What has the Diablo 4 Beta taught us? Blizzard is back, but we need to be cautious

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If you’re like most other gamers I have seen over the past few days, Diablo 4 is now high on your ‘most excited’ list for 2023. Move over The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, right? (Wrong). It’s been almost 11 years since the launch of Diablo 3, and since then the games industry has moved on. We’ve become more accustomed to ‘games as a service’, we’ve got better at implementing social elements into RPGs, and we’ve rethought lifecycle and monetisation – for better and worse – when it comes to triple-A projects.

Diablo 4 has been watching, like an ancient evil in the dark, learning from the mistakes of its peers. Countless Diablo-likes have come and gone in the decade since the dark lord last loomed huge over our consoles and PCs, and none have stood the test of time. Every newcomer that’s had its five minutes of fame before being unceremoniously killed off and cast aside has made Diablo stronger – anyone that so much as glanced at the past few weeks of beta tests could tell you that. The king is back, and it’s going to haunt the industry for a long time.

There are a few foibles I need to point out about the game itself, and they mostly stem from the technical side of things. The game suffers from disconnects, crashes, rubber-banding, and more than a couple of graphical aberrations (which I would care about more if the whole thing didn’t look so damn good). But all that is to be expected when you’re playing a game in its beta stage, really. The most insidious problem the game has is something Blizzard can’t wrangle out of the code in time for launch… because it’s Blizzard itself.

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