Like a bunch of people, I’ve spent the last week trying out the new warlock class in Diablo 2 Resurrected. It’s pretty fun throwing fireballs and waves of flame around while a summoned buddy tanks all the damage for me. Or at least it was until I got to the Maggot Lair. And not long after that, the Arcane Sanctuary. I haven’t even made it to Act 3’s jungle maze yet, but I’m not looking forward to it.
Well-loved as it is, Diablo 2 is not without flaws. Even in remastered form it still has the stamina bar David Brevik hates. Meanwhile, Diablo 4 does the live-service thing of having so many currencies to keep track of it can be headache-inducing. It makes sense that some people would find comfort in the halfway house of Diablo 3—though apparently it’s a lot more than just “some”
As Matthew Cederquist, Diablo legacy executive producer at Blizzard, recently told Eurogamer, “There’s actually millions of people that still play Diablo 3. Even when Diablo 4 came out, some players were cannibalised and brought over to D4, but there’s still a massive player base for Diablo 3,” he said.
“Every single ladder season that comes out, you will see people transition from D4 back to D3 and play for that opening weekend, or that week or so, and they’ll transition right back to D4. And vice versa D2.”
Good for them. Diablo 3 may have launched in an absolute state, but with some patches and updates it ended up being one of my favorite action RPGs. Every class I tried was fun to play, with a special shout-out to the monk’s ability to summon a giant bell out of the sky and drop it on people.
It’s the seasonal ladders that really draw players back, and while Diablo 2 Resurrected’s Ladder Season 13 just started, Diablo 3’s will continue to cycle around. “Our games fluctuate wildly,” Cederquist said, “and it’s because you have those seasonal contents. Everyone comes back for a ladder race, and actually the way we produce them is we separate them for that to happen, so we’re never going to have a D3 ladder stepping over a D2 ladder stepping over a D4 ladder. We want players to be able to say, Okay yeah, let me jump into this flavour of Diablo today, maybe this flavour of Diablo two weeks from now and so on.”
