Video Gamers Podcast - Delectable Diablo IV - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Gaming Horadrim Paul, Josh and Ryan are back to save Sanctuary and bring you the much anticipated gaming Deep Dive of Diablo IV. How good is Diablo IV? Does it grow stale? Did they improve from the previous Diablo games or is this a step back in the series? We break it all down in our own unique gaming takes and tell you what we think of this long awaited entry into the Diablo franchise.  Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Skippy, Kiitaclyzm, Gideon Is Lit, Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q  Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Video games covered this week:  Diablo 4 Diablo IV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hello fellow gamers and welcome to Sanctuary, a world created by a renegade angel and demon where certainly nothing could ever possibly go wrong. We are the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast and we are very excited to have you here with us for this deep dive of Diablo 4. I am your host Paul Paul, and joining me, I just found him floating in a coffin on the river clutching a severed finger. It's Josh. Hey, do you know how hard severed fingers are to come by? Of course I'm clutching that thing, man. I can get you a severed finger. You can get me one? You know a guy? I know a guy. I know a guy i know a guy i know a couple guys i can get your toe believe me there are ways dude you don't want to know about it believe me yeah

but walter hell i'd get your toe by three o'clock this afternoon with nail polish and then joining me and josh huh it can't be is that a symbol of the Haradrim? Deckard? Deckard Cain? Can it be you, old friend? It's Deckard. I mean, it's Ryan. The best character in the whole game. I was going to say, that's in honor of, I think, both of our favorite characters. What was his name?

Like, Mashiif or something? Mashiif, baby. Yeah, there you go. That sounds like a Pokemon. I caught a Mashiif, guys. Oh, boy. All right. Today we will be deep diving all things Diablo 4. But before we get started with that, Josh, I think you have a show review to read. Oh, I do. I do indeed. This one comes in from Best Gameo. It's a five-star review and it's titled No other gaming podcast comes close.

Our good friend best game EO says there are so many good things about this podcast. I can't even list them. They talk about anything and everything gaming and bring it all together wonderfully while talking about the latest and greatest or just talking about old school games. Awesome balance of humor and great genuine opinions about all the games I love and want to buy or check out. This should be your one go-to podcast about gaming. It is awesome.

Oh, that's one of my all-time favorite reviews right there. That's awesome. This is how you write a review right here, man. I'm not going to lie. Awesome. Credit to BestGamo for a phenomenal review as well. Oh, that's so nice. Yeah, thank you so much.

And then I think the only other announcement we have is just to let the listeners know that last Monday we did a deep dive of humanity. Today we're deep diving Diablo 4, so that means we're going to break our normal schedule. The next two Mondays will both be bonus round episodes, just so everybody has a little bit of a heads up yeah all right well we've got a lot to cover guys lilith is back someone's got to protect the common folk let's deep dive diablo 4 all right here's the description of the game on battle.net. Diablo 4 is the ultimate action RPG experience with endless evil to slaughter, countless abilities to master, nightmarish dungeons, and legendary loot. And in regards to spoilers, I wanted to let everyone know that

we're going to be talking about the mechanics of the game. We're going to talk about some of the class abilities. We'll talk about the different things that you can do in Diablo. We'll stay free of any major story spoilers until later in the show, and we'll make sure to give you guys a warning, and then we'll give some of our thoughts on story details a little bit later. So starting out the conversation here, I know already we are all huge fans of the Diablo franchise. We don't need to spend a whole lot of time here, but what is your guys' history with Diablo? Played them all, loved them all. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, honestly, I still remember going to the store and buying the Diablo 2. Like Battle Chest? Yeah, the Battle Chest. Yep, I sure do, man. I still remember that. I played Diablo 2. Like Battle Chest? Yeah, the Battle Chest. Yep, I sure do, man. I still remember that. I played Diablo 1. I'll be honest. I don't really remember Diablo 1 a whole lot.

I know I played it, but Diablo 2, man, that was a good day when I picked that up. Diablo 3, played Demon Hunter a lot in that one. We've been waiting a long time for Diablo 4, man. Oh, yeah. What about you, Ryan? You have a lot of fond memories of Diablo? Oh, I have so many fond memories.

Back when you had to use dial-up internet and nobody could pick up the phone and you're in the middle of really crazy, hectic things. And then somebody goes to make a phone call and it kicks you off. Mom, I'm on a bail run. Come on. i'm doing hell cows what the heck yeah i played so much diablo as a kid it was back and you know you got the i bought the same thing the battle chest later but i remember when lord of destruction came out lod and you know it back you had the little cd key and it was like printed in white on the

little back of the little cover and you you, oh man, that game, I played so much of that game with my friends on dial-up. And then me and Paul's cousin Anthony, I would bring over my whole tower and we would set up a different station and then we would just land together for hours and hours and hours over at our aunt's house. And yeah, very, very fond memories of Diablo,

and especially Diablo 2. Yeah, I think 2 in particular is definitely where I spent the most time. I played Diablo 2 first, and then also went back and played the first. Diablo 3 is kind of weird, because I remember playing it a lot. Josh, I know you and I both played it right at release. I don't really remember anything about Diablo 3. It kind of went in one ear and out the other but i remember still liking it but diablo 2 i just remember countless runs whether it was mephisto

or bail you would get the bots that would be running the account and it would be like uh nightmare dash bail run dash 215 and then as soon as you would kill bail they would leave and it would auto open the next lobby and you need to copy and paste 216 join the next run get all your good gear um yeah i absolutely love diablo it was definitely like the first action rpgs that i ever played and i just absolutely fell in love with the franchise dude i had the sickest uh wind force amazon that it was just a machine gun of arrows i was gonna say if one of us doesn't bring up the wind force man i remember it dropping because remember it would make the sound like it would do the and then it would land on the ground but then you had to press alt to highlight everything you know and then i think it just said bow but it

had like the yellow letters on it and you run over and you pick it up and then you were just like i caught it man it's the wind force and you just freak out man because you've been grinding for that thing forever farming sojs and runes and all that stuff yeah it was oh man that that game brings back some memories for sure oh i definitely had a whirlwind barbarian for a while and i also had a paladin that would just chuck all those hammers in the air and they would all just circle around the screen and yeah so so many fond memories now talking about diablo 4 here normally in our deep dives we talk a little bit about story now all the diablo games they all kind of boil down to really it's the same story in all of them.

Really, all you need to know is that demons are bad, and someone has to come kill the demons in order to save all the people. There is, of course, some lore involved, whether it's about the Haradrum, Soulstones, how all the demons are related to each other, like Lilith being the daughter of Mephisto. I think the real magic of Diablo is that even though the storylines are not terribly detailed or necessarily deep, it's just a great story. Good versus evil with incredible cinematics. And I think that's where the real magic is with the story of Diablo. It's not so much like it's terribly well-written dialogue, but you get some of the most memorable animated cinematics of all time in all of the Diablos. Do you guys feel like that's fair? Oh, yeah.

There is something just primal about watching the Lord of Terror go up against an angel that is just glowing wings, clad in armor, just kicking butt. It's so... I don't know, man. They are some of the best cinematics that you can watch in all of gaming. They really do it right. You know, I know there's story that goes in, there's characters and all that. I don't care about none of that, that dude i just want to see angels and demons duking it out yeah you know like the these these incredible like beings that they are man yeah i remember the first time seeing those back i mean blizzard always does a great job with their cinematics but back on diablo 2 scene you know was it in dariel on the second on diablo 2 i believe but yeah those those she's like the first boss in it. Yeah, those angel wings with the big streaks that run across, and then Mephisto and Diablo.

