There are few things more remarkable than when a series no longer needs to reinvent itself to feel new. Diablo IV is that kind of arrival—a moment where nearly thirty years of iteration, missteps, and rediscovery have converged into something that feels both deeply familiar and quietly revolutionary. I’ve played many ARPGs over the years. Even so, few have made me stop mid-dungeon just to admire the light dripping off a wet stone wall, or the way a single NPC in a roadside camp looks up from the fire as I pass by. Blizzard hasn’t changed the bones of Diablo. The core remains that same rhythmic dance of motion and impact, the slow crescendo of power as you carve through Sanctuary’s chaos. What’s changed is the way it all breathes. The game’s seamless world design, its shared zones and emergent events, make it feel like the genre itself has taken a deep breath. This isn’t just another top-down click fest; it’s a living, breathing place that manages to feel personal even when shared with others.
Diablo IV is to me the pinnacle of the genre. Not because it breaks boundaries, but because it perfects everything it has been learning since ’96. And like all veterans, the series has also learned restraint—an achievement that makes it a must-play for those who want to buy cheap PS5 games and experience mastery refined over decades. Every Diablo franchise installment, like every other game, has its own set of phases. With every game installment, the journey from level one to the campaign’s end is the most rewarding. In Diablo IV, this might be the best it’s been.
While the story is mournful and dark, it also hangs beautifully, almost tragically. Coupled with the world that shelters the story, it makes it all the more haunting. Villages and their life, uneven snow across the roofs, and the Scosglen forests, whispering to you, as if they were centuries old. There is a melancholy poetry in the pacing; every quest in the game feels like it’s in a conversation with the land. This beauty is only enhanced when playing coop. My friend and I often find ourselves in parallel exploring, while I linger in a dungeon, he’s tackling an event in the distance. The progress feels organic and shared, not forced. One nagging complaint continues to grow louder as my boots wear thinner: the mount. Or, more precisely, the mount's absence. Given the expanse of the game's geography, the time devoted to unlocking the horse feels needlessly punitive. There were nights after finishing a quest chain when I'd pull up the map to plan my next move, only to groan at the thought of crossing three zones on foot. It’s not game-breaking, but it felt like a strange oversight in a title that seems to have thought of just about every player's need. When the mount finally arrives, the sense of liberation it provides feels earned, but it's somewhat overdue.
The Craft of Choice
The character-building process in Diablo IV is the best place to start feeling like a craftsman once more. Each class begins as a sketch—a rough one—that slowly takes shape as you experiment and implement your sacrifices. The branching skill trees are plentiful, but not to the point of being indulgent. There’s a purposeful tension in their design: you can't have everything, and that’s the point—an engaging challenge for those who want to buy cheap PS4 games and savor thoughtful, strategic progression. In the role of Otto the druid, a shapeshifter who embodies both the peace of the wilds and the wild pulse of a beast, I clash with myself. My every skill selection resonates with various factions of my persona. Will I answer the elementals with a spark, storm, and stream lightning into my druidic strikes, or will I take the bear’s path and ground myself with the bass druid simplicity and the raw druid survival? There are always sacrifices to be made for every skill choice. I can't have the bear and the storm at the same time; that compromise gives the skill selection tree, strength, and balance.
Like the rune systems in Diablo III, the rune systems in Diablo IV seem to be designed to provoke thought. Dominance isn’t synergy; it’s a product of trial, error, and a little curiosity. There’s a flow and rhythm to a system and a synergy, and it’s rewarding to know that you’re the one who created it.
Respec and Renewal
In an ARPG, the ability to freely respec is often a debate. No one wants to lose the ability to experiment, yet if they make a choice too freely, they will lose all meaning and every choice will become a mundane process. In Diablo IV, respecs are designed to cost an amount of gold, and they are intended to be low enough to allow people to switch their build. This allows me to explore my Otto reimagining for the night, turning the Stormcaller Druid into a Storm Druid Bruiser to see how it feels. That freedom has become a quiet part of my routine. I’ll sit at a waypoint, refund my points, and begin again. The process is tedious in its manual nature—you have to click and reassign every node—but it’s also meditative. Still, a part of me wishes for a simple quality-of-life feature: the ability to save loadouts. The absence of it makes experimentation feel a little clumsy. I imagine a future patch will address it, because this is a game that wants you to play with identity.
The Five Paths of Power
Diablo IV’s five starting classes feel like fragments of the series’ long history, each plucked from a different era and reinterpreted for the present. The Barbarian is a familiar anchor, all fury and momentum. It’s the physical embodiment of persistence—swinging wide, absorbing blows, and thriving in chaos. The new weapon-swapping system gives it a tactical edge that’s surprisingly graceful. The Necromancer channels the cold logic of command. I’ve always admired how this class turns death into resource management, a kind of grim efficiency that balances macabre aesthetics with clever utility.
The Sorcerer returns as a perennial scholar of destruction. It is a class that feels simultaneously fragile and transcendent. Controlling the battlefield while performing elemental destruction is, after all, a spellbinding chore. The Rogue evokes the earliest memories of the series, but is also the most psychosocially accelerated in design. It is so quick, agile, and adaptive, and cohesive as a bridge between the ranged and melee classes, making every encounter a small puzzle in a myriad of ways. And there is the Druid, my chosen soul. A mix of the patience of nature and the fury of a storm, it is the perfect personification of the game as a whole—earthy, deliberate, and unpredictable. Shapeshifting is such a restlessly fluid feature. It ticks all the right boxes for my restless spirit. I read philosophy in each of these classes, a quiet wisdom in each of these, that makes the age of the wisdom of the franchise and the class feel alive thirty years, and so many classes of balance between nostalgia and the novelty.
A World That Feels Earned
There is something beautiful about Sanctuary that encourages me to stop what I am doing and listen, even after playing for weeks. When talking about sound design, Sanctuary is one of the few that gets it right. The sound of the wind changes as you pass through different regions. The villages you pass through each have their own sound, and the life is enough for you to know you are in a village. There is a sound a player gets simply by opening a chest that is automatic and satisfying. You can feel that Blizzard has put thought and care into each detail. The story, exploration, and story mechanics are so finely crafted that you can feel that the developers understand what the Diablo series was meant to be. Not the grand show it was, but the quiet, intimate, reflective feel of repetition that helps in moving a player.
Diablo IV is a confident statement within its genre that has no need for aggrandizing. It settles into its space with no need to shout. There is no need for unexpected surprises. The game simply sharpens, understands, and feeds the system to the player. I often consider the concept of “apex” not as a zenith of innovation but more of a moment of comprehension. Diablo IV feels as if Blizzard has come to understand its creation at long last. Other games will push new boundaries, and the genre will continue its evolution, but this is a milestone. It will serve as a reminder that mastery is not always about the new, but recognizing which of the older ideas still have value. When I log off for the night, I still think about Otto, waiting at the firelight in Scosglen with a storm crackling quietly above him. I don’t know where his journey leads from here, but I know I’ll come back to find out, one slow evening at a time. Diablo IV doesn’t ask for devotion. It offers a pledge, and that more than anything is what makes it feel like the true apex of this long, storied lineage.