Ahead is going to be a wall of text with (hopefully) aesthetic partitions and bullet points on the story of Diablo 4 as I experienced it. I just completed the story and have got a lot to say, and I hope someone can comment on if there was anything misrepresented or that I missed in mentioning. tl;dr at the bottom
Overall Mood
The tone of Diablo 4’s storytelling was incredibly clear since the start: The world is going to be full of cruelty, savagery, degeneracy, blood/gore etc. From cannibalism to ritual sacrifice, the game has it all and truth be told I was incredibly excited for the explicit nature of the game’s theme. That theme doesn’t persist all throughout the game, as with all stories there needs to be a mixture of other narrative devices and techniques (such as humor) to break apart the monotony otherwise the tone as a whole would grow stale.
The times the tone of gritty, hopeless, evil was broken felt incredibly forced. E.g. Lorath being a useless drunk in Act 3 or Meshif continuously referring to Lorath as Deckard Cain.
Games like Diablo, PoE, Gauntlet (their predecessor) all seemed to focus on the simple story telling of “There’s evil, defeat it and make the world right again”, but Diablo 4 does not have that until the very end when you finally defeat Lilith while also doubling down on sealing Mephisto’s soul away in a soulstone. The time it took to get to that point was jarring for a eudaimonic release of heroism in a rather hopeless world. Acts 1 through 5, all of them, never make you feel as if your actions really accomplished anything positive other than the prevention of outright destruction for all human life in that area of Sanctuary.
Speaking of the destruction of human life, a bit of canon to review.
Pre-existing Lore
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Malthael wiped out 90% of humanity. That’s the number blizzard cited in the 2021 BlizzConline Diablo IV “What’s next” video segment. 90. Percent. Sanctuary didn’t have too many humans in it to begin with, but yet there are hundreds of bodies set as mutilated corpses in places like Guulrahn in Act 3. Loads of cultists everywhere (I get it that they’re an enemy type and thus must be present in huge waves to offer a threat of badguys for us to beat), and it could give one the inclination to ask what did humanity do in the 50 years since reaper of souls? Nonstop procreation? As a +, no one in sanctuary makes any mention of what undoubtedly was the darkest time in their world’s history like “watching as all of their family and neighbors had their souls reaped” by Malthael; many of them are (assumedly) too young to know of it given their parents were nonstop having kids to repopulate the world of sanctuary, but there are elderly npcs present that should have given some color to the world’s history.
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The events of D3 are canon, to what degree is uncertain since only Activision-Blizzard seem to be the ones curating what they wish for D4’s relevance BUT Lorath Nahr exists - the same guy that helped Tyrael in adventure mode of D3.
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Tyrael was made mortal and attempted to reform the horadrim several times but succeeded only in training 3 people to current day: Lorath, Donan, and Elias.
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The Diablo 3 player character remains as some kind of godlike being with dominion over Death.
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The Angiris Council and all of heaven have decided to stay away from Sanctuary.
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Trag’oul still exists and remains the patron of all Necromancers and the keeper of the Balance between good and evil.
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Hell and all its realms are being populated with the souls of their lords because the destruction of the Black Soulstone and the death of Malthael only served to free and release them back to hell. Diablo lore describes them as being godlike entities within their own realms but incredibly weak when they manifest in Sanctuary (especially so if imprisoned within a host).
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Demons can’t manifest themselves into sanctuary without being summoned or without using the power of the four lesser evils combined (in the case of the Dark Exile and the primes being banished in a weakened state to sanctuary).
Act 1.
We eat blood petals that are the symbolic representation of Lilith’s blood, creating a link between us and her. This exists as the “get up and go” hook of the game as we’ve got a figurative timebomb ticking down in our veins and thus need to defeat/kill her to cleanse ourselves of the corruption.
Never again is this brought up in the story however, only in instances when we need a cutscene or cinematic to play just so that we can more closely follow Lilith’s presence (though we forever remain constantly far, far behind her until Act 6). We don’t ask Inarius to cleanse us (doubt he’d have the ability to do so given how useless he is anyway), we don’t search for old Horadric texts with Neyrelle on cleansing ourselves. Nope. Our only mission in-game is to defeat Lilith and surely all of our problems will be solved.
We run into the aforementioned Neyrelle in Act 1 and I knew this was going to be a problem character from the beginning. Punky attitude, arrogant to a fault, wants to be a horadrim and has no formal teaching besides what she taught herself from what she and her mother exhumed out of horadric vaults. I got Rey Palpatine vibes from her early on and found myself not caring about her or her mother’s role in the story… honestly felt like a forced storyline. Her mother had too much of a lust for knowledge that she would throw away any care she had for her own daughter… you’re made to want to feel empathy for the character but she slows down the quest to stop Lilith far too often and too much. Charges off ahead to unlock doors or access pathways for you on her own (when she’d most likely die for doing something so reckless with demonic enemies around). Her actions end up costing her an arm in Act 5 and I was genuinely surprised Blizzard allowed something bad to actually happen to her - was beginning to think she was going to be wholly unstoppable and replace us or the Horadrim as a whole as the new defender of sanctuary). 3/10 character.