It's always great. It always looks good. It's dark and grimy, but it still has these blasts, fire and the falling running around everywhere. They're always fantastic. And the fourth entry here hits you with that right off the bat the game opens with a 10 minute cut scene setting up the whole story about lilith being summoned into sanctuary so the only thing that i would say is that is a little bit of a

bummer is that since we always have to be on top of all things gaming related like we had already seen the opening cinematic we covered it on a previous episode but man are they they're they're just so fascinating to watch i know josh has said he would give anything for them just to produce a full-length diablo movie that's animated in that style make a billion dollars easy all right so josh just in case there any, any single person listening to this episode who hasn't played any of the Diablo's from like a general standpoint, how would you describe the gameplay of Diablo? Gameplay in Diablo is basically this.

There. Was that so quiet? Just courts, not picking you up. I don't even know. But I just clicked my mouse like a thousand times. So you'll hear it when you edit it. But just leave it at that.

So left, left, left, left, right, right, right, left, left, left, left, left, right, right, right. So that's the gameplay is you are just clicking furiously. I know there's some weirdos out there that play on controller. Listen, if you're a console player i you know i can't fault you for that but if you're playing diablo on pc and you're playing with a controller uh stop it number one uh you're weird um shots fired at almost everybody we know we are the only ones playing this keyboard and mouse on pc no there is a lot of a lot of the purists that are playing on keyboard mouse it's just this weird bunch of people

that think controller is the way to go there. No, for real though, gameplay in Diablo, this is an action RPG. It's isometric, so it's top-down. You are basically a character. You are wading into hordes of monsters. You have skills that you use that are on cooldown timers, and then loot drops, and then you get upgrades through the loot, your character gets stronger, you spend skill points, and that is the basic gameplay loop boiled down to as simple as you can make it. Yeah, I think that's fair. And there's also a large portion of the game being finding better gear, whether that's

rerunning certain bosses to get loot or joining new servers or checking vendors. There's always that hunt for the next piece of gear because the game is designed to be infinitely replayable. It's not where you just play a campaign and quit. It's designed to constantly be pulling you in for that gear. Looking at the Diablo series as a whole over time because you know we're now looking at you know like 25 plus years of diablo looking at four compared to previous centuries like i don't know how much you guys really remember about the specifics of one two and three but they have made a lot of changes over time so like for example in older diablos you could run around

with a ton of healing potions and mana potions i know for me that's like very deeply ingrained in my brain is the sound of using those potions i can perfectly hear it in my brain yep um they've gotten rid of that to where now your mana just regenerates over time you can only carry a maximum number of health potions so you can't really cheese your way through a lot of stuff uh they've gotten rid of corpse runs they got rid of that in diablo 3 um they've definitely made a lot of changes four is by far the most mmo-esque is there anything in particular about four that you either like or dislike and how the series has gone i definitely liked the uh not having to have the you know carry the tome of identifier and the tome of town portals.

Goodness, having to identify everything? Oh, gosh. That was so annoying back when they did that. I love the fact that that's still a thing and then the corpse runs from D3, but I did want to correct myself real quick. I know I said in Daryl, but I know I'll get hecked

for that, but it was Tyrael was the angel in Diablo 2. That was my bad. I thought you meant the first demon that you fight in Diablo 2. I'm pretty sure she's the first one. Yeah, you were talking about... Yeah, she's the one with all the arms or whatever, I think. You were talking about the angels, and I said that on accident.

I'd get heck for that. Anyways, yeah. Yeah, know your lore, Brian. Yeah, I thought you liked Diablo. Poser. Yeah, Poser lore, Ryan. Yeah, I thought you liked Diablo. Poser. Yeah, Poser. This guy probably didn't even play. Oh, man.

Yeah, for me, it's weird because everybody knows I like difficult games. They have definitely improved the quality of life over the years, like the no corpse runs. I mean, we all remember you had to save up for your Scroll of town portals. You had to buy potions, corpse runs, all that stuff. I mean, there was definitely some inconvenience to it, but it also gave the game some character too. And so it's this weird thing where I really appreciate a lot of the quality of life issues in Diablo 4. I mean, they have just made this game as easy to play as possible. And I mean that from a quality of life example. You can town portal at any time.

You can salvage and sell, and they give you a horse so you can run around faster. I mean, all this different stuff. But then they added level scaling in Diablo 4, and i am not a fan of level scaling in these games like we've talked about this before especially in mmos where it's like i want to run up to a monster that i've not seen before and have it just one shot me you know and then be like oh i'm not supposed to be up against this guy yet but i'm writing your name down and I'm coming back later for you. And so there's definitely some improvements, but there's definitely some things that Diablo 4 does that I'm not – it is a negative to me, I guess, too. I did like, though, that on the opposite side of that with the level scaling is you could run with somebody who's like level 13 or 14.

Yeah, which is fantastic. You're not just wrecking everything you know you still have to you you know you got your other uh aspects and other things that you have that you've advanced on so it's a little easier than before but it's still you know you're like oh oh crap i still gotta be careful you know yep yeah i think that yeah it's kind of a two-edged sword right either it makes for easier teaming up with your friends but but at the same time, yeah, I mean, I can see arguments on both sides. The one thing I will say that I felt is kind of missing in four is a little bit of that like discovery.

Even though we already poked fun at it, like when you would identify your gear in Diablo 2, that was always really exciting because you would see, oh, what does this gear have? I absolutely loved the Haradric Cube from Diablo 2, where you could throw in three gems, and then it would upgrade it to the next type, or combine certain gear, and then it would add sockets and things like that. That was always kind of fun. Or tossing in Wurtz's leg and creating a portal to the cow level, right? That kind of stuff was really fun to tinker with and mess around. That was also still early internet days, and I remember just dragging and clicking things and testing it. That kind of stuff's kind of missing from this one. Even though the world is very big, I felt like there wasn't a whole lot of discovery, even though

there's more places to go, if that that makes sense i feel like you're in combat constantly for better or worse in diablo 4 it's kind of just like you're you're constantly fighting yeah i i didn't i didn't find myself searching for things like going to different areas to to try to find a certain thing or try to find something because yeah you're just it kind of guides you and you're always on your path and battling and stuff like that. Yeah. All the gear immediately either sucks or it's an upgrade. There's not a whole lot of in between or anything here. Yeah.

So in Diablo four, there are five classes. We've got sorcerer, barbarian, rogue, necromancer, and druid. What class did you guys pick and why? I went with rogue. It fits my play style. i played it in the beta i tried the sorcerer in the beta as well and i did not like the sorcerer even though they were super op in the beta too honestly they're still kind of op but um the i like the rogue because it can play two different ways you can play ranged or you can play melee and it's very, very squishy, but it's also tons

of damage if you play it right. So it's that high risk, high reward for me, where if I get out of position or I get stunned and I don't have my, like my, my stun cool down, uh, ready, I'm dead. Like just hands down. I know I'm going to die kind of thing, but I really like that style of just get in, do a ton of damage, get out, pay attention to positioning and all that stuff. So I, I, I think i picked the right class for me because i had a blast with it brian's a man of class and i know he picked the right one what would you pick ryan sork bros for life we sure were what makes you like sorcerer so much um i don't know that was that was always one of my favorites even back you know in diablo 2. But I just loved that class. I love being able to kind of pop in and out.

