Do I Even Like Diablo Anymore?

This is something of a counter-point to last week’s post where I noted that we were in an “Age of Diablo.”   Almost a golden age, really, what with being able to play various incarnations of the Diablo series while waiting for Diablo IV to come out later this year.  How much more Diablo do you want?

Enter The Butcher!

You would think, having put up such a post… and having been effusive about the series on multiple occasions, that I might have spent some time over the weekend… you know… actually playing some Diablo.

I was, after all, getting over a cold this past weekend, which was a perfect excuse to do nothing but sit around and play video games.  But did I play any Diablo?

Well, I did play a little bit of Diablo III on Friday evening, getting myself along to the end of Act I with my Season 28 character, yet another barbarian.  But I was not particularly enthused and I spent most of the rest of the weekend’s video game time playing WoW Classic and EVE Online.

Now, of course, MMORPGs have that whole sunk cost fallacy going for them, so it is hard to compete… but I am literally replaying old content in WoW Classic and was doing so during the EVE Online move op I wrote about yesterday… my time played in EVE is always under counted because I spend so much of it tabbed out and doing something else… so clearly I could have found time for Diablo, but just didn’t.

All of which got me to question whether or not I even like Diablo anymore?  Is it going the way of TorilMUD or EverQuest for me, a game that had a long past happy state that I am never going to relive, so it just exists as a reference point for posts about video game nostalgia and the good old days and whatever it is I have gotten up to here for the last sixteen or so years.

I mean, some of my early posts here were about EverQuest nostalgia, for a game that was all of seven years old at the time.  It is going to be 24 years old in about two weeks.

Some part of me longs to go play it, but some part of me longs to go play those other two titles as well, and that just isn’t going to happen.

It wasn’t as though playing through the story in Diablo III was bad.  The problem is that I have done it before, multiple times.  Many times.

Which led me around to thinking more about what it is I do like about the Diablo series.  Certainly the mood it conveys, and the simplicity of the game play.  Diablo III loses a bit on those fronts, being a little too well lit, a little too neon glowy at points, a little too much in the indirect lighting to get the mood thing on that the first two titles did so well.

Still, it kept me playing through back at launch, with the expansion, and through a few seasons, though not very many seasons.  Maybe that was too much.  There are a lot of games in my history that I have only played once or twice, where the story was good enough, but I didn’t really need to see if through again.

Or maybe I am just not in the mood.  I suppose the real test will be when Diablo IV comes out.  But I felt like I had to ask myself the question, even if I couldn’t really test it right now.  Some things just wear out by the residue of the old enthusiasm remains behind.