Diablos III and Immortal are unworthy successors to the Diablo title. Diablo IV is reportedly much better (I haven’t tried it, and for that matter I haven’t tried Immortal, but for Immortal to be good, nearly everyone who ever wrote or talked about it would have to be lying), but it’s tied to plot points introduced in Diablo III and Immortal, which makes me worry that it would be a jarring lurch to go into straight from Diablo II. I hate the feeling that I’ve skipped a chapter, and while some installments in an ongoing series are so superfluous that you totally can just avoid them (the Assassin’s Creed series, for example, is an episodic series whose only ongoing plot is the stupid modern day frame stories that are best off ignored in the first place), it’s not clear to me if Diablo IV is that. I’d like it if someone took the new plot elements introduced in Diablo III and Immortal, cleared out the other 80% of the game retreading ground covered by Diablo I and II, and then presented it in a style consistent with those first two games rather than being World of WarCraft-ified in a quest to make all of Blizzard’s franchises more like the one that makes the most money. That game doesn’t exist, and so long as I’ve got 100+ games in my backlog, that’s enough to disqualify the otherwise (reportedly) quite good Diablo IV from my wishlist.
Hades is not that game. It isn’t literally a spiritual successor to Diablo II, but it’s closer to being that than Diablo III is, which is surprising since Diablo III is an actual numbered sequel and Hades was at no point even trying to be a Diablo successor. Diablo III had a few new ideas but squandered them with a combination of poor writing and slavish devotion to the settings and characters of the first two games. Diablo is a series where you go into a cool place, kill cool monsters, and watch the numbers go up as a result. The loot progression is critical to the gameplay loop, but what the loot actually is makes fairly little difference. The new weapons and armor you get are rarely that engaging on their own, but it does feel cool when you equip a new weapon and are now cleaving through monsters at a noticeably accelerated rate. And that’s not to say it’s a mindless process, either. While grabbing whatever has the biggest number will carry you through the base game, there is a lot of depth to build optimization in Diablo and especially Diablo II. Rather, what I’m saying is that where that build optimization comes out viscerally is not in what hat your character is visibly wearing, but purely in the rate of monster destruction.
And the reason that works well in Diablo and especially Diablo II is because the monsters and locations you’re in visually progress and the narrative accelerates towards a climactic confrontation (provided you’re playing with the Diablo II expansion’s Act V – Act IV is actually kind of lame, you just show up at Diablo’s house and beat him up and the Hell levels are just long enough for the momentum of the Act III/IV transition cut scene to wear off and then there’s not really anything else to pick up the slack in the story). Newer games’ “new locations” are locations from the old games with pretty minimal edits, and their new monsters are mostly the same. Even when locations do change significantly, it’s only to change into another old location. The mountain from Diablo II was reduced to a crater at the end of that game, so it is now the caves level from Diablo I.
The shift in art style in Diablo III was also a bad idea. I remember people making fun of the fan backlash over it and those people were and are stupid hacks. Making Diablo look like a gothic-themed expansion for World of WarCraft is no better an idea than World of WarCraft looking like an orc-heavy Diablo expansion. The unification of all of Blizzard’s games into a single mono-art style is bad. That it was the critics pushing for homogeneity in art against fans calling for more diversity is a bizarre reversal of what’s usually one of the critics’ redeeming qualities: A greater appreciation for the new. We can’t give the fans too much credit here, because retaining the old Diablo style would obviously not have been new, but at least it would’ve avoided winnowing down the old and actually shrinking the diversity of art.
And on the other end: Hades is a pretty good successor to the Diablo series. There’s definitely enough of a tonal mismatch that it is not a good idea to take it as literally a stealth Diablo sequel. In a Diablo game, Hades would be a world-devouring arch-horror and Zagreus’ quest would be to stop him, whereas in Hades the titular antagonist is a stubborn old man who must be worn down through a relentless defiance, but the ultimate resolution is reconciliation. I really like how well it’s handled, the game doesn’t present Zagreus as flawless but also doesn’t mind presenting a scenario where one side is more in the wrong and has to give more ground in a reasonable compromise than the other, and since the whole theme of the game is about wearing someone down over time, Hades’ slow crumbling before Zagreus’ relentlessness feels earned and plausible, not like the story reached act three so the writers flipped a switch and Hades instantly became more reasonable after a moment of emotional catharsis. It dawns on Hades slowly that no, really, Zagreus is never giving up on this, and it takes him a while to update his behavior on that realization.
Anyway, all that’s badly out of step with the tone of Diablo, but otherwise it’s a pretty snug fit. A gothic atmosphere, dungeon levels full of gory, infernal imagery, a host of ghastly and skeletal monsters, a heavily stylistic visual presentation that makes the game look like a playable film of a specific medium. Most people think of Diablo and Diablo II as just looking like themselves, but that distinctive art style comes from trying to look like claymation as best as the available tools permit. Hades looking like a 2D animated film that you can play is exactly the kind of visual update that Diablo III should have had – moving on from the old to do something new, rather than a relatively niche old thing being assimilated into the Borg cube of a bigger, more profitable old thing. Likewise, the mechanics are recognizably a realtime action dungeon crawler, but the details of how upgrades work and the new Roguelike elements significantly overhaul exactly how you play. The locations have Diablo III’s problem of being a bit of a retread – Tartarus is basically the crypts from Diablo I, Phlegethon is the pre-requisite Hell level, and while Elysium is new and interesting, Diablo III also managed exactly one interesting new location in its last act – but the new monsters and art style make them feel more distinct from older Diablo games than Diablo III’s rendition. Also, to be clear, I’m not marking Hades down for Tartarus and Phlegethon being vaguely thematically similar to Diablo series dungeons, because it’s not actually a Diablo game, just pointing out that Hades’ advantage over Diablo III as the accidental third installment in the series is more slight here than in other aspects.
Hades isn’t usable as the “real” Diablo III even with a few script edits to change the proper nouns around (especially not for purposes of being the missing bridge to Diablo IV), but if Diablo III had been good, it would’ve had more in common with Hades than with the Diablo III we got.
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