Venturing Back Into Sanctuary For Seasonal Updates in Diablo IV

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Over the weekend, I played a bit over twenty hours of Diablo IV in a period of almost thirty hours. My friends and I, the people I played the game with during the closed beta last Spring and who I started to play with when the game fully released over the summer, have been too busy to play much, with each other or alone. Since this was the final weekend of Season 1, when I suggested we do something, my friend (the one who works on the game) suggested we try to get through as much of the seasonal content as we could. I said I was up for it and we launched into it once we had all finished with work and eaten dinner, at which point we realized I had not cleared the campaign on any of my characters. I was ready to tell them to go on without me for now, but they opted to pile into the campaign behind me and the three of us cleared the whole thing in about five or six hours. It was honestly impressive, how quickly we blasted through it (especially since they could use their horses to ride places and I could just teleport to them, which helped cut down on a lot of running around until I got a horse of my own), even with taking the time to watch the cutscenes. I still missed some nuance here or there, I’m sure, but it was a far more complete version of the story than I’m used to getting from my experience of being powerleveled through Diablo III. I really don’t feel like I missed much in Diablo IV (other than the hundreds of side quests, of course) and while I’m sure some of the story will fade in time, I actually have a pretty clear understanding of what was going on and why it was going. Conversely, I barely remember the story of Diablo III and I’m not sure I ever really understood what was going on in that game other than “angels and devils bad, fight them so they stay away.”

It took a lot longer to level up a new character in D4 than it did in D3. I have vague, hazy memories of trying to avoid dying as my more powerful friends ran me through one nightmarish dungeon after another in D3. It was always tricky to stay close enough to get the XP I needed for my level count leap upward but not so close than I’d get caught in the crossfire or aggro some enemies. What I remember more is feeling like this was the video game equivalent of eating my steamed mixed vegetables before I could have any casserole. Sure, it was nice to be at the table with my friends, but I don’t really remember enjoying the meal much. There was no sense of accomplishment from hitting the level cap and starting to gain paragon levels. Gear meant nothing since it was constantly being thrown aside for something better. I never once altered the cosmetics of my character since it didn’t matter what I did so long as I was there and mashing buttons. There was no strategy to the tier of play I ever got to and little I ever did seemed to make a difference in what happened on my screen. Everyone murdered a bunch of enemies, everyone got big numbers, and everyone got a cut of the loot.

In D4, though, I actually feel like I accomplished something special when my friends and I managed to get my brand new season character from level four to level forty-five in just over twelve hours. Sure, we didn’t make a huge dent in the seasonal stuff, but it was still impressive how we managed to get strong enough to handle a helltide even if I was about fifteen levels too weak for it still by the end of thirty hours of gaming. It was a great place to get experience, though, since I got my last five levels in the hour that we participated in the helltide. If we’d been doing it at a time other than half-past midnight, I might have even gotten to access some of those cool chests since I wouldn’t be making foolish, exhausted mistakes that got me killed. I mean, I was also playing the party’s tank so I was always in the thick of it and that meant that, when we were doing high-tier stuff (like the capstone dungeon and the helltide), I was going to be dying a bunch anyway since I was the lowest-leveled character in the party. We still managed to get through it all alright, though there were a lot of close calls (which felt like a real accomplishment, given how underleveled we all were for the capstone dungeon).

I’m excited to launch into the next season (which will have already started by the time you’re reading this). I will probably try to play the game by myself a bit more than I did during season 1 [I’ve already played it twice by myself, which is double the number of times I played Season 1 by myself] so I can work on getting my map completed, but I expect to still be mostly playing it with my friends. Unless there’s a new Baldur’s Gate 3 style single-player game to drag me away from Diablo, I expect I’ll actually be able to stick to my plans of playing it on regular rotation. I would really like to avoid a repeat of last weekend, since I absolutely do not have it in me to have another weekend as chaotic and sleep-schedule-destroying as this past one.

