from the Anti-Matter Universe effectively bringing about the End times of Revelation. Better explanation and plot summary from the Wikipedia article if you weren't around in the 80's to watch it on HBO: Prince of Darkness (film) - Wikipedia.

Anyway, it's not just offensive (to me) its lazy and derivative; They seemingly retconned Akarat to be an analogue for the real world religious figure in this expansion in order to achieve the effect for which they were going. What if they made him into an Obama analogue? A Mohamed analogue? A Karl Marx analogue? All of these are just as lazy but would probably provoke a reaction because folks with those ideological leanings don't take affronts lying down.

Chris said:

The writers are clueless.

Anyone holding a soulstone needs to have a grusome death turning into a greater evil, it happens in every game and even Diablo 3 managed it. Really they should have left the soulstone plot behind after the Diablo 3 retconning and just had the evils respawn as normal. Even speaking to a greater evil should fuck you up, look at Rogue Monestary in Diablo 2.

Mephisto being the antichrist is interesting, but they just did a fighting the church storyline and I'm not sure that fantasy should be going that close to real life religious lore - at least mainstream stuff. Whatever this is should have been in this expansion though.

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I don't think they are clueless as much as they are just bad writers or writers with an ideological take going for an effect, and Blizzard has forced poor pacing and narrative structure on them. They might be able to tell a better story if it was just one expansion a year, with all of that content in one Xpac but the Seasonal model is more or less doing what the Live Service Model did to Destiny 2; the only difference is D4 is avoiding the power/gear creep that afflicted Destiny 2 over time with the seasonal character resets.

And that is my overall point, about which we seemingly agree, regardless of any extraneous comments regarding cancel/censorship: This is supposed to be Dark Fantasy/horror and we are far too close to the real world with this story. There was and is no need to bring any real world analogues into this. It was fine when Neon Genesis Evangelion did it because the terms "Angels" is exotic to the Japanese; It was fine when Diablo started out because they were clearly talking about Angels and Demons/Devils in a generic sense and clearly wasn't related to Real Life™. This is too much, though, and crosses the line, at least for me. I'm surprised that no one else has said anything or even seemingly noticed.