New ideas summoned into this series enliven the spirit.
It’s been over a year since the original release of Diablo IV, the latest addition to Blizzard’s beloved action rpg series. Diablo IV released during a modern renaissance for the ARPG genre, which has been dominated by games like Path of Exile, and delivered a well-crafted story campaign that was well received by critics. It was in all regards, a massive return to form for Blizzard, who for many years had failed to write compelling narratives for their lore-rich games and been recovering from the harsh reception of Warcraft III: Reforged.
Where Diablo IV faltered was the end-game progression and seasonal live-service model it launched with. Diablo IV’s initial release found players with not much to do after credits rolled and many structural flaws in its progression systems. Players found themselves pushed into an endless gauntlet of nightmare dungeons with a loot system that included mythic unique items that were almost impossible to find, a broken defense and resistance system, a loot system that didn't encourage much player expression and no real end-game goal to strive for outside of battling the pinnacle bossUber Lilith.
The past year of seasonal content has worked hard to iron out these flaws, introducing new mechanics such as the fiendishly fun infernal horde arena battles, completely re-working stats and gear and introducing a suite of quality of life features to make the gameplay experience more frictionless.
Now arrives Vessel Of Hatred, Diablo IV’s first expansion which continues the campaign storyline (aka the best part) of Diablo IV and works to further iron out the core flaws in Diablo’s end game progressions and systems.
Vessel of Hatred takes us to the southern jungles of Nahantu, a sprawling region of verdant green overgrowth dotted with the ruins of ancient kingdoms and empires. These are the homelands of Diablo IV’s newest class, the athletic & shamanic Spiritborn, and also the site of Diablo II’s third story act.
Yes, these are the same jungles that many players got lost in back in the early 2000s, struggling against gloams and blowdart shooting flayers. This time we’re hot on the footsteps of Neyrelle, our companion from Diablo IV’s original campaign, as she takes Mephisto’s soulstone deep into the jungle in an attempt to thwart the evil within it.
It echoes a similar sense of urgency from Diablo II, as players chased the lone wanderer through Sanctuary hoping to catch them before they lost control to the demonic power they were attempting to contain. This time, however, we’re not alone on our quest. Very early on you’ll encounter Raheir, a big boy with a bigger shield, who becomes your first mercenary companion.
Mercenaries are a new system for Diablo IV, and Raheir will set you up with a homebase for your mercenary squad and task you with finding new recruits to join the squad. Joining you on the ride are Subo the bounty hunter armed with traps and a crossbow, Aldkin a cursed child who wields demonic magic and Varyana the berserker warrior with a lust for combat.
Mercenaries have their own skill tree of abilities (usually based around crowd control, debuffs & support) and can be augmented to provide you with passive buffs. While they’re weak compared to your damage output, they do contribute meaningful buffs such as big boosts to your attack speed or providing large amounts of damage mitigation when certain abilities are triggered.
You can bring one mercenary with you during solo play, and one mercenary can be assigned as your reinforcement at all times. Reinforcement allows you to pick a mercenary and one of their core abilities (such as Raheir’s big ground pound attack), and tie them to activate when you set off your own spells. It allows you to add further customization to skills, such as allowing your Spiritborn to gain protection from Raheir’s damage bubble whenever they summon their animal guardian onto the field.
Alongside the mercenaries you'll recruit, you'll be joined by a crew of npcs including the absolute standout of the cast, Eru, an elder shaman and member of Kurast's council of leaders who acts as your guide through the lands of on your quest tso catch up with Neyrelle and save her from Mephisto's corruption.
Along the way there's some utterly gruesome boss battles and some truly set pieces and locations to trudge through including the return to a well known location at the heart of Kurast’s now destroyed and desecrated empire that anyone who played Diablo II will recognise.
While I can’t spoil the big plot beats of the campaign or the lore implications within it, I can say that your travels in Nahantu extend beyond verdant and lush jungles, taking you into twisted, weeping landscapes of corruption and demonic ichor and rocky, mountainous regions which provide a much needed visual break from all the greenery.
You’ll even delve into the spirit realm itself and speak with the ancient guardianss that protect Nahantu and provide strength and power to Diablo IV’s newest class - The Spiritborn.
The Spiritborn is snappy, responsive and incredible to play - but it also felt quite familiar in my hands. This is the evolution of the monk from Diablo III. An extremely agile, fast-paced martial artist with a lot of flexibility and room for skill expression in its moveset.
Each of the Spiritborn’s basic skills or generators, are a fast-attacking 3-punch combo that snap-teleports you closer to the enemy you’re attacking. It’s the monk’s fist of thunder ability baked into the Spiritborn's core attacks and it feels fantastic.
Where the Spiritborn diverges from the monk are the various playstyles that fall under the banner of each of the spirit guardian animals and the ability to mix and match how you dip into these various realms of the class.
The Gorilla is a slower paced-meatier combat style with a lot of synergies that tie into using thorns and blocking attacks with your quarter-staff to regenerate resources and buff your damage. The Eagle brings mobility, speed and a lot of ranged finesse to the mix as you set off explosive feathered quills and soar across the battlefield. The jaguar is about ferocious, fast paced combat, mixing attack speed buffs with the ability to increase damage based on repeated hits at the expense of defense.
My favourite however, is the centipede. Bless this creepy crawly gooper the bursts from the ground. The Centipede guardian is all about the cycle of life and death. Life for you via lots of health-regen abilities, and death for your enemies using a variety of noxious, poison attacks to spread plague across the battlefield.