Vigo was great though! Real, actual character with faults, self-doubts, progression and improvement, but then he gets killed off. Inarius’s knights penitent are fiercely into scruples or self-inflicted pain so much that they keep chaos warrior armor torture suits on hand for either the extremely devout or as religious punishment. Seeing Vigo die actually made me want to stop Lilith even more. 7/10 character.
Inarius is a big baby. He wants to go back to heaven because he has buyer’s remorse about absconding with the worldstone and creating sanctuary, but Inarius in the books and lore is described as the ultimate in vanity. His motivations would have (and should have been) to recreate the religion he had on sanctuary that worships him as a god and wipe out and evidence of demons that would challenge his rule. Not because he wants to go home. “Home” sold him out, they traded him to Mephisto as due payment for the Primes not interfering with Sanctuary, period. It was at this point I wasn’t sure that the writers for D4 even read the diablo books, as Inarius was flayed alive and kept in an oubliette made of mirrors in Mephisto’s portion of hell. Why he looks like a scuffed angel in full armor and robes again is beyond me. 1/10 character.
Act 2
You’d think Donan would have known better than to sit on the soul of Astaroth his entire life. Never has it ever worked out for the Horadrim before, but I guess Donan, and the writers, thought he was built different.
Astaroth had a severe lack of importance to the overall story of Diablo 4 other than to be a chapter boss for us to fight. He’s a demon OC that ranks probably at the same power level that Ghom or Cydaea did in D3. He’s not a prime evil nor a lesser evil, but a “baron of hell” as it is put. When did the war between him and the people of Scosglen happen exactly? In Donan’s lifetime for sure, but Donan wasn’t a part of the Horadrim 50 years ago so assuming it happened right as Donan was inducted into the Horadrim, give maybe a generous 1-2 years to learn how to wield magic and defeat demons… that puts Astaroth’s tyranny against the druids of Scosglen at being really funky fresh and recent. Who summoned him back then? One of the 10%'ers that still drew breath after Malthael genocided the world? Did he invade after the nephalem player character suddenly turned a blind eye to sanctuary in lieu of serving as a veritable god of death? What made Astaroth so powerful that he could overpower his host from the soulstone in an afternoon when he’s just a lesser demon? In the end, Astaroth was a big clown. The dog boss by itself was a tougher fight and you don’t even fight Astaroth once the mount goes down, he just flat-out dies immediately with it.
Airidah was a gimmick. A “wouldn’t it be cool if” from Blizzard about how they wanted the players to fight a fiddle-playing druid in a lightning storm. “I’m gonna separate the weak from the strong” says the old lady to an entire region that lost 90%+ of its population. The tree-guy wasn’t much better. How on earth does one possibly bleed that much. Magic? Then why doesn’t the triune magic the infinite blood hack into their rituals for everything else?
Act 3
These will get briefer since Activision-Blizzard also began to rush through the story to its completion from this point on.
Genbar’s storyline was a distraction for more content, I don’t believe we got anything out of defeating him other than the fact he was giga-simping for Lilith, conjuring minor demons, and being an overall nutcase in his little shack. The Orbei monastery by contrast was a good storyline filled with ambience, horror and terror, but still ultimately made lame by the fact that we are “yet again too late” to stop anything of consequence. D2 had you clean up messes made by the antagonists yes, but not with the same urgency that D4 gives. We’re made out to feel like any moment we can get to the bad guys and stop them but it is never the case.
Guulrahn and Taissa.
Loud audible sigh
Hey, isn’t it incredibly convenient that the one living prisoner inside Guulrahn, y’know that city sacked by cannibals and demons, is the one we’re sent on a quest to go find? A city of who knows how many hundreds of people. Yeah no, really awesome that they’re the only survivor, kept in a prison for whatever reason too… weren’t just like hiding really well or using the palace’s secret passageways to give the invaders the slip. Nope, kept alive just for us. Gotta love being that incredibly lucky.
Taissa is a character that seems to me, and stop me if this seem completely illogical to assume so, Blizzard didn’t know what on earth to do with. It’s like they created a blank character to be a sacrificial host to Andariel then went “wait no, what if she was actually much more important than that” so Lorath steps in to interrupt. Her having Andariel linked to her made me think “okay so when are we killing her” because she’s just going to transform given how dismal the world’s outcome of everything we attempt to intervene on goes. Could stop Lilith’s plans right there. Nope. Lorath makes no mention of how Taissa’s more of a potential threat for turning than we are. Culminating an act later when Blizzard subverts us all yet again when Taissa doesn’t in-fact transform into Andariel but like… manifests the lesser evil a couple feet away with Elias’s magic? It was weird. We kill Andariel, thus foiling Lilith’s plan of siphoning her for power or something, but that felt like a minor plot resolution instead of a major win. Seemed like Blizzard wanted to do more with Taissa later and didn’t want us to have to kill her and wouldn’t you know it in Act 5 we see more of her and it turns out she was actually a powerful witch all along and playing an undercover cultist just so she could get close to Elias.
Act 4 was really short, Andariel was disappointing how they handled her.
