The swan song for Blizzard’s 11-year-old action-RPG shows how much more immediate and fun loot and killing monsters in its colorful world can be.
Diablo 3 is not being sunsetted. But the 11-year-old game is now the oldest of the four — yes, four — Diablo games that Blizzard currently operates (the others being Diablo 4, Diablo Immortal, and Diablo 2 Resurrected), and the developer has decided that it’s time to move it into a kind of semi-retirement phase.
First, though, it gets a swan song. Sept. 15 marked the launch of the game’s 29th season, “Visions of Enmity,” which will be the last season to get its own theme and any new content. Patches and technical support will continue beyond this point, but from season 30, Diablo 3 will begin cycling through old seasonal content every three months, resting on its laurels like a legendary band touring its greatest hits.
In all honesty, seasons in Diablo 3 were never that big a deal in the first place — beyond the familiar call of a fresh start, an excuse to roll a new character and do it all over again. Blizzard only added seasons to the game in 2014 after the release of the wonderful, course-correcting expansion Reaper of Souls, and fleshed them out gradually over time with features like the Season Journey objective structure. It wasn’t until season 15 in 2018 that they acquired distinct themes and new gameplay mechanics — but even in this form, they were pretty slender updates compared to the ambitious template set by Diablo 4’s current first season, “Season of the Malignant.”
And yet, upon revisiting Diablo 3 to try out season 29, it’s hard not to be struck by the profound contrasts with its sequel — contrasts that often aren’t favorable to the new game.
The big feature of “Visions of Enmity” is Diabolical Fissures: portals that spring up at random as you slaughter your way across Sanctuary. Enter one and it summons a scene plucked at random from the game’s campaign, populated with aggressive packs of elite monsters who don’t look like they belong there. Random conditions and effects are applied, too — I’ve encountered levels staffed entirely by Rift Guardian bosses or murderous Care Bears — but there’s scarcely time to think about what’s going on. Survive and kill are the watchwords. At some point (it could be immediately), a monster kill will summon another portal to another remixed scene. And again, and again, somewhere between five and 10 times. If you get to the end, you get a fat cache of loot.
Diabolical Fissures are similar to the Nephalem Rift dungeon remixes that have been the staple of Diablo 3’s endgame since Reaper of Souls, only abstracted to an almost comical degree in the way they pounce on you while you’re doing something else, and the way they nest dungeons within dungeons within dungeons. They’re a lot of fun. They’re also a perfect demonstration of the way Diablo 3 has leaned hard into randomization ever since the advent of Nephalem Rifts and the brilliant, free-form Adventure Mode.