I know D4 doesn’t really have the incredibly intense loop of leveling and loot of Diablo III, but I think the promises of what changes are coming to the game show that the people making it are paying attention to what their players want and are working on making Diablo IV the excellent game I think we all know it can become over time. After all, it took several years for Diablo III to become the game people loved and even then they were complaining about “missing” classes the entire time I was playing it. Anyone trying to tell you that IV is worse than III is either stuck in nostalgia or just wants to be mad about something. It is different, for sure, but not worse. Considering it’s barely a year old and most people are comparing it to a game that was over eleven years old (and supported via constant improvements and new seasonal content for all of the later years of that period), I think people are just being pissy. I mean, if they wanted Diablo IV to be the same thing as Diablo III, then they never would have stopped playing D3 no matter what D4 turned out to be. Which, you know, is pretty much what happened with those folks.

Anyway, I’m having a good time and I have no plans to stop any time soon. I will freely admit to a little bias since my adopted family sister-in-law works on it and I will always show up to support the endeavors of the people I care about as long as I can do so without sacrificing myself but, as I told said friend, I was going to be playing this game anyway. Diablo is the only game like this (adventure looter or whatever they’re calling the genre these days) that I actually enjoy, but I do genuinely enjoy it. It can be a bit overwhelming at times due to all the action and violence, but it really is an enjoyable experience since it’s so much less fiddly than other similar games. Sure, I can look up a build that is guaranteed to work for any similar game, but I can also do a bit of freestyling or experimentation in D4 and still enjoy my experience as long as I’m taking care to maintain a cohesive build. It’s so much simpler than the absolute mess and chaos of the similar game my friends tried to get me into when they’d gotten tired of D3 and craved that kind of gameplay. I really did not enjoy Path of Exile. It was far too finicky and messy for my preferences and the experience playing through the story was not just boring and largely unintelligible, but also incredibly time-consuming. D4 is so much more fun to play that I’m only ever tracking the hours in retrospect and I do that for literally everything I do.

Mask Time

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Reggie twiddled his thumbs, looking around Georgine’s office. She kept things tidy, so there wasn’t much to look at other than the dark computer, a calendar with nothing written on it, and the small notepad she was usually holding.

Uncertain how long he’d be waiting, Reggie leaned forward to see what Georgine had been looking at before a lab tech had asked her to come look at something downstairs.

Upside down and refusing to do more than lean forward, it took him a while to work it out. It was just a to-do list full of notes about phone calls, meeting times, reminders, and a section of rote daily tasks. Just as he was finishing his scan, Georgine’s office door slid open and Reggie glanced up at his manager as she stepped into her office.

“Glad you find my to-do list so engaging.” Georgine arched an immaculate eyebrow at him.

Reggie’s face heated as Georgine walked around to her chair. “Sorry. I was bored.”

“Thank you for waiting.” Georgine flashed him a small, polite smile. “Any questions before we begin?”

“Yeah, what does ‘mask time’ mean?”

Georgine looked down at her to-do list. “It’s a reminder. A mask you heat up and place over your eyes to keep the ducts clean. I use it every night so my eyes don’t get irritated by the dry air in the lab.”

Reggie nodded and launched into the presentation he was supposed to be making. Georgine, attention fixed on him, picked up her notebook, flipped to a new page to take notes, and used the motion to press on the drawer that held her disguise to make sure it hadn’t been disturbed. It would be disastrous if anyone realized that she’d used the company’s prototypes to take down that annoying hero last month.

The Best Tabletop Session I’ve Ever Played In

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Last night, the occasional D&D game I’m in on Thursdays (we’re supposed to be weekly, but we have an average of four sessions every three months) finally became the longest campaign I’ve ever been a part of as a player. At twenty-one sessions I’ve participated in out of a twenty-three total for the campaign, I’ve finally broken the record of twenty sessions I’ve been sitting at since 2016. Now, I’ve run a handful of campaigns that have broken past this number. I’ve routinely broken past fifty and even hit the triple-digits once. Every single campaign I’ve participated in as a player, though has fallen apart fairly quickly. One campaign made it to twenty sessions and naturally concluded (it was a limited run that just happened to hit twenty sessions) and then every single other one of them fell apart in the single digits save two that just faded away in the early teens. Most of them never made it past five. Any other multi-sessions games that ended naturally were all one-shots that ran long. This has been going on since my very first days playing Dungeons and Dragons in 2010 when I went from my third session of Dungeons and Dragons to being the GM because the person running the group didn’t have the time anymore and that has been the story pretty much ever since then. Almost all of my tabletop groups prior to 2020 were groups I joined as a player and then became the GM for since the GM couldn’t keep running and I stepped in as a temporary stopgap so we could keep meeting until, eventually, my role as the group’s GM became permanent.

