Diablo: The Legendary Action RPG Series That Defined the Dungeon Crawler Genre

My mom bought me Diablo in 1996 from a Best Buy. M-rated. I was like ten. She saw “fantasy adventure” on the box and figured it was fine. First time I clicked on a fallen one and it exploded into chunks, I knew this was not a normal game. I’ve been chasing that feeling for almost thirty years. I have a problem.

“Stay a while and listen” — yeah, Deckard Cain’s voice lives rent-free in my head. The original Tristram music, the cathedral, the sound of a door creaking open in a dark room. Diablo 1 was a different experience. There was nothing else like it. You went down. It got worse. That was the whole game and it was perfect.

Diablo II Is Still the Best One and I’ll Fight You

Look. D2R is the reason I still have Diablo installed on every computer I own. The skill synergies, the rune words, the loot system — Diablo II’s itemization is the gold standard and nothing since has topped it. Finding a Ber rune in 2003 was a life-changing event. My friend literally screamed. We were in a cyber cafe and the owner came over to see what happened.

Enigma gave everyone teleport and broke the game in the best possible way. Hammerdin was so dominant they nerfed it multiple times and it was STILL good. I had a Summon Necro with 30+ skeletons that cleared everything by existing. My buddy had a Frozen Orb sorc and we’d do Baal runs for hours. You’d join a game called “baal-01” and just chain-run the final boss for loot. The economy ran on high runes. There were websites — d2jsp — with fake currency just for trading. It was a whole ecosystem.

Diablo II Resurrected is the way to play it now. Same game. Same mechanics. Same broken builds. Just looks better. Controller support is a bonus I didn’t know I needed.

The Lore is Genuinely Good (Mostly)

Sanuary is humans caught between angels who don’t care about us and demons who want to eat us. The Angiris Council literally voted on whether to genocide humanity and Tyrael was the tiebreaker. That’s the backstory. This game where you click on skeletons for loot has a genuinely interesting cosmology if you bother reading the codex entries. I know most people don’t. I do. I have opinions about the Worldstone’s destruction and how it affected nephalem potential. Yes I’m fun at parties why do you ask.

The Prime Evils — Diablo, Mephisto, Baal — are great villains because they’re simple but effective. Diablo possesses people through soulstones and keeps coming back. Baal corrupts everything he touches. Mephisto is the creepy one who corrupted an entire religion from the inside out. Duriel is just Duriel. Everyone hates Duriel. His charge attack in D2 Act 2 killed me more times than I can count. You’d walk into that tomb and immediately get one-shot by a giant maggot. Fun memories.

Lilith in Diablo IV was a good call for a main villain. She’s not just “evil demon.” She created humanity with Inarius and she genuinely wants us to be free — on her terms. The game does a decent job making her sympathetic in a weird way. The cosmetics they sell of her are kind of funny though. “Hey here’s $25 worth of Lilith-themed armor for the character who fights against her.” Capitalism finds a way.

Classes: I’ve Only Ever Mained One

Necromancer. Every game. If Necro is in the game, that’s what I’m playing. D2 skeleton army. D3 Corpse Explosion build where you’d pop a body and the entire screen would light up. D4 Corpse Tendrils where you pull everything in and blow it up. There’s something deeply satisfying about using your enemies as ammunition. Dead things should be useful. That’s just good recycling.

I’ve tried other classes. Barbarian is fun if you want to feel like a blender. Sorcerer is the “I stand far away and press buttons” experience. Rogue is for people who wish this was Dark Souls. Druid can’t decide if it’s a tank or a caster and ends up being neither. But Necro? Necro is home. Raise the dead. Curse the living. Profit.

Diablo III’s class roster was actually incredible. Witch Doctor with the zombie charger build was hilarious. Monk spamming hundred-punch combos felt amazing. Crusader with a flail the size of a small car. D3 had a weird trajectory — launched to universal hatred because of the Auction House and real-money loot, then Reaper of Souls saved it, and now it’s a power fantasy where you hit for numbers that look like phone numbers. Trillions of damage. The game lost its horror roots but gained pure fun.

The Loot Problem

That orange beam. You know the one. The legendary drop sound. I’ve heard it thousands of times and my brain still lights up like a slot machine. Diablo’s whole deal is the loot loop and nobody does it better. Kill stuff, get stuff, kill bigger stuff with your new stuff. Simple. Effective. Dangerous.

Diablo IV’s system is… fine. Legendaries drop constantly, you extract the powers, imprint them onto other items. It’s crafting meets loot. Being able to target specific builds is nice. But when everything is just a vessel for a legendary power, items stop feeling special. In D2, finding a unique item MEANT something. Shako dropped and the whole party lost their minds. In D4, a legendary drops and you’re like “oh cool, another Temerity, I have six of these.” The system works. It just doesn’t hit the same.

The stash situation is a whole separate complaint. I’m a digital hoarder. I have sets I’ll never use. I have gems I’ll never socket. I have legendary items “just in case they buff this build.” My stash is a cry for help. And D4 gives you one (1) stash tab for free. One. In 2026. Insane.

Seasons: Groundhog Day But With Demons

Every three months, reset. New character. New season mechanic. Same campaign. Again. I’ve played the D4 campaign, I want to say, seven times now? The early game is a slog when you’ve seen it before. Skip to the endgame, that’s the real game. But you have to earn the skip first. It’s a design choice I understand but don’t enjoy.

Some seasons have been great. Season of the Malignant with the caged hearts was weirdly fun. Season 4 with the Loot Reborn changes was a genuine improvement. Others have been forgettable. The battle pass is fine — it’s just cosmetics on the paid track, no pay-to-win, which is the bare minimum but at least they meet it.

Diablo IV: The Current State

I play D4 right now. It’s the darkest the series has been since D2 and I appreciate that. Open world is cool but underutilized — world events feel repetitive after the first few times. The horse riding is whatever. But the combat? The combat is fantastic. Each class feels weighty and impactful. The sound design alone deserves awards. Hitting things in D4 feels BETTER than any other ARPG on the market right now.

The endgame still needs work. Pit pushing gets repetitive. Uber boss farming is either trivially easy with the right build or impossible without it. The leaderboard grind is there if you want it, but it’s more about time investment than skill, which is a bummer for people who want to compete without treating it like a second job.

The Bottom Line

8.5/10. The series as a whole deserves enormous respect. D1 created the genre. D2 perfected it. D3 found redemption. D4 is solid and getting better. But no single game in the franchise is flawless, and the live service model means you’re always waiting for the next patch to “fix” things. I’d rate D2 Resurrected a 9.5 and Diablo IV somewhere around an 8. D3 is probably a 7.5 on its best day with Reaper of Souls. D1 is a 9 for nostalgia and a 6 if you try to play it now without rose-colored glasses.

If you’ve never played a Diablo game, D2R is the place to start. It’s the best one. It teaches you everything you need to know about why people love this series. Then jump to D4 for the modern version. Just — set limits. “One more dungeon” becomes “one more dungeon” becomes “where did the last six hours go” faster than you’d believe. I’ve been losing weekends to this franchise since 1996 and I don’t see that stopping.

Available on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, and Android.