I love the teleport. I love that. And then I had this Arclash build that was just ridiculous. It was so good. I know in the beginning we did, with our ultimates, we did the big snake. The big snake, yeah. The big flashy snake. But there was just...

It's just the way I... Because this was almost... It wasn't really like a ranged sort because you'd have to get in to do your stuns and your cooldowns and ice shields and all that stuff. So I was popping in and out, teleporting in and out. So it was kind of just

constant. You're constantly clicking all the buttons using all your cooldowns. I barely went through any mana with this build because the only thing I used was the Hydra for mana. Everything else was just cooldown resets and stun abilities. So I had a blast playing the Sorc. I tried a Barb and I tried a Rogue.

And I had some fun playing them, but yeah, the Sorc is the one that I loved. Yeah, I tried a little bit of necromancer and barbarian but sorcerer was just way too much fun i felt like the mobility and i just love magic casters yeah like why would i run around as a barbarian that just jumps and clobbers stuff when i can play someone who's conjuring lightning fire ice like to me that's just always more fun and i hate chasing mobs that are running when you're like a barbarian or something like that you know you right click anyone anywhere and you're gonna be able to hit them so i i stuck with sorcerer which i also played in the beta all right well we're gonna go go

ahead and take a short break and we'll be right back all right continuing our discussion here about the diablo 4 classes the way progression works in this one is uh you know very similar to the other diablos and really any action rpg you level up over time you get to put points into your skill tree and in the beginning you have access to what they call basic skills, which is like your generic vanilla attack, your left-click attack ability. Then you start to unlock your core skills, which unlock your secondary attack. Then you hit a certain part of the skill tree that's all about defensive abilities. Then there's a couple more trees down the line, which are more class-specific.

Then you get to unlock your ultimate ability and then you unlock a really powerful passive ability in the end of the skill tree so walk me through your guys approach like what was your thought process as you went through it did you follow guides did you tinker around in the beginning how did you approach building your character i for me a lot of the fun is just coming up with my own builds. The internet's out there. There's people that don't want to put the thought into it. I get that completely. You do you. But for me, a lot of the fun of a skill tree and a character like this is trying to come up with the build that I want to play. So I do a lot of experimenting on that.

And so I'm constantly trying something and then, and then going, yeah, okay, that kind of worked. Let me try. Now I want to try a range build. Ah,

that one's not so fun. Let me go, let me go try this build now. Okay. Let me go back to range and try this other ability. And I, I just do a lot of like bouncing around until I find something that really lands.

And then I kind of settle into that and go, okay, let's see how strong I can make this at that point. And so that's how I enjoy it. I know that there's always that optimal build out there. And if you search for best rogue build, you're going to get 5,000 YouTube videos that are all screaming at you, best build, end game build, must check this out and all that stuff. And it's kind of like, I just want to have fun with it, man, and play the way that I want to play. So for me, that's how I do it. I just theorycraft and try stuff out, see what works, see what doesn't. I am the exact opposite. I see that video and I click. That's how I got.

I was like, oh, that hourglass build. I was like, oh, man, I'm not high enough level yet to make it make sense. But I can't wait till I can do it. Because that's what's fun. Killing everything you walk up to. You can make an argument for that. I got a wife. I got kids.

I got a business. I got a house to take care of. I got too much stuff to try to mess around and try to figure out a build i want to just go in and wreck everything so i'm the guy that and i don't blame anyone that does it either way but i i i look up okay this is the most uh proficient build and this is gonna just nuke everything that's what i'm doing oh that's really funny i fall almost exactly in the middle of you guys so when i played i got and by the way i exclusively played on world tier 2 the first playthrough i never dropped it to one at all i feel like you don't have to no i felt like a lot of enemies in diablo because a lot of, they have procedurally generated traits, like maybe they're resistant to a certain type of magic. So my thought process was, I want to have abilities

that use all the different magic types. So my primary attack was like the ice bolt, but then my secondary attack was chain lightning. And then my ultimate was like the giant Jafar from Aladdin, you know, snake that's enormous and sucks enemies into the middle while doing damage. And what's funny is I was playing as that and I was having no problems at all playing the game. But I could tell that I probably had a really bad build because I started kiting a lot while killing enemies. And I realized normally that's not really how you have to play Diablo on World Tier 2. And so then I did look up my first leveling build, and I just quickly remapped everything to what they said. And I could not believe how much faster I was killing stuff.

It was legit probably three to four times as fast at that point. I didn't realize how important the defensive skills are. So for Sorcerer, really all you do is you select your one ability. Everything else is defense. To the point that you can face tank everything in this game, including all the bosses on world tier two, standing still doing arc lashes directly in their face and just casting magic. I don't know that that's necessarily the best way to play.

If you want to steamroll everything in your path, you can do it. If you want to tinker with your own builds and play your own way, you can do that as well. So it's funny. I went through about two thirds of the campaign before I looked up an actual build and then, you know, retooled it at that point. All right. Now, in regards to the gameplay loop of Diablo 4, there is a lot that you can do, whether it's out in the open world or just like individually on your own. You can advance the storyline just by playing through the campaign. You can engage in PVP. There are world events that give you powerful loot depending on how quickly you complete them. There are world bosses to kill. There are collectibles and challenges in each region on the map that give you different rewards.

There are aspect dungeons, nightmare dungeons. Plus plus you can always bump up the difficulty and play through the campaign again on a higher setting and get even better gear uh guys you can even work as a bounty hunter for a tree all right like that that's how many things you can do in diablo 4 no shortage of choice i think probably the most important thing to talk about in that list are the aspect dungeons because that plays such a central role in gearing your player. So Ryan, will you tell us a little bit about what aspects are and how they work and how it impacts a build? Yeah, no, it definitely impacts the build. So once you get a little further into the game, you're going to start getting legendary weapons.

So on the bottom, you'll see these different kind of descriptions on perks that you get with said weapon it's it's like an orange riding with like a yellow star next to it so as you as you get further and you get those weapons you'll start getting these different perks that give you you know 1.1 cooldown off of this ability or you know this much damage on that so so it's different perks throughout the weapons or whatever the item is you know armors and stuff like that so there's two ways to get them is uh they have like you said the aspect dungeons so you can come in and you can you know complete the dungeon and you you'll get you know set items with the aspects and then you can go to the uh oculus and you can take an item if you have one that that you really like it but it's a lot it's a lot lower level item and you want that perk still you can actually uh take it to him it'll

destroy the item but then you get that aspect in there that you can put onto another item um which is pretty cool so like i said it does destroy the item but you can put on another one so if it's a low level doesn't really matter um not all the aspects go to every item. So some of them you're not able to do it. And then they also don't stack. So if you have two items with the same aspect, it'll be kind of grayed out so they won't stack. But it's definitely a big factor once you get to a higher level if you're able to channel that with your regular build and do those to to drop cooldowns in half or do different things like that where you can just

keep stacking things in and just running through everything i i love the aspects in this game to be honest i think it's one of the coolest things um in the game it keeps you hungry for that next piece of loot yeah hey i found this dungeon it is paul mentioned it early it's like you know there's not a lot of discovery in this game like for new things but as you go around the map you will discover these dungeons and then if you hover over it it will say hey here's the aspect that this dungeon unlocks and it may not be for your character like they're you know they're through the whole world. But you guys are sorcerers. And you're like, hey, I found this sorcerer dungeon. Will you help me run it?

