Why I Won't Be Playing Diablo 4

If your first response is “I don’t care if this random guy isn’t going to play this video game”, that’s valid and I support you. Your journey with this post likely ends here. Godspeed.

This post is also in no way a judgment on anyone playing Diablo 4. Enjoy yourselves! Under certain circumstances, which should become clear in the course of this writing, I probably would be too. But, at least one person has asked me why I’m not playing, and that’s an opportunity for me to dive into my thoughts about this game, and touch a bit on live service games in general.

…okay, cool, you’re still here. I think I can actually explain my point in a single screenshot:

Source: https://youtu.be/x6G6xqEUNWM?t=4403

Imagine: you’ve paid $70 for a game. You’re about an hour in, and the game asks you to hit the TAB key to view your map.

Suddenly, alongside the other important menu items that reflect important aspects that involve actually playing the game or interacting with your fellow players, there’s another tab that, through its incredibly intentional placement, says “Hello! Thank you for buying our video game! Would you perhaps like to give us even more money? 🥺”

Microtransactions and season passes are not new concepts. While they’re more often leveraged in free to play games, where the cost of entry is zero, that’s not always the case - Diablo 4 being the most recent example of the later.

Let’s get a few things out of the way: this isn’t that big of a deal. Nothing you can buy in the store, or get in paid a season pass, will impact how well your character performs in the game. Everything you an acquire in-game for real-world money is just “cosmetic” - most notably how your character appears to others, or gestures they/you can make in the game to communicate with other players (emotes).

What I find distasteful - what pushes me, personally, away from the game - is my belief that temporary content of any sort, in any game, preys off players’ fear of FOMO. Logging into a game to see your friend wearing something cool, or making a fun gesture, that you can no longer access in the game - or can only access by paying a premium - may not directly impact your character, but it can directly how you, the player, feel about your character. And this is not an accident. They want players constantly engaged, so that players feel more invested, and potentially decide to spend a few bucks here and there.

Diablo 4 isn’t the only game to do this. One of my favorite games is Final Fantasy XIV, and like many other ongoing games, they hold temporary events that demand you play the game on the game’s schedule, or you will miss out on a cute side story, and what’s likely the only free way to make sure you’re apart of what may be year’s hottest new fashion trend.

This sort of design, every form, actively pushes me away from the game. Video games are a hobby designed to entertain me, and I want to engage with that hobby on my terms, when I have the time. I don’t want to feel punished because I wasn’t willing or able to play during a specific, arbitrary window of time specified by that the team behind the game.

Imagine you have a book. Now imagine someone comes to your house and rips out a chapter of that book if you decide to take a break from reading it for a month. Doesn’t feel great, right? It’s not a perfect metaphor, but for something like Destiny 2, where if you miss a “season” worth of story, that story is no longer available? It’s not far off.

To Destiny’s credit, it’s free to play. To Diablo 4’s credit, the developers have said that no story beats will be locked behind ephemeral content. Each of these games is a balancing act.

What I realized last year, playing Marvel Snap - a free to play card game with a season pass model - is that I only have room in my life for a single game that asks me to play specific content at a specific time or risk missing out. As much as I love Final Fantasy XIV, I wish the number of games I played wit this mindset was zero, but I tolerate it, in this one case, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps in part because I’ve already missed years of the game, and so there was never a chance I was going to have the “full experience”, and perhaps because their seasonal events take place over several weeks and generally only take an hour or two of my time, at most. Would I still prefer it to be different? Absolutely. But in this case, I can stomach it.

All of this gets compounded when you’re aware of the reality of the AAA game space. Games are incredibly expensive to make, both financially, and in the sheer amount of (often underpaid) human labor involved. It complicates the act of critiquing how these companies choose to monetize such large investments, though remembering that most of that revenue goes to the executives and investors at the top, rather to the labor itself, simplifies matters for me considerably. I’d feel a lot better buying a neat piece of armor if I knew it was going directly to the developers and artists who made it a reality, instead of further inflating a corporate suit’s bonus and bumping the stock price enough to please the leaching investor class.

Could I simply ignore the FOMO, choose the aspects of the game I enjoy, and only interact with those? Probably - but there are new games released every day that don’t demand anything of me, and patiently wait for me to have time for them. I also, obviously, only have so much control over how my brain works - it’d be fantastic if I could stop feeling anxious, too! Once I figure out that particular trick, I’ll let y’all know.

I am genuinely glad to see so many people enjoying Diablo 4, and there will always be a part of me that wishes I could join them, but I’ve learned, through far too much trial and error, that engaging with these games will likely end in my feeling more stressed and more anxious, which is the very opposite of what I’m looking for in this hobby.

I simply no longer have room in my life for new games that punish me for not playing on their schedule, rather than mine.