I miss expansion packs. Blizzard in particular was famous for what we’d now call “post-launch DLC”, updating the likes of StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo with incredible upgrades that extended beloved storylines while adding on much-needed polish and complexity for players in love with their games. To my intense joy, Vessel of Hatred is very much a Blizzard expansion pack in that classic mould, continuing the cliff-hanger ending of Diablo 4, adding on a wickedly fun new character class and cleaning up some of the cruft that had accumulated over five seasons of play.
Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred reviewDeveloper: Blizzard EntertainmentPublisher: Activision BlizzardPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC(Steam and Battlenet), PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One.
Before I get into the brilliance of Vessel of Hatred, a confession. After wrapping up Diablo 4’s storyline soon after launch and one or two abortive attempts to get friends interested in co-op sessions, I hung up my adventuring gloves and moved over to other titles before the game’s second season. I heard good things – Season 4’s “Loot Reborn” update in May seemed particularly popular amongst friends still playing the game – but with a surfeit of other distractions, I had no great ambition to return to the world of Sanctuary before its first proper update.
That made me a little apprehensive about getting up to speed with the game after almost a year-and-a-half away. I shouldn’t have worried though – for whatever Blizzard has lost over the years, as veteran designers have moved on, it still is absolutely excellent at making its games easy to grasp and fun from the off. While a of new content and systems have been added on, a lot of the dead weight has been sloughed off too. You’re free to start a new character with the original campaign completed, if you already played it back in the day, or even with the whole campaign completed if you want to get to the “end-game” content right away.
The new campaign is certainly worth playing through at least once, though it feels perhaps a little shorter and less conclusive than those added in Diablo 2’s Lord of Destruction and Diablo 3’s Reaper of Souls. It picks off with your character on the trail of your erstwhile companion Neyrelle, who absconded with Mephisto’s soulstone at the climax of the last game at great personal risk to herself. She’s fled to a new area, the lush jungle of Nahantu, which has been grafted onto the bottom of the already sprawling map of Sanctuary. I really enjoyed exploring this new biome, and especially being reintroduced to some classic motifs and characters from Diablo 2 (“You speak now to Ormus.”)