And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. And then maybe we'll go run one of the rogue ones so that I can get the aspect that I need. So you're definitely looking for these dungeons. And that's part of the fun is when you find it, then you're like, oh, cool. I know I'm about to get this cool aspect that I can then put in my gear for me the aspects are what you build your like your build around like like that they are the cool thing like you get your skills and you can definitely theorycraft a little bit and put points in your skills and stuff like that but you have a very limited skill bar in this game which is also a detriment to me because it's like you give me all these neat skills but you're saying I only have like four slots that I can slot these into because the other two are your basic attack

and your core attack. So then I'm like, you give me 12 abilities and I can only use four of them at a time. Like, come on, man. But the aspects are phenomenal. They are skill changing, skill enhancing, build changing things. I would find a piece of gear that had an aspect on it that would do something. And I would be like, I have to try this out. Let me change my whole build to try to build around this aspect and see how that works. Like for instance, rogues get this skill called flurry where you just stab like in front of you, but you get an aspect that says flurry now does aoe damage and does like 12 more damage so it's like well wait a minute that changes everything because now i can hit everything around me in a circle versus only what's in front of me

so let me just let me run with that and see what i can do and there's i i mean i feel like there's hundreds of these aspects in the game so i that me, was one of my favorite parts of this game. And I do like that you know what you're going to unlock in that dungeon. It's not just a 1 in 120 chance that you get the one you're looking for or one that's useful. You know ahead of time whether or not it's worth that investment. And they're not long dungeons. They are procedurally generated. So even though the world of sanctuary is designed

and crafted and you know exactly the layout of that world anytime you go into a dungeon it's procedurally generated so it's different every time different enemies different layout and then as soon as you complete it which i would say most dungeons on world tier 2 they take you what maybe like 15 minutes i was gonna say 15 minutes yeah right around there yeah they're not terribly long but they are fun and you can run them solo or bring a buddy and if you bring a friend yeah you both get that you know aspect unlocked now we were able to play a lot as a group and i think one of the most memorable times that we all got to play was when we all took down our first world boss together so we got to fight i'm still not

sure how to pronounce it avarice the gold cursed i believe is correct um funny fight all right who who wants to describe what this guy does as he runs around like vomiting molten gold everywhere i guess yeah that's that's my kind of friend, man. When are you guys going to puke me up some gold? Come on. I know, right? This fight's bananas. So this is, you know, there are world bosses.

There's these map-wide events that happen and everybody that's on that server comes running and kind of does all that stuff. And there's a few different ones too, which is kind of nice. I think there's three different world bosses as of right now um this avarice the gold cursed i had never seen before so i thought this was really cool it's like this gigantic weird fat troll looking thing that's toting around like this giant treasure chest and the cool thing about these boss fights is they

start off kind of slow and timid and then then they go through these phases where by the end, this thing's just going bananas. And I just remember this dude puking up gold piles, and if you were standing in the gold piles, you'd get wrecked. But then gold coins would fall out everywhere, and then they would kind of sit on the ground. Yeah, and then they would explode. And if you got caught in one of those,

you were one-shotted, man. So it was really funny to watch people run for their lives in all this. And it was really distracting. And this guy would make a little teleporter and then run into it, but then come running out in a different direction. So it was a lot of moving back and forth and getting out of the way and stuff like that. I thought it was a really fun fight.

And a lot of reses. Yeah, and a lot of reses. A lot of res reses a lot of people be dying to them gold piles man a lot of people just literally standing in the fire not moving i think a lot of them were like no experience in the mmo world or anything like that they're like oh whoops yeah and i got no good loot out of that like the pieces that i got were i mean they were powerful but they just weren't good for how i played well i just yeah i i after i beat it because i'm in uh you know tier three now i was in a dungeon i'm like okay i'll do some dungeons solo so i was in one i was at the last boss he was giving me a little bit of trouble and i hit up my little brother jake and and i'm like hey man you want to do this real quick he's like oh i'm at a world boss it started

in two minutes and i was like oh all right i'm at a world boss. It started in two minutes. And I was like, oh, all right, I'm coming. I left the dungeon, went to the world boss. We beat it. You know, again, I don't think I got the best loot. We didn't get the mastery or whatever of it by like seconds, which sucked. And then I went back and I was like, I was hoping it would keep me where I was. No, I had to redo the whole thing. But it was worth it.

It was fun. I forget who we fought, but it was a fun battle. It's always more fun in groups, no matter what. Oh, that's for sure. Yeah. Uh,

before moving on just very quickly, we want to let our listeners know about options for support on Patreon. So our show is almost entirely funded by our listeners. So if you like what we do and want to support and keep our podcast running, you can sign up over at multiplayer squad.com starting at $5 a month for support. You get some amazing perks like all our episodes ad-free and a day early, and you also get two bonus episodes every month. So if you

want to give us a little bit of a tip or a thank you, even if you just sign up for a month or two, or long-term support is obviously great, you can go ahead and do that at MultiplayerSquad.com. Okay, so I think that different people can play this game very differently. And this was never more apparent than when we were playing with our friends or in different groups. So for example, our buddy Andy, who was a guest host for our Outriders episode, he skips every single cutscene in Diablo, does not care at all about the story, and will go way out of his way to do every single world event. It does not matter how close or how far. If Andy sees or hears one on the map, he will beeline it every single time. Me personally, I think the story and

the cutscenes are probably the best thing that this game has to offer. World events, I don't really care about at all. But yet, we were still having a blast in our completely own different ways. So I think you can find joy and or frustration in a lot of different ways, depending on what kind of gamer you are. So I was just kind of curious like did you guys mostly like shotgun the campaign did you focus on dungeons or side quests uh were you trying to 100 certain regions before moving on how did you guys kind of approach the way you played i was i oh go ahead i was gonna say i kind of a little bit of everything at first i got really distracted anytime. I love dungeons. So to me, dungeons were like the classic Diablo experience.