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Passion, Drive, And Pumping The Brakes

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Recently, while talking to my boss about what I’ve been working on, he suggested something that I’d been considering for a long time. Something that I’ve been halfway working on and hoped to eventually convince him (and the rest of my team) that there was a need for me to work on it more than I was. Something I would love to be doing instead of my current job. It was a very rewarding moment, to not have to wade into what I expected to be a battle and instead sail smoothly over a calm sea of mutual inclination. It was an incredible turnaround from just the week before (that inspired the Self-Destructive Repetition poem from last week) and that made it feel like the work I’d been thanklessly doing for almost a year now was actually going to pay off for something. I did my best not to react in surprise or shock, and I don’t think he noticed how surprised I was that he had jumped straight to an idea I was slowly building towards, but it was amazing that we both agreed that this thing (which I’m going to avoid the specifics about because it is way too early to do more than prepare and think about, not to mention I still don’t want any of my blog posts to connect to my actual employer or job so my coworkers don’t find out I sometimes complain about them here) would be a cool thing for our team to have, especially if I was the one doing it. Since then, with his express approval, I’ve been able to go from slowly working on this project in my spare moments to actually putting real time towards it every day.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 On The PS5 Has Awoken Something In Me That I’d Long Forgotten

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Over the course of the last couple years, I’ve noticed I have a tendency to write a “My Final Thoughts On Video Game” blog post once I finish a video game. Pretty much every game I’ve played and written about in more than one post falls into this pattern. Except for Baldur’s Gate 3, which is probably good because this is the sixth time I’ve written about the game since it was fully released in early August and I have no doubts in my mind that I will write about it again. Today, I’m condensing another month of playtime into a single post because I not only returned to the game much sooner than I exepected (likely because it is a more manageable investment of my time to play it on my PS5 than on my PC since I can more easily kick myself off my couch than I can kick myself out of my desk chair), but I’ve moved from playing a single file to playing through several at once. It is a significant depature from my gaming habits with games of this size and complexity, though I’ll admit that this falls more closely in line with how I used to play games back in college and high school. What is most noteworthy to me about all this is the last time I played a large RPG with significant story variability on a console was in college. I’ve played every major RPG (and any other game with a story that is altered by player choices or moral alignment) on my PC since 2012 and don’t know if I’ll ever going to go back to that now that I’ve broken away from it.

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Emotional Processing And Pain I Could Once Ignore

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Content Warnings for discussion of childhood trauma (specifically neglect and abuse at the hands of my parents and brother).

I wish yesterday’s good mood had lasted a bit longer [it did eventually pick back up again, but today did not help much]. I made it through an entire day with it intact, but it did not survive a night of poor sleep and an unfocused day of finding myself browsing the internet because I needed something more engaging than my work to keep me awake. At least nothing bad has happened. I came by this poor mood honestly. It is a melancholy of my own making. A sadness of my own. Pure, homegrown sorrow. It was, of course, influenced by outside sources, as all such things are. It’s not like I want to think about my miserable childhood. I’ve gotten pretty good at not thinking about it, most of the time, but there’s little I can do in the face of something that will push past the blanket I’ve thrown over that portion of my mind and draw bits of my past out into the light. I’m only half to blame for it this time, though. Sure, I chose to watch last week’s John Oliver deep dive about homeschooling knowing that I was going to get myself caught up in the misery of the past, but I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be so focused on how homeschooling is used by some parents to avoid scrutiny while they abuse or neglect their children. Nor was I expecting an incredibly brief conversation with my friend about her trip to her local county fair to bring up oddly strong memories of the fairs I went to ask a child that eventually revealed to me that all the happiest memories I have of my childhood are from when I was alone or at least away from my entire biological family. But they did and now I’m trying to figure out if I have something I need to work through here or if I need to allow myself to be sad for a while since that’s a pretty reasonable reaction to my reflections and minor realization.

