Less loot, more horror, more pale fleshy things shuffling around out of sight. Slowed it down, maybe, zoomed in, dropped some gross blood rituals in my way. Now that I've seen it, I'm thinking, 'Wait, where was this?' It got me daydreaming about how they could've changed the fundamental Diablo experience. Tyler: Imagine if they had taken a big risk like that! I was busy covering the Hong Kong protests during the Opening Ceremony, so I actually didn't see Diablo 4's cinematic trailer until after I played the demo. Makes me wonder what that Dark Souls-inspired Diablo looked like. James: Diablo 4 does play with the camera during scene transitions and cinematics, zooming in for a closeup of our character belly-crawling through blood and bones here and there, but I can't help but wish for something a little more intimate. Games felt a bit more mysterious, particularly as kids, and the conversations about them more isolated.ĭiablo 4's spell effects are still bright, but not quite the fireworks show Diablo 3 was. There is still something to the low-res sprite-based character models and flat environment art, though-we have to do a little imaginative labor to fill in the details, and it's this era of games that grew up with primordial creepypastas. I grew up in a Christian family, and at 13 I remember thinking 'Hell yeah, this is some evil shit.' Looking at it now, Diablo 2 is pretty benign.

James Davenport, staff writer: I don't know if Diablo 2 was ever really that 'dark,' but it arrived at a time when, at least in the US, anything Satan-adjacent was still a huge cultural taboo.

We loved the Hellraiser horror of the cinematic trailer at BlizzCon this year, but can the game live up to that promise? Many people welcome this return to Diablo 2's atmosphere but, looking back, was Diablo 2 really that grim, or are we looking through morose-tinted glasses? Is this dark look a facade that conceals an otherwise typical genre-piece with the same looter loops we saw in Diablo 3? Let's discuss. Path of Exile and Grim Dawn have plenty of gothic gloom. However, the action-RPG landscape has changed since Diablo 3's release.

Diablo 4 environment art don't like it