And so I would do just about every dungeon I came across, even if it wasn't really my aspect, you know, just for the fun of, because there's always the boss fight at the end and you've got a good chance at loot and stuff like that. You got to go find the butcher too. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was one of the fun fights that I thought you were going to mention was us kiting the butcher and trying to all stay alive in that fight and stuff too. But then... And you can just get lost for hours, man, just doing all these little side missions and the little cellars that you find and the dungeons and the world events and that stuff. But eventually I went, I got a job to do. I got to play the campaign and actually get

through this game so we can talk about it. And so for about two days, I just did nothing but beeline the campaign straight through. I wanted to experience... Because that's where you get to the endgame content once you beat the campaign. And I really wanted to see what that was. So as much as I was having fun just wandering around the world and doing things and all that, eventually settled down, played through the campaign. This is where you get, like you said, Paul, you get the cut scenes and the story kind of comes together. And it's, you know, that's a lot of the wow moments as far as the Blizzard cinematics and stuff go. But that's kind of how I approached it i did do a decent bit of end game stuff that's when you beat the campaign you get to the next world tier and you

kind of open up all of the the things that they have for people that have beaten the game at that point which is a lot it is a lot yeah which is so cool like i you know you beat it and then you look at your map after you're like whoa there's still a lot i can do yeah i i was uh kind of the same i everybody knows i love cinematics and games the more the better if a game's half and half that's my type of game for sure but i i also get you know sucked into the little side quests and the missions and they're those people's stories like you do something and get the guy and you find his son's remains and you're like oh you know his kid died and you bring him back to him and then i'm like oh what is this person and there's another exclamation point you start going and i'm like oh wait i start get itchy

for a cinematic so then i i go back to the main campaign and i'm like i need some more i need some more and you play through so many lost journals in this game oh yeah you run across them every two to three minutes there's a lost journal and a side quest to do yep oh look a mud pile oh a journal yeah for me i really love the campaign so i primarily shotgun to that i had heard that you can pretty much get very close to level 50 if you only do the campaign so a lot of people were even saying you're better off doing more side stuff later. So I primarily just focused on the campaign. However, I would pepper in side quests and I have to clear every cellar. I don't necessarily clear every dungeon if it's not an aspect that I need. But if I see a cellar that I can clear out in 20 seconds and get some gear, I will be line it for every, every seller and then get that little green check Mark that it's been

completed. Yeah. All right. So I think now's the time to get into story spoilers. All right. So if you don't want to hear anything about end game story here, maybe skip ahead about 10 minutes, but here's where we can just kind of open it up.

What do you guys want to talk about? Is there anything that you found exciting disappointing what were your favorite parts low moments what do you guys want to talk about dude go okay i'm gonna steal it from you then yeah that battle at the end was so freaking cool lilith oh man that with v and r yes yeah oh my Cool. Lilith. Oh, man. Lilith V. Inarius. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Are you talking about the cut scene? Yeah. Dude. That was just... I can't even... You can't describe it, how cool that was to me. I was just sitting there in my chair with goosebumps.

Like, oh, oh, oh, oh! No way. Oh, my gosh. Oh! Oh! Yeah, it was just... Man, that's... I know, Josh, you felt the same about it. So, you know, I won't take too much of the thunder with it, but man, that thing just blew me away when she stabs a spear.

I'm like, yeah, dude, I, I've never been so riveted to my computer screen. I honestly, maybe ever, like I, it was so cool that i i like instantly like paused the game you can't really pause it but like left it in a safe spot and then came to discord and said i think i just witnessed the coolest cut scene i've ever seen in all of video gaming like and i legitimately still think that i mean that thing blew me away, man. And that's why I was like, give me a full-length movie like this? Yeah. Dude, I'll pay $30 for a movie ticket to go see that, man. That is bananas good.

When I was a kid, I think there was an option back on D2 where you could just go and watch the cut scenes. And I used to do that. I think you just go and I just watched the cut scenes. That's how much I loved them. So this one, that cut scene anytime you guys saw the Lilith petals on the ground Oh, you know like how you had like I was anytime I saw those I was just like oh, yes, dude Yeah, like it's in time. I don't understand how anyone I had another buddy My buddy Sean that I play with a lot. I used to play destiny with him a ton and I

Same thing. I see it. I get so excited and I click it. And then in the background, I hear... You hear all the fighting. Yeah, I hear all the fighting because he just skipped right through and he didn't care. And I'm like, whatever, dude. If you die, you die. I'm watching this. Yeah.

I mean, story-wise, I will say I really love this genre of like angels versus demons the keanu reeves movie constantine is is right up my alley man because that is just oh i love that stuff so much man yeah and so you know this fits into there i will say that the cut scenes were absolutely exquisite this this kind of what lilith is trying to do with sanctuary and you trying to stop her is really neat. There's parts of the game where I felt like they just didn't know where to go with the characters and the non-cutscene stuff. Like you're following Lorath and then you meet this guy

and then, oh, well, we've got to go over here to get this person and now we've got to go do that. And I felt like I was just on this giant, like fetch quest slash let's go meet this person and now we've got to go do that and i felt like i was just on this giant like fetch quest slash let's go meet this person because maybe they can help us kind of thing a little bit of a wild goose chase yeah and that's exactly what i started feeling like is like i'm just running around this world with like where is the direction like like you're not telling me a story at this point you know and so the cut scenes would tell the story, but the gameplay didn't really other than like minor parts where it's like, okay, well, this is how we're going to fight Lilith.

And then I kind of went, okay, yeah, but then they've got me going four or five different places. And again, nothing really makes sense at that point. So it's, it's really weird to me because in game storytelling, not so good. Cinematic storytelling, freaking awesome, man. It kind of feels a little bit like we need to make the game longer. And how are we going to do it?

Okay, well, let's throw in an escort quest. And whether or not it works for you, now it's a 10-minute escort across the desert. And now you've got to trek all the way to the East coast and go find a ship. And maybe you can find the part that you need over there. And, um, some of the storytelling just wasn't terribly fleshed out.

Like the fact that Elias is immortal. And then they're kind of like, well, he just kept a part of him alive inside the severed finger. And it's like, okay, so it's like a Harry Potter horcrux, I guess guess but they

don't explain how it works yeah like why don't we do the same thing elias did like if any of us can have immortality i don't know but we have to go back a second to and you guys know that i was going to complain about this but the anarius and lilith cut scene it's absolutely incredible i agree probably the best cut scene i've ever seen in a game. The problem is that almost half of that cinematic is the Diablo official cinematic trailer that got released like two months ago. Josh and I watched it, covered it on a This Week in Gaming episode. So when it started, and then you do get more. So like their trailer was three minutes out of the eight minute cut scene so i was a little bit perturbed that i got almost half of the best scene of the whole game before the game came out without any real context so i don't really like when companies

do that i feel like they could have chosen something else to highlight cinematically, or maybe add an extra cinematic somewhere, and then just don't show me half of the end of the game. Dude, the intro cinematic was great. Why not show that to people? It's the first thing they see. You're not spoiling anything. They showed us that too. We had all that before. I'm just saying, I get what you're saying saying though, because it's like, have confidence in your product, save the best thing for discovery. Let people, like let people experience that you don't, it's like a comedy movie trailer, right? Where they show funny jokes. And then when you watch the movie and they're like, well, these were the best jokes in the movie. Like, then you're just left kind of disappointed at that point.

Or like, imagine the sixth sense. If they they're like you won't believe what character was dead the whole time like if that was in the trailer you'd be like what wait so i know spoiler spoiler yeah so so as as as much as i loved all of these cut scenes they knew it was good and they showed all of it to us too early so they knew if we show this it looks so good everyone's gonna buy it but then there was only so much more we hadn't seen so i was just like oh man yeah that was amazing and i'm glad that there was five more minutes that i hadn't seen but i just wish maybe the cinematic trailer even just shorten it maybe maybe make that 90 seconds instead of three minutes and maybe i would have felt a little

different well because you think like good how many i mean how many more sales did they really get from showing that much of it you know it's probably not much anyone that was gonna buy it is gonna buy it and that was good enough like you said 90 seconds would have been more than enough to hype everybody up so that it was frustrating too yeah that just just you see that much of it and you're like okay well i've already seen this you know for something that was so amazing yeah and you know what worked really well for me story-wise? Because we knew nothing about it before. It was the whole relationship with Lorath and Donan.

