In Diablo circles — I don’t mean circles of hell, I mean in the community around Blizzard’s dark fantasy action RPGs — there is a cool game to like, and it’s Diablo 2. There’s no real debate about this. The 2000 game is Diablo at its moodiest and most unforgiving. Yet it’s still impressive in its scale, has unbeatable longevity, and plays pretty well today, especially in the Resurrected remaster.
You can try for purist points and stump for the first Diablo, but it’s very much a first draft, and nobody really thinks it’s a superior game. Diablo 4 is far too current and too popular to be cool to like; the done thing is to complain about whatever the latest balance changes or endgame tweaks are instead.
And then there’s Diablo 3. Reputationally, this game sits in a weird limbo. It was pilloried before launch for its more colorful, less grungy art style, and pilloried at launch for terrible network issues, a real-money auction house, and tuning that felt off. Eventually, Blizzard rescued it with the superb Reaper of Souls expansion in 2014 and excellent console ports. But the stink of those early days remains, while the game is perhaps not yet old enough — or its sequel is too new — for a full reclamation movement to gather momentum.
But, quietly, people still play it. And they are having a great time. I have always loved Diablo 3 — even at launch, when it had many problems. It’s available right now on Xbox Game Pass, and I would recommend it over any other Diablo game, even Diablo 4, to a new player.
This is, admittedly, because it’s the most welcoming, most rewarding, least hardcore game in the series, and by far the easiest to get into. It has neither the stern old-school design of 2 nor the inevitable live-service bloat of 4. It feels trim and contained, which is an extraordinary thing to say about a game that has basically limitless content and that has been in operation for 14 years (and was actively updated for 11 of them).
Despite its deep roots in computer RPGs, Diablo 3 has an arcade sensibility that cuts through all its stat complication and communicates what’s great about it in an immediate way. It has the best gamefeel and the most refined combat in the series, hands down; positioning and tactical crowd control are key, and you need to keep moving to pick up health drops (you have only one health potion, and it’s on a cooldown). Moment-to-moment, it’s just more fun to play.
You can get as lost in Diablo 3‘s itemization and progression systems as you want, but, controversially to some action-RPG fans, it has a level of resistance to min-maxing and theorycrafting because its character builds are so fluid. Skills and skill-altering runes aren’t arranged into trees with complex interdependencies, or sunk in deep crafting systems, but can just be swapped around with almost total freedom. In Diablo 3, I don’t play to a build and try to shape my gear around it; I adapt my build to the gear as I pick it up, which means my character is always changing how it plays. To some ARPG players, this is heresy. To me, it’s constantly refreshing and exciting.
It helps that every character class, skill, and rune has been fine-tuned by Blizzard — the best to ever do it. Diablo 3‘s pyrotechnic Wizard remains the most thrilling glass-cannon class in Diablo history, and the game abounds with wonderfully flavorful twists on classic archetypes — especially the Monk, Crusader, and Demon Hunter.
Diablo 3‘s campaign is probably the weakest thing about it, although personally I’ve never understood people who play these games for the story. Suffice to say that it’s suffused, especially in the voice acting, with a kind of vigorous, broad, high-fantasy camp that I know most Diablo fans find grating but I think can be very entertaining if you bring the right frame of mind to it. That’s especially true of the scenery-chewing villainy of Zoltun Kulle, the ghostly mage who accompanies you for a spell.
Beat the campaign, though, and you can play Diablo 3 in Adventure Mode, which is a gloriously surreal endless remix of all the game’s content, scattering Bounty missions across the world map and building to runs of the wildly randomized, explosive Nephalem Rift dungeons. This is context-free monster massacre and character progression on an exhilarating exponential curve.
Finally — and, sadly, this only applies to the console version of Diablo 3, not the PC one — it is one of the greatest local co-op games of all time. Playable by up to four friends with a supremely unfussy drop-in, drop-out structure, and with an impressively streamlined user interface, Diablo 3 doesn’t ask much of a team beyond keeping each other company as they revel in its satisfying infinite mayhem. It’s a wonderful experience with a natural rhythm to it: bursts of savage monster-killing interrupted by chatty downtime as you sort through your loot and refine your builds.
Diablo 3 is about as uncool as Diablo can get, but I will always be ardently in love with it. And I’m not alone. There are dozens of us! Maybe one day, Blizzard’s retrospective gaze will fall on us and decide we need a new class or a new expansion, too. But maybe we’ll tell them not to bother; Diablo 3 doesn’t need it.