Diablo is an action role-playing video game series developed by Blizzard North and continued by Blizzard Entertainment after the North studio shutdown in 2005.

Whereas its core games, the Diablo I and Diablo II were well-received, Diablo III had a botched launch. Following that, and after a few extension games, including Diablo Immortal, which was highly-praised but received the lowest score in critics, Blizzard launched Diablo IV.

After initially announced Diablo IV at BlizzCon 2019, Diablo IV was launched as public betas in March 2023.

It features an open-world gameplay, procedurally generated dungeons, and loot-focused character-building, just like before.

And here, Blizzard Entertainment proudly announced that Diablo IV beta was the franchise's largest, having registered nearly 62 million hours played (an equivalent of around 7,000 years of gameplay) over the course of just two weekends.

The numbers show that Blizzard has learned its lessons.

Diablo III, which was released in 2012, was actually critical and commercial success. But it had a lot of points of failures, which include an unnecessary "always online" gameplay, security issues where players got hacked, bad handling of user accounts, broken servers, and a real-money auction house that nobody liked or wanted.

The next biggest release, Diablo Immortal, wasn't that all different, but it was launched in 2022, and was more focused on mobile devices, not desktop PCs, meaning that being online all the time wasn't a big issue.

Diablo IV followed that footstep.

While the beta is capped to just Act 1 and three of the classes, the game has exceeded players' expectations in almost every way.

First, it has a stellar dark storytelling, in which the story follows the dramatic resurrection of the Lord of Hatred and Queen of Succubi, Lilith.

Taking place 30 years after the event of Diablo III, players must venture into a gruesome and dire journey across the land of Sanctuary as humanity descends into madness.

Lilith, daughter of Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, is known to all of Sanctuary as the Queen of the Succubi. Once the lover of the archangel Inarius, her union with him led to the creation of the first nephalem.

Her relationship with humanity, the Heavens, and her archangel consort are a complex and messy web of painful truths and moral ambiguities.

Her grip on Sanctuary cuts deep into the hearts of men and women alike, cultivating the worst in its denizens and leaving the world a dark, hopeless place.

Diablo IV is the game where Lilith makes her return, after first being introduced in Diablo II.

After that, besides the characters and the storyline, Diablo IV doesn't follow Diablo III's pace, in which Diablo IV's main plot is similar to that of Diablo II, where players is pursuing Lilith across Sanctuary.

Then, Diablo IV has also improved the game's combat gameplay, as well as providing a live-service foundation that aims to chart out a strong future for the action role-playing game.

Long story short, Blizzard has made it clear that Diablo IV is an improvements over its predecessors.

By following the highly-praised Diablo II, and combining that with the elements of Diablo Immortal, the developers managed to infuse the ARPG into a competitive game, while retaining its long characteristics of slashing and fireball-slinging mayhem.

In the endless battle between the High Heavens and the Burning Hells, players are given a chance to again roam the wilderness to slaughter ceaseless blood-thirsty opponents.

Still, there are downsides.

With Sorceress, Druid, Rogue, and Necromancer playable classes to choose from, players can roam free through quests and combat in the world of Sanctuary after the resurrection of the demon Lilith.

But some people complained about the character creator in Diablo IV that feels quite limited, at least the version available in the beta.

Aside from picking from a handful of faces, hair styles, and tattoos, there isn’t a whole lot for players to customize.

While those traits would soon be covered by the gears they encounter or buy along the way, some players are also disappointed that they couldn’t pick a voice for their character, which instead is determined solely by the sex and character class they chose in the first place.