I loved everything with these characters. These are like two guys who served in the Haradrim, and they've got this long history where there is a certain element of respect that they have for one another, but a lot of animosity and tension. And you see that play out over the course of the game. And here, Donan's son dies, and Donan wonders, should I have done something different? And you've got this really moving death scene right before you fight Lilith when Donan dies. And right before he dies, I did actually chuckle a little bit because he's like, did I do enough?

And Laura straight up stares him in the eyes for eight seconds until Donan dies. And then he goes more than enough. And I was like, you could have said it when he was still alive. But like, I thought that was such a cool moving moment. I thought that their whole relationship was really interesting.

I loved all of that a lot. Anything else you guys want to talk about story-wise? No, I mean, that's really it. It was a tale of two different things for me. That's basically my summary for the story is the in-game story stuff. I really didn't care for that much. I mean, I'm not saying it was bad and I hated it. It just really didn't add anything for me. You know what you

can tell is if you would press a button during the cutscene and if it lets you skip dialogue, you can probably skip it and you're not going to miss a lot. But if it says press escape to skip cutscene, you knew not to do that. Yeah. That's true. That was a good measure.

Did you guys skip any cutscenes or anything? No, I didn't. I didn't skip a single one. I didn't either.. Did you guys, did you guys skip any cut scenes or anything? No, I didn't skip a single one. I didn't either. I would sometimes read the dialogue and just like skip. Oh yeah. I can read faster than they can voice it,

but yeah, but never skipped the full cut scenes. No, that would be insane. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and take our last ad break and then we'll finish out the show with our regular segments.

Okay. Josh and Ryanyan we're back we're gonna close out this diablo 4 deep dive with our regular segments let's start out by offering up some hot takes all right anyone want the honors who wants to go first maybe we should clarify hot takes for anyone who maybe isn't aware this is where we're going to intentionally exaggerate aspects of this game just to have a hot take right it's something that we believe but maybe it's a little bit exaggerated i would i would never exaggerate any stance never never ever well what's funny is i my hot take was legitimately going to be this game has the best cinematics I've ever seen. But I don't know that that's actually a hot take at this point, because it seems like everybody agrees where it's like, no, man, this thing's

a banger. I've never seen anything like that. Metal Gear Solid, I think, could make a case. See, I've never played those. So I'm actually going to pivot off of my hot take to something different. And I don't know that I have played a game where I've had so much fun and then gotten to the endgame part, which is usually where the content starts that I really enjoy, and then just hit a wall so hard that I nearly knocked myself out. I get that Blizzard tried to provide all this endgame stuff for you to do, but I find all of it to be very, very

boring in the regard of like, I'm not accomplishing anything here. If you like the loot grind, man, that's what this is geared for. But it's not jiving with me, man. And I was expecting to play this game for months and months and months and do that loot grind a la Diablo 2

kind of thing. And I got to the end game and I felt like John Travolta. You know what I mean? Like the meme where he's just looking around and he's kind of going like, where is everybody? And I just was like, what am I supposed to do? Because I did that, I did that, I did this, and I did this, and I don't want to do them 500 more times. Go grind your renown, Josh. Go grind for loot. Go grind your levels. You know? And so for me, my hot take is, I don't know that a game has knocked me out with hitting that gameplay wall more than Diablo four has. So I almost have exactly the same hot take Josh. And I know recently we've been on polar opposite ends, but I had exactly the same take.

I I'll just to make it a little bit of a different take. I'm going to say that difficulty in this game is way out of whack like i played it on world tier two because the game does not let you go straight into nightmare and they recommend that you're level 50 blah blah blah i played on world tier two i think in my entire playthrough i think i died maybe six times and two of them was to the world boss. And the fact that you can play through this game and just wreck face, there's a time and a place for it. I like having just a little bit of a challenge. And so when I finished the campaign and I got up to,

I think I, I stopped playing at like level 48. I did the capstone dungeon. We played that together. The three of us got on. And then once I unlocked nightmare mode, I was like, you know know what even though the game's been so easy up to this point i i just didn't have the right carrot in front of me because grinding will never do it for me as soon as it becomes a loot grind or a reputation grind or um just getting every single green check on every dungeon, every seller, do every world event.

I don't, that doesn't do anything for me. And I would have loved to play through this game on Nightmare because I have a feeling that that difficulty would be exactly where I would want it on the dial, but I'll never do it because I already know everything that happens. I have no desire to play through again. So I don't know how many hours I actually played of Diablo four. Maybe it was like 17 to 28. Like I have no idea. It could be anywhere in that range. Loved every minute of it. And now I have zero desire. It's like when you finally hit that breaking point in rust where you had your mega base and all your AKs and it all gets looted and it's like all right well we're done until next season yeah that's kind of how i felt where i was like you

know what i'm done i loved it but i'm gonna uninstall it because the end game just doesn't work for me but i can see why it would for others uh what about you ryan what's what's your big hot take 17 hours i think i did that in one day one time you probably did some of us were playing humanity while others were only playing diablo i played quite a bit i played quite a bit i was guiding the characters uh in diablo is what i was doing yeah yeah there you go um i was you know honestly i i was kind of on the same plane as you guys with that this end end game, I'm definitely not as drawn as I would thought I would be to, to playing more to once we got to that level, you know, I'm kind of like, okay, well, I mean, I can do all these things that'd be exciting, you know, to get them done,

but I'm just, I don't have that itch now that all the cinematics done, I've seen all that stuff. And now it's just, like you said, it's just kind of a loop grind but um other than that my other one was i as much as i liked the cinematics and i thought some of the stuff was cool i honestly thought this story kind of sucked it does in a way you can easily make that argument it's not very well written yeah i thought that it was just it didn't you know and like i said the cinematics draw you in. It was amazing. It was beautiful. But throughout the game, I just wasn't as drawn in as I thought I would be.

And it didn't have the progression like you guys were saying. Like Diablo 2, I know we keep harping back to it, but it was just one of my favorite games ever. So you'd have the axe, but the axe felt different because it's a different environment. It's a different world you have to actually go to the desert or you go to that kind of jungle area in act three and stuff so it made that progression it made it feel so much different and there was different creatures and and so i just it sucked me in so much more than than this one did and i just i was i was really aside from you know all the cinematics and everything, I was really let down with the story.

I get that. I do. I mean, I think you nailed it, that the cinematics are incredible, but the overall story and what Lil is trying to do, and it's like, it's not the best. Yeah, no. That's why I kind of poked fun at it in the beginning, right? Demons are bad.

Someone has to kill this demon. And that's really what the story boils down to. See, but I like that stuff, man. That's why I kind of poked fun at it in the beginning, right? Demons are bad. Someone has to kill this demon. And that's really what the story boils to. See, but I like that stuff, man. I do like it. It's not bad. But the story is not very detailed. Yeah. All right.

Well, those are some of our thoughts. Josh, you've got some community reviews to read. We always pull community reviews just so you don't have to take our word for things. You can get some other opinions on the game. Always try to pull some positive and some negative ones. This is a Blizzard game, so I went to Metacritic for this since it's not on Steam. All right, this first one is rated a 2. This person did not like Diablo 4.

