Post: Still Act I
Wednesday the 15th of October, 2025, morning.

According to my trusty Playstation App I have logged about twenty hours into this slash-em-up romp in the last week.

I mention it because I mentioned playing this game to LM on the weekend and his eyes got real big and he told me a short cautionary tale about a friend of his who sunk literally thousands of hours in Diablo games of the past and how it was a black hole of attention grabbing and that I should be careful and for gosh sake, brad, stick to Baldurs Gate, dammit.

But I’m making progress, I argued.

And I am. I am playing as a whirlwind barbarian who blurs through enemies with abandon and I’ve been fulfilling all the little side quests and unlocking new skills and levelling up well into the mid-thirties all while I narrow in on completing Act I of the quest story line.

But I get it. Everything is so incremental and there is almost no grind. I mean it’s all grind, but the grind rewards you with a fresh shot of endorphins every couple of minutes. You just keep cooler better stuff and mightier skills and bigger numbers and there is a ceaseless motivation to just keep thrashing about and progressing. In fact, the game seems to know this giving you new quests that sometimes just happen as you stroll by… none of this clicking and choosing, heck, it’s more like hey you, follow me and kill these demons.

So I progress. And I unlock. And the game goes on.

Post: Dungeon Basher
Friday the 10th of October, 2025, dinnertime.

When I play games like Diablo IV I often need to take a beat and try to remind myself that these games are designed for teenagers. Sure, we lifetime gamers in our 40s still dive into big titles like this and get lost in the fantasy of bashing baddies with our big fantasy weapons, but really, they are narratively simple for a reason.

I’ve been mildly surprised by D4 tho.

I mean, yeah, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between the main story quests and the side-questing (to grow my character) but for a brute force slugfest, the story is actually pretty solid.

Too, the side quests are anything but raw fetch quests. There are entangled narrative arcs and plots with reputational impacts. You are not just running off to find random object X but rather you are, say, replacing objects that got broken in previous quests to help characters with questionable motives, if you so choose.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying games designed for kids can’t be narratively interesting, but often the plot is there as much to force skill grinding or whatever as it is to tell s an actually interesting story.

Heck, sure… maybe D4 isn’t gonna win any writing awards. But it has been pleasantly and surprisingly compelling to pay attention to the story in this one.

Post: Another Deal
Thursday the 9th of October, 2025, mid-morning.

I am distracted by a dearth of games. Another title I’d been eying for a couple years showed up on one of those too good to ignore massive discount sales and, well…

I was gambling on Diablo. I had dabbled in this game back with the original literally decades ago and knew I had a vibe for action RPG games. The whole mindlessly hacking through waves of enemies and blurring through chaos of it all can be very much its own kind of flow state game where there is almost no thought beyond taking the next few steps, healing, and continuing the battle.

It’s not for everyone, but it turns out (particularly because I’m a wee bit sick and confined to the couch this week) that I can sink six or seven hours into this game and not even blink.

The game looks a lot like Baldur’s Gate, another of those recently acquired wishlist games, but the play style is almost the polar opposite. Wherein BG3 one is strategically conducting battle in turn based order, planning each move with precision and care lest the a careless use of finite action point sour the strategy and doom the fight to failure, D4 is a tank of button mashing, brute bashing and raw force. There is strategy, of course, but it as much about building a powerful character that can take lots of hits and deliver devastating attacks BEFORE one goes out to fight. BG3 is chess, D4 is football.

D4 is also a sinkhole for my attention. I’m not sure what else or how often I will post about a game that is essentially bludgeoning through a world map, but too, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be another one of those games I was pining to play and then got bored with two hours in. It hasn’t been. I can see this becoming a new mild obsession, actually. I’m only on my first build and at level 22. Just wait until things get serious, huh?