I have been absolutely buried in the live service space for years now. I mean, essentially a decade, if we’re counting Destiny 1 as the launch of this era, a string of games that aren’t quite MMOs, but aren’t quite not. They are something that demands almost endless play. Or rather, begs for your attention, as long as it can hold it.
Over time, it became simply too much. With my “main” being Destiny, I had to set down games like The Division or Genshin Impact as it was just too much content to consume. Other games like Anthem or Avengers didn’t even last long enough to need that kind of attention, given how easy it is to fail in the space.
That’s why I am pleasantly surprised with Diablo 4’s apparently quite short seasons. As I’ve said before, I didn’t play really any of Diablo 3’s seasonal content, but I wanted to give 4’s a shot given that I quite liked the base game. But my fears about adding another life-consuming live, seasonal game to my roster do not appear to be panning out.
At least this season of Diablo 4, even if others are a bit more involved, it’s become pretty clear to me that you can experience almost all of what a season has to offer very quickly. I did the entire main questline in a few hours, I’ve farmed dozens of Malignant Hearts and gotten some favorites. My Necromancer is in World Tier 4, hot on the heels of my Eternal realm Rogue and Barbarian. I cleared the entire battle pass before level 70, unlocking every reward.
That took…a week. Granted, a week of pretty intense play, but a week all the same. While at first I found myself kind of going “that’s it?” the more I reflect on that, the more I appreciate it. Everything from here on out feels optional. I can refine my Necromancer build like I’ve done on my Eternal characters and keep leveling. But there’s no rush, and this character transfers to the other realm anyway after all this, so I’m not losing anything, really.
There are some ultimate endgame challenges that would take a truly long time, but I don’t really care about getting to level 100 or beating Uber Lilith for I think, a title? Again, my goal was really just to clear the battle pass and get a fun late-ish game Necro build. And I’ve pretty much done that.
For a long time, the refrain in gaming was that there wasn’t enough content. Games, especially live games, need to keep delivering content. And while that is true to a certain extent, it is almost refreshing to see a live game demanding far less of my time. Things have sort of flipped (becoming a parent certainly contributed, for me personally). Diablo 4 has a $10 season pass for cosmetics (we won’t talk about the cash shop), the same as any other one in similar games. But the actual seasonal mechanic and challenges are all free. So you don’t even have to invest money, per se, much less all that much time.
Destiny seasons are a lot longer. A story is spread out over eight weeks and probably takes an hour a week to get through. There are seasonal activities, dungeons, raids, weapon grinds, PvP, a million things to keep you eternally engaged. Then you go a level past that into a game like Genshin Impact with just giant content drops at a rapid fire pace that become almost unsustainably huge if you’re trying to balance other games along with it.
Maybe Diablo seasons get a bit bigger in time, but right now I’d consider their length an asset, not a detriment, even if I was a little unsure about how quickly it all went at first. And I don’t have to be done, I can keep grinding if I want. But I also don’t need to put it down to play say, Remnant 2 for the next few weeks. And that’s nice.
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