And they say, beautiful game, open world, cool effects, but boring as bleep? Probably the first Diablo I am bored to play after literally 10 days. Level scaling killed the motivation for investing your time in the game to get overpowered. There is simply no point in playing once you finish the dull campaign. Do some side quests, dungeons, nightmare dungeons. You're at around level 70 and thinking, OMG, I literally am forcing myself to grind this, to do almost the exact same thing over and over. And what's with this archaic online-only mode? There is no way at the moment to play with randoms online besides events. I did not expect

that Diablo 4 will be just a time waster, a bit disappointing overall. I can understand what they're saying, but if you get all the way to level 70 you probably should rate the game higher than a two because it means you definitely enjoyed it for a while yeah yeah that's like on steam when you see 2200 hours i know yeah thumbs down this game sucks it's like okay yeah obviously um that one just did touch on some of the repetitive nature, level scaling. I despise level scaling, especially in this game. So, all right, this next one is a perfect 10. And it says, Blizzard really knocked it out of the park. Diablo 4 is a return to its roots.

The atmosphere, graphics, the audio and music, cinematics, gameplay, quest lines, and story are all top notch. This is the true sequel to Diablo 2. It's the best launch I've seen in a while with short, less than a minute queue times with zero server downtime when I've tried logging in, which is fantastic considering how Blizzard launches normally go. As long as you're not the first hardcore player to reach level 100 and die because a server went down. Yeah, so bad. I will give them kudos.

The launch of such an anticipated game was buttery smooth, man. I did get kicked from the server randomly a couple times throughout the very first three or four days, but it would always let me right back in at that point too. So I do have to give them kudos for that. very first three or four days but it would always let me right back in at that point too so i do have to give them kudos for that and i will say the graphics and the music are both unbelievably this had some of the best music i've ever heard in a game yeah and atmosphere the graphics in this thing the way that what they do with the perspective on that stuff is really cool

okay this next one is a three so this is not good and that says giving it a three for art and sound this is diablo by name meaning that's the only reason they gave it a three right this is diablo by name only i don't know why they decided to add level scaling it totally breaks the game i hate it so much level one is just as powerful as a level 90 it's a ridiculous concept remove it or add the option like Witcher 3 did. This feels like a cheap port of their terrible mobile Diablo Immortals game with updated graphics. I hope they remove the level scaling. It is by far the worst flaw of this game. You can never, ever feel powerful when you level up. It doesn't matter because so did the enemy.

Yeah, and that's completely true. But of course, if you want to play with a friend and you're level 88 and they're level 30, you can't play together. I mean, we've done that in a lot of games before, though, where you say, let me re-roll a character closer to your level or something like that. You can work around it. It's weird because it's a quality of life thing,

but for me, it's a huge detriment to the game itself. I do agree. All right. weird because it's a quality of life thing but for me it's a huge detriment to the game itself i do all right um and then uh i've got we're we're running out of time here so i'm going to read one absolute middle of the road one on this one this person rated it a six and they said the story is good the graphics are nice and the music and sound is immersive i enjoyed going through the campaign however diablo 4 is not an action r. It is an MMO RPG with all the bad stuff like level scaling, online only, timed world bosses, and hell tides, and none of the good aspects of an MMO like the social aspects, trading, and more interaction. Also, the skills are few and full of cooldowns. I can't spam my skills like I did in Diablo 2. You're constantly out of mana, and due to a horrible concept of damage buckets, Vulnerable is a must for all builds, which severely restricts build diversity. The open world is nice, but there's barely any mob

density, and sometimes it feels more like a walking simulator. Finally, the mob level scaling penalizes you as you level. You never truly become stronger. And in fact, lower level characters can carry you instead of you carrying them. That is true. And it is true that everyone does build around vulnerable, where all of us were applying vulnerable to all enemies, because that's how everyone has to play the game. Yep. All right, guys. So that's what some of the people out there thought about the game.

We always do a little thing where we guess what we think the overall rating for the game is. In this case, it's going to be on Metacritic. And I did go by the user scores on this because we don't care what critics think. We want to know what gamers actually think about something. Yeah, we want to know the gamers that definitely never review bomb anything. Certainly not by Activision Blizzard. No. Man. Okay, so I believe I won this last time.

Yes, you did, Paul. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for reminding us. I get to go first. I think this game deserves like an 8.4, something like that. However, I think because of review bombing, whether it's because of politics or the work environment of Blizzard, let's just leave it at that.

I'm going to guess it's probably something closer to like 6.8. So I'll lock that in as my final answer. Okay, 6.8 for Paul. Ryan? If we sandwich him, he can't win, Ryan. It's true. That's true. You know which way to go't win. Ryan, it's true. That's true.

So you know which way, you know which way to go from 6.8, Ryan, I'm going to go 6.7. All right. And I'm taking 6.9. Nice. Oh,

you ain't winning this one, Paul. Um, I actually, uh, my, my official before looking and knowing the score i actually guessed 8.9 because i didn't think that this people would review bomb this game for some reason i didn't i didn't think so either i was definitely gonna be high it did get review bomb the actual is a 5.7 what what i did on this is I took the aggregate of PC, Xbox, and PlayStation

so that it averages out to what the three platforms are. That is so stupid. So 5.7. So Ryan, that means you are a winner and you get the honor of introducing this next segment. Lilith's a lucky lady. Oh, here we go. Hey, Lilith. How you doing, baby?

You want to go? Oh, Mirren? Oh oh mirren oh wait wait wait let me explain all right we've got some crossover yeah i'm down for this crossover star wars diablo yeah what about your uh professor garlic from hogwarts. Where's she in the mix, Ryan? Yay, man. Different area codes. That's what I was going to say. Alright, so this is our Make Love Marry Murder segment. Ryan, do you want to tell the people how this works? Yeah, so basically we're going to make love, marry, murder

on the scale. We do that for all the games that we deep dive. Murder is obviously just didn't like it, didn't vibe with you, didn't feel like a game that you want to play again. Make Love is going to be one that you're kind of lukewarm on it. It was good. It had some good, some bad. And Marry, obviously, is one that just they hit it out of the park,

and you want to play that as long as you can all right so ryan diablo crouch which is your your legal name what what are you going to give this game i think uh no one will be surprised that i am going to marry this game so hard i'm going to yeah yeah i know right i know for a second i was like wait what i'm gonna marry this game so hard. I'm going to take Diablo 4 to expensive dinners, lavish vacations. I'm going to take out a second mortgage just to buy it a new fancy car. This game, as much as I had issues with different parts of it, and it's not my favorite game. It's not something that just absolutely blew my socks off other than other parts of it.

I had so much fun playing this and and i found myself all the time like guys can we play anyone else want to play hey anyone in the discord speaking of shout out discord get on the discord if you're not because you can play with us sometimes if we're available but uh i've played with some people through the discord i played with played with you guys. I've played with my brother, my friends. I was always on this game way more than we needed to do for the deep dive, but I'm a big-time Mary on this one. What about you, Josh? I'm actually a little torn on this one. I'm giving it a Mary, but it's because

there's nothing that this game does wrong. And I had a blast playing it. There was never a time playing Diablo four where I was like, this sucks, man. Like, I don't want to have to play this right now. Loved every single second of it. Is it perfect? No, it's definitely got some issues. I don't think it's the best Diablo by any means. Is it fun? It is incredibly fun to play. I would play it right now. I've got absolutely zero against Diablo by any means. No, not even close. Is it fun? It is incredibly fun to play. I would play it right now. I've got absolutely zero against Diablo 4. But at the same time, it's not the best game that I've ever played or anything like that. And I do think that there's a lot of faults with it. So I'm on that kind of borderline, like it's a really strong make love or kind of a shaky marriage.

