Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred
Back in my post about Transistor I mentioned that the second game I finished in 2025 was probably going to be Helen’s Mysterious Castle; instead, it turned out to be Diablo 4’s expansion pack, Vessel of Hatred. It was… okay.
First, about Diablo 4 as a game: it’s actually really good, although it took some time to get there. The Diablo 4 team seemed entirely determined to learn absolutely nothing from the Diablo 3 team’s mistakes and recoveries early on, and honestly that’s still kind of a recurring theme across Blizzard as a whole (I suspect inter-team communication basically doesn’t exist), but Diablo 4 got really good — the game is fun to play, the classes are varied and have a lot of viable endgame builds for what is now a large variety of endgame content, it’s really everything you could want out of an action RPG. The seasonal content is hit or miss, but the current Season of the Witch is probably my favorite since the Season of Blood’s vampire-based content back in Season 2. So my comments on Vessel of Hatred do not reflect on how fun the game itself actually is to play.
Story spoilers follow, obviously.
Vessel of Hatred’s campaign, in comparison, felt like two different storylines jammed together yielding a half-ass mash of both. This was a significant letdown after Diablo 4’s original campaign, which was — for the Diablo franchise — a real step up from prior games, which basically had kind of an excuse plot to send you into games. Some of this, I think, is due to the decision to sideline a significant amount of story around important NPC Lorath Nahr into a physical book between the two campaigns, and then discard most of that in Vessel of Hatred (the silliest thing being that Lorath spent an entire book’s worth of exploration hunting for Neyrelle, whereas you get stabbed, thrown in a river, and find Neyrelle within 30 minutes of starting Vessel of Hatred). I would have loved to seen this storyline fleshed out a bit more — Nahantu is a fascinating place, but you get rushed pretty hard through its content, characters get introduced only to get brutally killed, and there’s just a ton of focus on Diablo Jesus, a.k.a. Akarat, out of nowhere. It’s actually extremely funny that you end up finding the Tomb of Akarat at the end of Vessel of Hatred, once again doing something in a short matter of time that someone else failed to do — the Zakarum Crusaders got lost in Hawezar and slowly died off in the swamp because someone was convinced the Tomb was was there, when instead it was a few hours south.
Anyway, that half of the story’s fine, if a bit underwhelming because they also felt the need to shoehorn in an almost-entirely-unrelated plot about the Cathedral, which has been floundering since their patron angel was literally killed in Hell by his ex-wife. Reverend Mother Prava, who seemed to be on a fire-and-brimstone warpath at the end of the Diablo 4 campaign, is instead now the sane, stable figure in the church seeking your health, while new heavily-scarred, weird-wooden-cigar-smoking giant Urivar is presented as the head of the “burn the heretics” arm of the church and then killed off, all within the same 8-10 hour storyline. This could have probably been its own story at some point — it contained about the same amount of content as the average Diablo 4 season plot, so why not put it there?
Unfortunately, the mishmash of the two meant the storyline was a real disappointment after the initial campaign. Hopefully the inevitable next one’s better! And now I can go back to ignoring Diablo 4’s storyline and just smashing demons en masse on my druid each season. That’ll do.
Traveller
Last November, I finally ended my D&D 5E run of The Alexandrian’s remix of Descent into Avernus. All things considered, it went pretty well; there were highs, there were lows, there was a murder investigation, there was a hexcrawl in hell. The party even got a better ending than what is implied by the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3. In December, we decided to switch gears (and I got to take a break from the GM’s chair); our rogue’s player is now running Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller 2e. This is a wild little game, being primarily an update of the version from the 70s and presenting a sci-fi universe that always feels just on the border of being similar to something you know, but at the same time… not quite.
And no, no one died in character creation. I don’t think that’s actually possible in 2e anymore, although you can come out pretty heavily in medical debt if you get very unlucky. (We only really had one bad accident, wherein my wife’s character was injured as a test pilot for the Imperial Navy, but the military takes care of its own in Traveller’s universe.) Determined to see exactly how hard I could go with a build designed to try and talk my way out of combat in a universe where combat is extremely deadly, I rolled up disgraced noble and high-priced Solomani lawyer Fontaine Infinity, who so far has picked up some work for us to do after fleeing a pirate attack, and is currently wrangling in court to get 28 million in fines removed from the pirate ship we accidentally stole. It’s fine.
It’s a fun game, although I think some of the group is having to adjust to both the game itself being a different pace, as well as a change in gamemastering style after putting up with me for close to two years. At least the system itself is not too tricky — Traveller is, at its heart, an extremely simple system mechanically (which is funny given how in-depth its character creation is). Looking forward to our next session.
Triangle Agency
And speaking of new games, next weekend I’m running Triangle Agency for Blizzard Watch’s Tavern Watch Plays podcast. I am unbelievably excited about this game, honestly — the whole oeuvre of “questionable secret agency that takes care of very weird shit” ala Control and Severance and the SCP Foundation is extremely in my wheelhouse. This is a game I might just find an excuse to play as an ongoing game once this one-shot finishes, assuming it’s as good as I think it’s going to be, because (without spoiling too much, and yes, it is actually possible to spoil things about Triangle Agency) this is a game that begs for an extended, but finite, play through. It has endings, actual endings, that your characters pursue through their actions.
If anyone’s interested in something like that, let me know; it would almost definitely be played entirely online, but rounding up players early and often is probably something I should be doing anyway.