The Queue: Post-Modern Post Apocalyptic

After the Diablo 4 early access and open beta weekends, I keep thinking about the way that the action RPG juggernaut has translated open world gameplay into its isometric oeuvre and I realized that the game has a very similar feeling to games like the original Fallout or its modern incarnations.

The Sanctuary we see in D4 is in its own way post-apocalypse: the events of Diablo 3 saw the deaths of a huge portion of the human race and the destruction of the previous status quo of the world. Playing in D4, you see familiar institutions and locations, but radically altered from the ones we knew in previous games. In many ways, it feels like the people of Sanctuary are trying to carry on with a way of life that vanished forever when Malthael killed 90% of humanity.

It’s very reminiscent of when the Black Death hit and utterly changed the course of our own history. In Sanctuary, people remember the past, but the great nations and empires of that time are, at best, stumbling revenants that haven’t decided to fall yet. It’s a fascinating base state to start your game from, because it dares to ask the question where can we possibly go from here and doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending in mind.

Anyway, it’s the Queue, let’s get things going.

Yep. The wolf pup cosmetic is account bound, so it’s there already and will be there if/when you decide to play the game. You can delete the demo.

I believe so, yes.

Hey, LuotianX, I’m not answering your comment because you put it in spoiler tags so I’m not sure if you want it answered or not. But as a blind man, believe me, I have a lot of opinions on that subject.

No.

I mean, my answer is predicated on what Nintendo has revealed about the game’s story as well as my opinion of the previous game’s story, which was a pretty bog standard fantasy RPG in terms of what it did narratively. I watched my wife play the game for literal hours and hours, but I also watched her drop the thing like a hot rock the second Animal Crossing New Horizons came out and she never went back and that’s pretty telling to me.

I don’t believe that Breath of the Wild was bad. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the narrative was a framework that they used to hang their What if Zelda but Skyrim game from, that it did the job they intended it to do, and that it simply wasn’t intended to do more than that. Do they have loftier aspirations this time around? Is this going to be the epic, hits all the notes The Legend of Zelda game that ties together every single game in the franchise and finally, miraculously, makes it all make sense and explains how Link ends up on Mars in a sarcophagus fighting demons?

I mean, it could be, but without Nintendo doing much to hype it, I can’t in good conscience say yes to Soeroah here — we know almost nothing about the story in Tears of the Kingdom right now. I know more about the plot to Diablo 4, and I know almost nothing about that yet.

In the immortal words of 2012’s Avengers I understood that reference.

But in all honesty I still get twitchy every time I remember running Ozruk back in the day.

Okay, that’s the Queue. If you’re curious as to my thoughts about how Diablo 4 uses real historical events like the Black Death and the aftermath — I mean, in the hundred years after the Bubonic Plague ravaged Europe there was wide scale loss of land cultivation because so many laborers were dead that there wasn’t anyone to actually do the farming and tell me you don’t think Sanctuary probably had a similar problem after 90% of all people died — then thank you for reading this Queue, Dr. Eleanor Janega.