Diablo 4 has a surprisingly strong hold on me, considering it’s my first Diablo game and I’ve never really been into the ARPG genre at all. I was pushed to finally wrap up the campaign by the fast approach of Diablo’s first season, so I could dive head-first into the Season of the Malignant. Speaking to the developers about the season only made me more interested in jumping in, but since I did, I’ve been finding myself getting more and more annoyed. Everywhere, people are asking me for help, and I’m going out of my way to offer assistance. I consider myself a relatively helpful person, and it doesn’t really bother me to do these side quests, except for the fact that I’ve done a ton of them once before already.
Diablo 4 allows you to carry over renown from your Eternal Realm campaign run into the Seasonal Realm, but only from certain sources. Renown from discovering areas of the map will carry over, as will Altars of Lilith. You’ll have waypoints from the five major cities on the map, but will have to rediscover the rest. If you’ve explored the entire map and collected all the Altars of Lilith, this will get you to only the first two renown tiers in each area. I haven’t done either of these things because I have other more important things to do, which means I have to grind renown more than people who did actually do those things in preparation for the season.
One way to get renown that jumps out frequently is side missions. Just walking around the world exposes you to plenty of side quests and opportunities to gain renown from. But hearing the same voice lines for the second time has already gotten grating, and there isn’t any way for me to know if I did a side quest with a previous character already if I don’t manually track everything I’ve already done. Now imagine a second season, in which we have to do the same side missions. And then a third. It’s going to get very old, very fast if new side missions aren’t introduced.
It’s not so much that I’m mad about having to grind renown – that just comes with the territory. There are plenty of ways to get renown that don’t necessarily involve side quests. Clearing dungeons is one, and defeating strongholds is another very useful and more efficient one. The best way to proceed is to hit the dungeons tagged by the Tree of Whispers, but it’s far less satisfying to just do dungeons without having missions to break up the monotony. And, again, you have to repeat side missions. It makes the whole gameplay loop that much more arduous, especially considering you have to hit level benchmarks before you can unlock parts of the season journey.
This all has made me realise that despite my excitement to engage with Diablo 4, maybe I’m truly just not built for the grind. I don’t want to have to redo content, I want to engage with new, interesting content that doesn’t require doing legwork I’ve already done once before. Maybe Blizzard will change this in the future, but I’m not seeing that as a likely outcome. Until then, I’ll be resentfully avoiding side quests and attacking strongholds as much as I can.