But I have to look at it and just go, I really had a blast playing this. If you know what you are getting into, which is a high price tag because it's a $70 game for the base version, and you understand that you're going to hit that point, likely, maybe you like grinding, and if you do, then it's well worth it. But you're going to get to that point where it just is repetitive, and it's glaringly obvious at that point. Likely. Maybe you like grinding and if you do, then it's well worth it. But you're going to get to that point where it just is repetitive and it's glaringly obvious at that point. It's not like they hide it very well or anything else. And if you're good with that, don't even hesitate. But yeah. So for me, I'm going to give it that shaky marriage because it's not perfect. Yeah. It's kind of like where you start hearing the toasts at the wedding and you can kind of tell like oh this marriage might not make it yeah yeah for me about my first marriage

paul yeah oh boy all right anyway uh so i would say this game is marriage material. It's not the most rock solid marriage, but I do think it is a fairly solid marriage. I think if you start to grow tired, maybe just reroll a new class and play. I think for most gamers who can afford the $70 price tag, it's worth it. You'll get at minimum 18 hours out of this game and probably a lot more. And I think most people would play it differently than I did, where I just kind of shotgun the campaign, peppered in some side stuff here and there, and then I was done. If you are someone who loves doing achievements and 100%ing stuff, oh man, this game will give

you, I don't know, hundreds of hours of content that just doesn't work for me but yeah i would still say it's like i i would call it a must play game if that makes sense so no matter what that's gonna make it a mary in my book i would just say like i do with a lot of games as soon as it feels grindy just quit because it's not gonna get better once you hit that wall you've hit the wall play a new character or quit and go play something else and um but if they release an expansion for this which they will they will oh yeah we'll get back into diablo at that time but i probably won't play this again at all until there's new content yeah all right well guys let's go into our last segment let's go to the leaderboard and see where

this game stacks up. So over at multiplayerpodcast.com, we have a list of every game that we have ever done a deep dive. We are now clocking in a total of 99 games. Diablo 4 makes number 99. And we have to come up with a three-man consensus of where this game ranks against everything else that we have covered. So just to give a couple examples here, we've got Disco Elysium at number five. We've got Hogwarts Legacy at 16. We have Splitgate at 28. Resident Evil Village at 36 maybe like the closest game we could compare this to in a weird way is lost ark uh which we have yeah there's a lot of similarities there yeah plays very similar i would say diablo 4 is definitely a lot better than lost ark i don't think we need

to go any lower than this but uh what's your guys gut instinct looking at it? What range are we looking for? You better pump that number up, boy. I actually have a very specific number in mind, which is weird for me because usually I kind of go like, oh, I'm in this range. But I'm going to just put it out there. You guys can call me crazy or not. I think 18 is perfect for this game. I could see why you're saying that.

I could maybe say 19 if you really love Hearthstone that much. I mean, another Blizzard product, go figure. But it's one of those where it definitely, this game ranks up there in the upper echelon for me for fun level. I would recommend Diablo 4 to anybody. Like we have people that have never played Diablo before that picked it up and went, this game is a blast. And we went, right?

But then again, at the same time, it's not without its flaws and you do hit that wall. Like you don't necessarily with some of the other Diablos either. Um, so I mean, I think for me, that's a great spot for it. I don't know where you guys are at. What are you thinking, Ryan, since you're the highest on it out of the three of us? I was actually thinking, because i knew how you guys would be so i was trying to be somewhat reasonable but i was thinking closer in the lower teens somewhere like 14 15 ish for me um the eternal debate what do you call those the the the early teens the late teens the lower middle is 17 we've never known or 15 high teens right i guess oh yeah yeah i guess i don't know the better teens and the worst teens is what i call them yeah so we're actually pretty close to each other see like

when i look at the resident evil 4 remake i had so much more fun playing resident evil 4 as much as i loved diablo yeah i liked resident evil 4 i Evil 4. I have them in the same... They're in the same tier, though. Fun level, Diablo 4 gets it for me. But oddly, I think Resident Evil 4 Remake is the better video game. Yeah. I could see that. You know, just from an all-around perspective. But Diablo 4 is way more fun, in my opinion.

Did you guys die more in Hogwarts Legacy or Diablo 4? Oh, Hogwarts Legacy. I think I did too. I think I did too. I know, man. How weird is that? Like, if you don't go into Nightmare, you don't die much. Even Nightmare.

Dude, I've done Nightmare Dungeons. And that's the problem. It's no different. This is the whole thing. Everybody mentioned level scaling, but every bad review and even a good review mentioned it. It's not, I was so pumped to get to that difficult part. And it's not, it plays exactly the same as World Tier 2 did. Yeah.

Yeah. When I look at the list, I would have trouble putting Diablo above Hogwarts Legacy. See, that's where I'm at. I see. I have a hard time putting it above those two i liked 18 as well since ryan's just a little bit higher ryan did you play elden ring a little bit not a little bit i played some of the other dark souls games but not not much of elden ring

yeah i feel like elden ring again kind of like you were saying josh i think elden ring is the better game but i'd rather play more Diablo because Diablo is just more fun yeah yeah I don't know I don't know we gotta honor we gotta honor Ryan's slightly higher 17 Ryan yeah I would

I would find that proposal I can respect it it's Diablo freaking 4 man just because I hit a wall doesn't mean it's diablo freaking four man just for that just because i hit a wall doesn't mean it's not a good game either you know so uh i'm okay with that so we'll lock it in at 17 that puts it below valheim satisfactory outriders dos 2 resident evil 4 and hogwarts legacy but we will have it above elden ring hearthstone cod war zone gta online halo infinite and terraria yeah it's a good spot sweet we say it all the time like

almost all the games on our list we enjoy to some level if you're within like the top 20 that's really high praise on our board yeah all right Then we will lock that one in at 17. And I think that wraps everything up here for this deep dive. I'm really glad we were able to get this one out because we were all like, okay, we know that this is coming out a few weeks after the game, but let's just crush as much Diablo time as we can. Let's get this one.

What a terrible problem. No, I barely got to play. Now we're doing that with final fantasy 16, where we're all trying to go play by the way. Hey dude, I put five hours in today and it came out. See Ryan,

Ryan, that's, that's dedication. I'm committed. I'm committed to the pod. Oh yeah. And then as a reminder to our listeners, make sure to swing by our Patreon page to sign up for bonus episodes at

multiplayer squad.com. You can join our our free discord there's an invitation in the episode description and hit us up on socials at multiplayer pod.com or at multiplayer pod that's all it is i'm young i know how to use social media i'm with it i'm hip uh we would love you to check out all of our episodes we do release episodes about gaming news on Thursdays we have quick take episodes that are like 7-12 minutes that release every Saturday

and then as a reminder the next two Mondays we will have bonus round episodes and then after that our next deep dive will be Ark and then after that it will be Final Fantasy 16. So we are very busy with some very big games right now. We'll have to play those as much as we can. I think that wraps everything up.

So thank you so much to everyone for listening. And until next time, happy gaming. See ya. All right. See ya, everybody.