As most everyone knows, especially on this site, the actual Diablo franchise died with Diablo 2. We have D2R and I'm grateful for that, aside for so many irreplaceable LoD items being lost to time now due to people forgetting to log back in or not caring.

Anyways, I hated D3, like most people. I tried. I liked it in the beginning before the expansion and especially before the major nerf on original Inferno mode. I thought the difficulty level felt accurate for what 'inferno' mode fighting the literal demons of hell should be. I gave up shortly after those nerfs and hated the story. I came back for the expansion just to follow the story and see if they could salvage anything from it.

I haven't bought D4 yet or played it because I waited to see how it would play out and wanted to see if it would get to the point of where D3 was with trillions of damage and other stupid shit or get to the PoE level of running through the game at lightspeed farming garbage endlessly but with D3 drop rates of uniques or "legendaries" dropping 10 at a time.

So yeah, clearly it didn't look like it would be appealing to me, because it just isn't a Diablo game.

But how is the story? I purposely didn't watch or read anything about the story or watch any of the cinematics from the game - assuming there even are cinematics like D2 and D3 had - so I have no idea where they went with the story.

Honestly - from someone who literally grew up on Diablo (my mom bought me D1 in 1998 when I was 7 after I saw my cousins playing it a year earlier when I was ) and played it non-stop until D2 came out, and then did the same with D2 until about 2017 when I started just not playing games as much. I've read all the books that were out when I was going through middle and high school and loved most of those.

I really am a lore junkie for the game and universe.

How disappointing will D4 be? Or is the story not as shitty as the rest of the game looks?

Pls be honest.

-trillions of damage=>checked
-legendary dropping like candies=>checked

story 7/10 for me. but let's be honest, this isn't aaa games. story alone doesn't justify paying for d4.

poe2 got a closer vibe to d2 than d4 lol.

only trillions?


absolute disgrace

I enjoy it. If you’d rather watch the videos on YT you can as well. The games actually quite enjoyable if you just follow the story and enjoy it at a slower pace with some cashews and a club soda.

Bad ofc, they want you to "love" main villain, angels are bad, and other "cool" narratives are everywhere.

Edit: I was talking about main game story. Expansion story is solid 0/10, not even worth discussing.

This post was edited by Madmaxio on Aug 31 2025 05:19am

Diablo 4 has lot of default that you wouldn’t like (Trillion damage and leg dropping 10 at the time), but the story isn’t one of them. Story is really good and cinematic are awesome, definitely worth it to play the story at least.

D4 has the best story/storytelling in any game I ever played.
I grew up long time ago and I remember games in 90s where you played through level and at the end you got a wall of text with 8bit music telling you whats going on.
Back then that was acceptable way of telling story, but I hate when games today are 30 years behind and you are supposed to learn story by reading books found in desert or listening to NPCs in town. For me games like that (eg. PoE2) simply have no story at all, bcs Im not willing to interact with this last century storytelling. Its so lame when GGG is not even willing to spend money on cinematics or cutscenes to make it even on like Warcraft 3 level, barely D2 level (not ressurected). Its almost insulting how little they are actually trying. You basically have no chance of leraning story in the game, you just have some general idea that "something is happening", but no details at all, or you have to go read story somewhere outside of game.

But D4 with its cinematics is on Marvel CGI level, cutscenes including your customized characer look and everything has hands down best storytelling techniques in any game ever.
And I even loved the story itself and really enjoyed it, certainly best in the series for me. VoH expansion is a lot weaker though.

One thing I didnt like was somewhat lacking continuity, even though I didnt personally like D3 story at all, I still find it somewhat lame that they randomly and AFAIK for no reason decided to ignore some aspects of previous game lore (including many books), such as Nephalems.

This post was edited by DJVibrejtr on Aug 31 2025 02:11pm

Liked the story in non xp, the xp story is just designed to stretch out otherwise mundane content but only makes it worse.

Original: 4/10(I liked it but doesn’t mean it was amazing)
Xp: 0

I like the story I thought it was good

It's in a different league to Diablo 3 so there's that. Definitely the best story Blizzard have done in a very long time. Still, it's an arpg so don't expect anything particularly deep...I think these games are best when they gesture at concepts, themes rather than try to explain everything thoroughly as then you see it for all the silliness. D2 does this beautifully but might also be a product of its time. Diablo was always more of a mood piece to me which is why D3 is so jarring. I'd say D4 is fun to play through...never really too cringe and some of the side quests are interesting. Not sure about expansion...I want to try it but people tell me not on par with the main campaign