

Diablo 4 drops your character into a key role thanks to some gruesome early-game events and uses your unique perspective as an outsider with close ties to Lilith as a way of gradually peeling back the layers of secrets surrounding Sanctuary’s creators. In the middle of this cosmic mess is the human population, which is faring about as well as you’d expect: horribly. By trouble, I mean “turning people against each other, inciting murder, and spreading chaos everywhere.” Inarius, Sanctuary’s co-creator and an angel of light, gathers his forces to fight Lilith in an epic battle, and all this plays out against a wider backdrop of an even bigger celestial conflict between heaven and hell. Lilith, the daughter of hatred – hatred here being Mephisto from Diablo 2 – is back in Sanctuary, the land she helped create, and she’s causing trouble. Most of what I did and saw was a bit too familiar, but Diablo 4 executes pretty much everything so well that it’s hard to complain. That feeling stayed with me throughout the rest of Sanctuary.

Despite the sameness, even down to my choice of sorcerer yet again, I still enjoyed zapping hordes of demons and frost orb-ing my way through the bleak countryside. This marked the third time I played through Fractured Peaks in just two months, after all. My first few hours in the final build of Diablo 4 were awfully familiar, which was unsurprising.
