When I originally reviewed Diablo IV, I spent a ton of time playing it. I dropped a solid 60 hours in while playing through the original campaign during the press review window period and had a review that was mostly ready to go by the time the embargo lifted. While I enjoyed it greatly at launch and spent another 90+ hours with it immediately after release, a month or so later I found myself revisiting my words and wondering why a game that I was so enamored with a month ago suddenly felt like more of a chore than a delight. I checked out “for good” during the Season of Hatred Rising and hadn’t revisited Diablo IV until the imminent release of Vessel of Hatred. Rather than rushing to get my thoughts up, I decided to hold my review for a few weeks after release to provide some much needed clarity once the new sheen wore off.
Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Platforms: Windows PC (Reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PS4, PS5
Release Date: October 7th, 2024
Price: $39.99 USD
Diablo’s story hasn’t really ever been it’s strongest feature, but it has at least pretended to stick to the theme of being demonic and evil over the years. Vessel of Hatred starts off incredibly strong, as the opening cutscene shows Neyrelle having corruption fueled blackouts, during which she has a vision of Mephisto literally shredding her body apart and turning her into a living Dreamcatcher while being held captive inside of his chest.
She awakens to find that the corruption has murdered the poor sap who was providing her a ferry down the jungle river and she clutches the soulstone. That opening cutscene is by far the most memorable and remarkable thing Vessel of Hatred has to offer, because by the time you reach the middle of the story, it loses so much steam that you’re not only limping along, you’re almost defiantly pushing forward just to see if they bother paying any of it off.
At no point during Vessel of Hatred‘s campaign do you meet any characters who are fleshed out well enough to actually develop any emotional attachment to, let alone care about, despite multiple attempts at emotional pleas. Bringing back mercenaries is a neat idea, but there’s no reason to try and make characters bond with them.
There’s a mercenary who’s also a smith who loses an arm trying to help you because you helped him rescue his daughter, but that story was done way better with Raubahn in Final Fantasy XIV. I already forgot the story with the other three mercenaries because they’re even less meaningful. Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred selfishly goes back to the well and promises more interactions with known characters from Diablo II during the chase to find and stop Mephisto, but it’s all somewhere between a shallow cash grab and a prayer that nostalgia equals sales – since the allure of revisiting iconic scenes has no soul.
You’d think revisiting Travincal would feel like a big deal, especially since Nahantu is basically just a new name for the Flayer Jungle, but no. Aside from being a visually familiar set piece, it doesn’t feel important or special at all. On top of that, there’s a battle that has you fighting cameos from minor characters, but those are likely lost on anyone who isn’t a hardcore Diablo fan.
Raise your hand if you even remember Meshif, let alone that he was somehow still alive in Diablo IV‘s base campaign. That’s the worst part about this expansion: the gameplay has improved since Season 3, but none of that is dependent or reliant on the expansion. For $40, you’re getting a story that’s tailored to the assumption that you’ll be playing through it with the new class because the story and lore attached to the Spiritborn is so integral that playing as any other class is far less rewarding and feels like being a tourist in your own game.
Diablo IV might have managed to be somewhat on task when it came to keeping up the sinister and spooky vibes with the things they did with Lilith. You’d think given the introduction of a hardcore Inquisitor named Urivar who shames Inarius for failing, burns a heretic alive, to be a real threat to your intervention, but nah.
He’s all but completely absent until the burned knights show up out of nowhere and he’s reduced to being generic boss fodder who gives you transmogs for his mask and sword. Great. Character work that’s thrown away because no one could write a competent story for him.
There’s one part of the story that’s supposed to be super sad where you have to make a sacrifice and a character expresses deep regret and remorse for it, crying and sobbing, the whole nine yards – but because it all plays out so fast, as the player you’re just like “aw that’s sad, anyway” and it falls completely flat.
In fact, it’s so flat that when the inevitable happens, you can see it coming from nine miles down the road, all because this story teases you with getting vindication on Mephisto only to refuse to pay off on anything and instead sets up the bridge to the next expansion.
I wish I were kidding, but the story goes from dark and heavy to literally having to force Neyrelle address her mental health issues to keep you from being killed, and then it literally becomes a meme and does the “maybe the real Diablo was the friends we met along the way” trope, where you’re reminded that when you’re struggling, your friends will be there to help you get through it.
Mental health is important, but this is probably the worst franchise to shoehorn it into. Horror fans are a core tenet of the Diablo fanbase, so preaching to them about how important having friends to keep your mental health in check is an astonishingly bad idea.
All things considered, the expansion is mostly on par for the tone of Diablo IV and the “new ways”, but as a hardcore Diablo fan, I kinda feel like my intelligence and my reverence for the franchise was insulted by whatever this was instead of just giving me a compelling path to an epic showdown. The Spiritborn itself is pretty fun to play, but it bastardized both the Druid and the Barbarian, basically being a mashup of what makes both of those classes feel interesting.
A more apt comparison is that the Spiritborn basically feels like mashing up the Monk and the Witch Doctor from Diablo III, but because elements of both were already experimented with among the existing characters, the Spiritborn comes out not only stupidly broken, but I feel like we’ll need to see both Druid and Barbarian completely revamped in order to not feel like inferior clones.
For $40, you’re basically buying a story that feels like it was written by five different teams and then forcefully stitched together, while only one of the groups had any actual familiarity with the Diablo franchise instead of just writing a generic dungeon crawler story.
Add to that a broken overpowered character that’s a bunch of fun to play if you like melee heavy “in the thick of it” characters, and the ability to ride a cat instead of just a horse, some runes that give some more minor buffs that aren’t exactly build defining like rune words were in Diablo II, and a goofy multiplayer raid style thing that doesn’t fit in Diablo at all, and you’ve got a decent chunk of new game to experience.
The Undercity (which is basically Rifts from Diablo III) is the best part of the expansion. The new area is probably worth about half of the asking price, but unless you just wanna play the new class, there’s very little reason to pay more than $20 for Vessel of Hatred.
The story isn’t good and while Nehantu is more interesting to look at than the endless deserts, Blizzard has got to stop treating Diablo like an MMO. They need to treat it more like a single player dungeon crawler that also happens to have some online elements to justify these price tags. Especially when they’re already asking players to pay for a battle pass, there’s even less reason to justify this expansion costing more than $20.
Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred was reviewed on PC via Battle.net using a beta build provided to Niche Gamer by Blizzard Entertainment. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred released for Windows PC (via Steam or Battle.net), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 on June 6th, 2023.
