Matthew Rossi

Last week's Diablo 4 Campfire Chat introduced a lot of changes coming to the game in May (including a vastly overhauled itemization system), but one small change may have flown under the radar: increased zoom distance.

I play a lot of games and I am always hitting moments I completely find compelling or fun or interesting. And then, once I am done playing them — and usually much later, hours or days later — I realize that I should have screenshotted or recorded it. By then, however, I’ve moved way past it, and going back would either be a process of hours of gameplay from an old save, or with games like Diablo 4, literally starting the whole game over again.

So anyway, I had a whole lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 stuff I was gonna talk about, but then I realized I forgot to take the SS of me talking to an angry bird, so here we are.

Diablo 4 is about to upend itemization with a new philosophy that stresses quality over quantity.

I am rapidly becoming convinced that I am the most contrary human being to exist, because the more people complain about Diablo 4 Season 3, the more I seem to be loving it.

It’s okay to not be good at something you enjoy doing.

Sometimes I just stop and marvel at the way the Diablo 4 team worked our characters into the in-game cinematics. There’s my character up there, confronting Lilith. It’s not just Lilith monologuing, it’s not Tyrael blowing up the Worldstone or Baal breaking a man’s brain, it’s me. The character I’ve been playing all game is the one we get to see step up, and she’s a fully customized, distinct looking figure.

And they even managed to capture how utterly done with Lilith’s whole deal she is.

Lately pretty much every morning has felt like waking up with a mind flayer tadpole, so I figured I’d embrace it. It’s the Queue. I’m kind of splitting my time between Faerun and Sanctuary lately — yes, I’m that one guy who likes Diablo 4 pretty much just as much as when it launched — and I won’t lie, there’s some cognitive dissonance.

Luckily, I tend to do Dark Urge origins and those are a fair bit more… shall we say sanguine? It makes it easier to leap between them when I go from giant barbarian soaked in blood to giant barbarian soaked in blood, I guess.

The Last Epoch launched last week after five years of early access, and it's an ARPG that, like almost every ARPG in existence, is clearly heavily influenced by Diablo 2.

Here I am, playing Season 3 of Diablo 4 and I’m still learning new things about the story and lore of the franchise. In one throwaway conversation with Taissa you can ask her about Andariel, and she drops that little bomb.

Bring it in, everyone.