I had a low day and thought I’d do some D4 when it hit me, these are depressing stories! Everyone I look for is dead! Even some I speak to in begining end up dead by the time I get back! They’re well written, just sad. I reunited a guy and his goat. A goat passed out after eating too much salt. Salt made from AN ENTIRE VILLAGE!! Guess I should’ve watched Ted Lasso instead?
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Yeah you’ve come to the wrong franchise if you’re looking for happy endings lol
Not sure if you’re new to the series, but Diablo isn’t really a go-to for pick me-up-story telling.
D1 has a couple of tragic moments (the Butcher encounter as witnessed by the townsfolks, the end of the story itself) but overall it’s more a story in a dark universe than a dark story where everyone loses people they care about.
D2 also has a couple of tragic places (I am mostly thinking of the Act 3 Zakarum Temple filled with blood; or the massacre in the Act 2 Palace) but you arrive after it happened. You don’t see the deed happening. So it’s more of a power story in a dark universe rather than a sad and dark one.
D3, well, is D3. Characters have as much power as gods, villains keep rambling endlessly about how they will shatter your world until you kill them, rinse and repeat… It’s power fantasy
But D4 is really a dark story. You don’t just arrive after the fact like in D2, you really see massacres, dismemberment, sadism, blood sacrifices etc… happening all over. And it’s not just in a couple of places in the story. It’s really everywhere. It’s like the D4 writers passed the message “Each quest should have a grim ending”. Or rather, they saw how people wanted Diablo to get darker after the D3 fiasco, so they listened (a bit too much) and cranked the button all the way to “grim” and “sad”.
In general I have very mixed opinion about D4 story. It has just too much grimness. It’s like every other person in Sanctuary is on a frenzy rampage to kill, eat or chop parts of their neighbors. And, on the opposite side of the spectrum, we have a certain prime evil reduced to bargaining with humans where they should be the very essence of terror/hatred/destruction… It does not make any sense
In Diablo, humans are always fodder for the Eternal Conflict. Even the main character that defeats the prime evils in one game is consumed/killed by the start of the next one. This is the way.
I suggest Skyrim if you want a good mix of stories and NPCs that actually go about a regular life in the world.
This is why Lilith made a lot of sense to me. She was the main villain of this game, yet seemed like the least evil option in this universe. Kinda curious how many players would’ve sided with her if this was an rpg with choices.
There are quests where you actually save people, but yeah, there is always skme tragic component involved even then.
I really enjoyed most of the side quests. The activities get a bit repetitive (collect 20 goat horns, kill 20 ghosts, find 3 flowers, find person hiding in massive area, etc) but the stories were entertaining enough.
I think I’ve done most of them, but I’m still missing a few quests in each area according to the renown tracker. Not sure where they are, probably those random drops you get from certain enemies that starts an “unlock the cache by killing 20 more of these guys” quest.
My favourite so far was Tending Nature (the one where you have to look for herbs to heal a druid’s injured bear). I was not expecting the way the quest gets resolved and admittedly got a good laugh against my better judgment. Won’t spoil it here though for anyone who hasn’t run it yet.
Didn’t it feel bad killing a bears during that quest?