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Personal Warmth Thanks To Cozy Blankets And A Good Day

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I spent the weekend relaxing. I did my chores, listened to podcasts, played more Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m currently hopping between a few alternate save files as the mood strikes me), and enjoying the chilly weather. I got to sleep underneath my comforter for the first time in more than five months, maybe six, and I feel like I slept super well both nights I got to sleep past sunrise. I had a few weird dreams both nights, none of which I remember at this point beyond a few vague impressions (well, now that I’m really digging into those impressions, I remember most of one of them), but I slept like a rock. Both mornings, when I woke up, I had to carefully stagger my way to the bathroom because my body was so dead to the world that I could barely keep myself upright until I’d had a chance to go back to bed and lay around for a while, waking up slowly as I luxuriated in the comfortable sensation of being beneath a big pile of blankets and not being so warm that I was sweating through them. I’ve always appreciate a good, weighty blanket pile, but my past couple years of plastic-covered windows and desperate attempts to keep my apartment warm enough that my pipes don’t freeze and my pet bird doesn’t die meant that I couldn’t do my usual thing of opening the windows in my bedroom at night in the winter and burrowing under as many blankets as I could comfortably fit on my bed.

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The Luckiest Man In The World

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“I’m the luckiest man in the world.”

Zach rolled his eyes. “You’re lucky alright, but don’t let it go to your head, Mister Two-Times-Lottery-Winner.”

“I mean it, though. Look at that parking spot!” Eli gestured at the distance between his car and the steps leading up to his accountant’s firm.

“I not only won the lottery twice,” Eli paused to make sure no one was listening as they walked past, “but I didn’t win until I’d learned enough sense to not blow it all immediately. Plus! I always find good parking, I’ve never had anything stolen despite how often I forget to lock my doors, and that I’ve never tripped, choked, or gotten sick. There’s no explanation for it other than sheer luck.”

Eli grabbed the railing running up the center of the stone stairs and gestured at the building. “Plus, I happened to make friends with the right accountant while I was this building’s janitor, so I’ve got no worries about embezzlement.”

“Yeah, fine.” Zach said from a couple steps behind Eli. “Who cares?”

“I do. It doesn’t make se-” Eli, looking back at Zach, tripped on the next stair and fell forward, barely catching himself before he face-planted onto the marble.

As Zach opened his mouth to laugh, there was a sharp crack followed less than a moment later by an air-shattering boom. Abandoning propriety, the two of them scrambled up the steps, through the doors, and into the shadowy depths of the firm’s lobby.

As the two of them sat on the ground, panting, while the accounting firm’s security staff scurried around to find the source of the bullet that had nearly killed Eli, Eli laughed until he was gasping.

“Okay, I won’t argue.” Zach said, fighting the panic. “But you can’t say you’ve never tripped anymore.”

My Experience Of OCD As A Whole

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Content Warning for discussions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, specifically the obsessions and compulsions that make it up, which, in my case, includes suicidal ideation.

I write about my mental health a lot. I’ve written blog posts, poetry, short stories, and even worked on longer fiction all about my depression, my anxiety, dealing with trauma/PTSD, etc. The only thing I’ve never managed to really cover in a way that felt satisfying was my OCD. I can write about it just fine and I’ve done plenty of blog posts discussing it and the ways it impacts my life, but I’ve never really been able to capture how it feels in a way that felt true to my own experiences, as I’ve done with the other things I’ve mentioned. The only bit of writing I’ve ever found that felt true to my experience of OCD (specifically as an expression of it rather than a mechanical depiction of it) was John Green’s Turtles All The Way Down, and even the best mechanical depictions of it are still fairly rare given how often it’s falsely depicted as different types of fastidiousness in popular media. Green’s excellent book felt incredibly reflective of my own experience, even if it still fell short because of the inherent distance between Green’s experience (which he wrote about) and my experience (which I’ve yet to ever convey in a way that feels true and complete). It’s frustrating to want to capture something that has such a strong and particular feeling to it and be unable to do it in a satisfying way no matter how often I’ve tried.

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