Act 5 was the weakest act, story-wise, out of all the rest. I don’t even have questions to ask about it - it was, simply put, quite lame. Swamp magic. Donan is sad. Neyrelle loses an arm. Weird tree. Taissa was secretly a capable witch all along but don’t worry she won’t help you save the world. Snakes.
Act 6
Caldeum’s got the gate to hell right underneath it eh? Wow, should’ve warned the Yshari Sanctum about that one, maybe they’d have been wary to look for such a thing after they were infiltrated by the lord of lies 50 years ago. Could possibly be that all the mages and wizards were wiped out by Malthael and couldn’t have been around to check but… HOW is there a gateway to hell in Caldeum? It took all three Primes to open a gate to Hell or at least Mephisto to channel on it, and Diablo 4 implies that the gate to hell existed (hence needing the key that Rathma held) already before Lilith was reincarnated. Who or what made it? Was it always there?
Lorath wags the soulstone in front of Inarius only to have it yoinked away, only to have it return to him 2 zones later as a plot device for Reverend Mother Prava (and Blizzard) to issue the remaining knights penitent to attack us as enemies here on after. We’re enemies for life now.
How did Prava possibly live anyway? Her faith was that strong? It is possible that faith in the diablo universe could do something like that (see crusaders and paladins), but the source of her faith wasn’t that holy. It seemed more like Blizzard didn’t want to kill her off so that literally after we discover she’s alive she makes us her foil for her faction from then on. Could have been better if, idk, some knight (or Iosef) saw us comb over her body for the stone and assumed we killed her/were aiding Lilith and thus make us wanted by the church? I mean cmon, we see her get swarmed by demons in the cinematic…
Closing Points
They threw Andariel and Duriel at us for nostalgia points and my god how they butchered Duriel’s presence in the story. Might as well have been a random overgrown slug or sandworm causing some quakes under Caldeum while we were passing through. Who summoned him? Elias was already dead so did Lilith do it? Wouldn’t she have wanted to save him as a rearguard to protect her advance into hell? We just stumble on him in a pit of no real strategic importance or consequence. Wouldn’t Lilith have rather siphoned Duriel’s power for her cult or for herself instead? Duriel wouldn’t want to work alongside Lilith against ANY of the prime evils anyway since he originally betrayed them in the Dark Exile - his presence assisting them in D2 was to make amends for his screwup.
From Act 3 onward, the game started to really feel rushed. The story was less about what could make feasible sense and more about what was convenient to blizzard or delighted them in an artsy way. Neyrelle, Taissa, Donan, the Tree of Whispers, Lorath, Elias, Prava, Inarius… all of the characters felt or started to feel hollow, one-dimensional, and childlike.
I was either being talked at or I was babysitting. Lorath fails at being the sage hero archetype, the orphan hero archetype of Neyrelle proves to be as irritating as she was at the beginning but then steals away the soul of the lord of hatred from probably the only 2 people left in all of Sanctuary equipped to do something with it (3 if you count Tyrael as a future cameo if he yet lives). Donan dies to some ambient environment clutter. Inarius was thrown away as a character and utilized tragically, Prava’s a zealot with plot armor, and Lilith?
Lilith was a demon with daddy issues who didn’t accomplish really anything. None of her promises came true for anyone, none of her methods seemed genuine, no great universal secret, boon, or reveal made themselves evident by her deeds or words. Lilith existed as a Walmart-brand dark wanderer that we could never reach, until we did, and all of her talking and platitudes served no purpose. I thought we were going to get a “big choice” moment where we could side with her intentions, with mephisto’s, inarius’s, reject them all, or at the very least question whether or not she may have been the one in the right all along. Instead we got none of that. We went from riding on a horse cold and alone in winter to being the hero of sanctuary because we had to be… or we would have been corrupted by Lilith’s blood.
The only redeeming portions of the story, in my opinion, were: Mephisto, Vigo, and Rathma (however small his was), with honorable mentions to that exorcist lady in Kyovashad, the bear druid in Scosglen, and Meshif because of nostalgia.
It’s 2023 and we don’t get dialogue options beyond asking pointless questions. We don’t get a choice system, we don’t get agency. Nothing in this genre of game got pioneered with D4, no risks were taken, the storytelling was art-house yet shallow. If you care about the lore of Diablo then you’re probably annoyed like I am or, even still, unimpressed. You’re a side character the entire time. In Diablo 1, 2, and 3 you’re the hero because you’re the one who takes it upon themselves to save the world. In Diablo 4, you have to be the hero or you’ll die, and you play second-string to “more important” characters who all lack sense and/or depth - who don’t acknowledge your importance until the final act of the game. If you made it to the end of the post, congratulations, your reward is a one-armed bandit (more than likely corrupted) sailing off with a prime evil as a traveling companion.
TL;DR
I really like the lore of Diablo, it’s a shame that Diablo’s writing team doesn’t. It’s lazy. They create too many questions while also having too many contradictions, plot points of ridiculous convenience, the major motivation for the player-character being an afterthought, and minimal impact of our presence in the world beyond that of stopping Lilith herself.
If there’s anyone who has answers to some of what I wrote above, I’d love to hear what I missed.