I started my journey using the ability Stinger, a chunky big kick that reminded me of the monk’s lashing tail kick that reflects its damage out to any enemy you’ve already poisoned. I ended up retiring stinger for Touch of Death, a delightfully disgusting ability that echoes the monk's exploding palm spell. With a quick jab, your Spiritborn infects an enemy with an extremely potent poison that leeches health back to you. If they die while infected, out pops a revolting swarm of pestilence that becomes a temporary minion, attacking enemies and spreading more plague and disease for you.
Summoning the centipede itself has it burst out of the ground and start shooting green lasers of poisonous death at enemies, it’s gross, fantastic and the coolest thing in the game.
Where things get really fun for theory crafters is the ability to mix-and-match your Guardian Spirits. Once you complete (the very thematic and cool) Spiritborn class quest, you’re given the ability to pick two guardian spirits to bless you. These confer big passive bonuses such as the Gorilla spirit providing you with a constant recharging barrier for protection, or the centipede allowing you to spread a debilitating slowness to anything that’s poisoned by you and also tag any ability you use under that spirit’s power.
You can go all in on the centipede (all hail our centipede king, we love you) and have him bless you twice, or you could play a mostly centipede-based build, but receive a lesser blessing from the jaguar to allow yourself to stack damage buffs. There’s even a mix of paragon board buffs, glyphs, passives and legendary powers that reward you leaning into a Spiritborn build that mixes up all the various spirit guardians or even creating a ‘generator only’ style build out of basic punches and kicks, which once again echoes many builds from the diablo 3 monk.
All this fun play expression really needs some endgame activities to go hand in hand with it, and thankfully Vessel of Hatred massively expands the end game content and activities for you to experience.
Progression and the entire levelling experience has been completely reworked for the expansion. There is a new level cap of 60, and paragon is now split off and on its own levelling track after you hit max level. The game’s original difficulty systems have been massively tweaked and replaced with a system very similar to Diablo 3’s (even down to the torment I-IV options). Once you hit torment I difficulty, all content and loot is open to you. Higher difficulties only provide better loot drop rates in return for their increase in challenge.
Players now have a big mix of activities they can engage with while both levelling and progressing their character in end-game. Previous seasonal activities such as The Pit (based on diablo 3’s greater rifts mechanics) have returned and are now baked into the game’s end-game loop.
Some of these activities remain mandatory. You WILL have to run the pit to upgrade your paragon board glyphs, which are an essential component of build-power and endgame progression. If you don’t like the pit, well you’ll have to buckle up and get ready to power through them, just like we had to slam through nightmare dungeons in Diablo IV’s original release.
Joining these gameplay modes are the new Vessel of Hatred activities. The first I encountered was The Undercity, a time-trial multi-floor dungeon rush. You’ll be thrown into a small dungeon with a limited amount of time to rush through to the end boss. Killing certain tagged elite monsters and lighting braziers along the way increases your rewards and also gives extra seconds on the clock to ensure you don’t run out of time. It’s fast, frantic and a lot of fun.
The seasonal mechanic launching with the expansion involves realm-walkers, giant hulking demons with a portal to another dimension built into their back. Defeat the realm-walking demons out in the overworld and you can jump into their portal to do a multi-level dungeon and be rewarded with potions and buffs that enhance loot you can encounter during other end-game activities - cool!
There’s also the Dark Citadel, a co-op dungeon that a party of four players will need to defeat together. It’s the one thing I haven’t been able to experience yet due to limited time on the test server and timezone issues, but as a mostly solo-self-found ARPG player, I’m hoping that this experience will not be mandatory for certain item drops or progression.
A lot of love has gone into crafting the overworld zone of Nahantu well, with one particular moment standing out - a very unique stronghold encounter in the southern reaches of the jungle. Echoing some of the claustrophobia and ick of Diabo II’s infamous maggot lair, my spiritborn was submerged into a dark, maze-like environment with only a lantern of holy light to protect them from the creepy crawlies within.
According to the Diablo IV developer Rex Dickson “there was some fear that doing a dark maze format for a diablo stronghold wasn’t going to be fun… [it was] a big departure for us in terms of gameplay… and came to fruition via countless playtests and feedback sessions”. It’s this desire to take risks and create new experiences in the ARPG format that has me excited about both Vessel of Hatred and Diablo’s future.
Ultimately, the jury is out on if this will all come together and click as a satisfying longer-term live-service experience. There are a lot more activities, progression systems, and interesting loot ideas (I didn’t even talk about the return of socketable runes) and actual endgame here to sink your demonic claws into. I’m still not entirely sold on some of the game’s core systems, the paragon boards still don’t have the same appeal to me that Path of Exile’s sprawling skill-tree does, the lack of a loot filter can make the item hunt more tedious than pleasurable and I’m not entirely sure that lengthy ultimate skill cooldowns and builder/spender class design mechanics work well in an ARPG format.
For those like me who love Path of Exile’s endgame atlas system and ability to specialise in certain end game activities - it’s on Blizzard’s Radar. Developer Colin Finer noted that ‘[the development team love] meta progression systems, and always want Diablo IV to feel rewarding, no matter how deep into a character or season you are. We think a meta progression system would help accomplish that. It’s something we’re actively discussing but don’t have anything to share just yet”.
It’s an interesting thought to chew on and it shows a willingness from the team to explore new ideas.
For now, Vessel of Hatred continues to be in dialogue with its own legacy, from setting its story campaign in the jungles of Diablo II’s Kurast to looking back at some of the key progression and power systems of the franchise’s own past that clicked with players and bringing them back with a new spin.
