I've killed Diablo more times than I can count. Mephisto, Baal, Andariel, Duriel, Lilith — I've sent all of them screaming back to wherever they came from, and then I've done it again the next season, and the one after that. I've been doing this since 1997. Close to three thousand hours, if I'm honest about it. I play like a dog: hours at a stretch, every boss, every drop, grinding for the one item, the better roll, the next pile of gold.
I should probably be embarrassed about that number. I'm not. Diablo is the one world I keep choosing to go back into, and I've thought a lot about why.
The night the Butcher found me#
Let me start with the moment that hooked me, because I was ten years old and I have never quite gotten over it.
Diablo, in 1997, was almost unbearably simple. A village called Tristram, a cathedral, and a staircase going down into the dark. You descended, level by level, into a dungeon that got worse the deeper you went, and somewhere at the bottom was the Lord of Terror himself. No open fields, no branching quests. Just down.
And then, on one of those early floors, I opened a door.
The room behind it was papered in bodies. Hooks, blood, the remains of people who'd come before me. And out of that gore came a voice like a saw dragging through bone — "Ah, fresh meat" — and the Butcher, a bloated, cleaver-wielding horror, charged straight at me. I wasn't ready. I didn't know you were supposed to run. He cut my character down in seconds, and I sat there with my heart going like a hammer, genuinely afraid to open the next door. The hair on my arms stood up. I was a kid alone with a computer and I had just learned that a game could do that to me.
That game understood something the sequels have spent decades chasing: dread is mostly about what you can't see. The light around your character was small. The dungeon was quiet, then suddenly it wasn't. You were always descending, never sure what the next room held. The cathedral itself was a holy place twisted into something blasphemous — King Leoric, the Skeleton King, had gone mad because Diablo's soulstone was buried beneath his church, slowly eating his sanity from below. Everything about Tristram was sacred architecture turned against you.
The mythology underneath#
It took the sequels to explain what I'd been walking into, and the mythology turned out to be enormous.
Before the world, there was the Eternal Conflict — the endless war between the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. Hell itself was born from Tathamet, the primordial dragon of seven heads. From its three dominant heads came the Three, the Prime Evils: Mephisto, Lord of Hatred. Baal, Lord of Destruction. Diablo, Lord of Terror. The weaker four heads became the Lesser Evils — Andariel, Duriel, Belial, Azmodan. Long ago the Lesser Evils rose up and cast the Three out of Hell entirely, down onto the mortal world, in an event called the Dark Exile. Everything in the series follows from that act.
But the part that gives the whole saga its weight isn't the demons. It's where we came from.
Two beings grew tired of the endless war: Inarius, a renegade angel, and Lilith, daughter of Mephisto himself. They stole the Worldstone and used it to fashion a hidden realm, cloaked from both Heaven and Hell — a refuge from the Conflict. They called it Sanctuary. And together, an angel and a demon, they had children: the Nephalem. Half-angel, half-demon, and from the very beginning more powerful than either parent.
That power terrified everyone. The other rogue angels and demons of Sanctuary wanted the Nephalem wiped out before they grew strong enough to threaten Heaven, Hell, and everything between. Inarius couldn't bring himself to kill his own children — but he couldn't defend them either. Lilith could. Lilith did. To protect her children she slaughtered every angel and demon who threatened them, an entire massacre born of something almost like a mother's love, twisted past all reason.
It was too much for Inarius. He turned on her. He couldn't destroy her — whatever he felt for her ran too deep — so instead he banished her to the Void, a realm of endless, empty darkness. Then he took the Worldstone and used it on his own descendants, tuning it so that each generation of Nephalem would be born weaker than the last, their titanic power bleeding away over centuries until all that remained were ordinary, mortal humans. Us. He hid Sanctuary from the heavens and set himself up as a god, founding the Cathedral of Light, and spent eons pretending Lilith had never existed.
So this is the thing every human in Sanctuary is, in the lore: a watered-down descendant of god-like beings, the product of an angel and a demon, deliberately crippled by a frightened father, and mothered by a banished demon who killed for us. That's the ground every Diablo game is built on. It's not a fight between good and evil. It's a family tragedy the size of a universe.
What the series became, and what it lost#
Diablo II, in 2000, took that claustrophobic staircase and blew it open into a world — five acts, deserts and jungles and the gates of Hell, and a story about a Dark Wanderer walking east, leaving ruin behind him. The Wanderer turns out to be the hero of the first game, the one who'd "won." He'd driven Diablo's soulstone into his own forehead to contain him, and it had slowly consumed him instead. That's Diablo at its best: there is no clean victory. You contain the evil and it costs you everything.
I'll say the quiet part out loud, though. Nothing since those first two games has pulled me in the same way. Diablo II had texture — rain in the wilderness, the red sky over the Pandemonium Fortress, Tal Rasha's tomb where Baal was bound. These places felt cursed. Diablo III is a better-built machine in a lot of ways, but it traded gloom for spectacle, darkness for color, and some of the dread leaked out. The further the series got from that small light and that quiet staircase, the more I felt the loss. D1 and D2 didn't just show you horror — they made you sit alone in it. The later games are louder and emptier for it.
Why I came back for the fourth#
Diablo IV knows exactly what it lost, and it has spent its whole existence trying to earn it back.
The world is grim again — muddy, medieval, religious in the way the first game was, all cathedrals and blood and cold open country. And the story finally centers a villain worth the name: Lilith herself, pulled back out of the Void in a hail of blood. The mother of humanity, returned. She's not a screaming demon. She's a mother who believes she can save her children by making them strong enough to win the Eternal Conflict at last — and the horror of her is that she's almost convincing. Her father Mephisto and her former love Inarius circle the same story; the family tragedy comes home.
The expansions are deepening the exact thread I care about. Vessel of Hatred sent us into the jungles of Nahantu chasing Mephisto's slow return, and introduced the Spiritborn — a genuinely new hero who channels the spirits of jaguar, gorilla, eagle, and centipede. Lord of Hatred brings Mephisto fully into the light and, with him, the Paladin — the holy warrior, back at last.
I've played all of them. But I always come home to two.
The Barbarian is the one I love most — all weight and fury, a wall of muscle dragging a fistful of weapons through everything in the room. There's no finesse to defend; you wade in and you break things, and Sanctuary becomes a brawl you win with your whole body. And right beside it, the Necromancer — my other constant. Where the Barbarian is a single furious body, the Necromancer is a tide: you raise the dead to fight the dead, an army of bone and blood that grows as the bodies pile up. One is the loneliest class in the game and one is the least lonely, and somehow they're the two I keep building, season after season. The Spiritborn and the Paladin are my newest joys — feral speed, holy fire — but the Barbarian and the Necromancer are home.
The part I can't explain away#
So why the three thousand hours? Why every season, every boss, the endless grind for an item I'll replace next patch?
I think it's because Diablo is honest about something most fantasy lies about. There is no final victory here. You kill Diablo and Mephisto crawls back. You stop Lilith and her father steps into the light. The wheel turns, the evils return, and you walk back down the stairs again. That should be bleak. Somehow it's the opposite — it's a promise that there's always another descent, always more dark to walk into, always a reason to pick up the blade.
I came up through geology, then Unity, then building things that respond to people. The thing I chase in my own work — a world that pushes back, that has weight and mood and consequence — is the same thing that's kept me on that staircase since I was a terrified ten-year-old who'd just met the Butcher. Diablo is the world that does it best.
The light around me is still small. The next room is quiet. I wouldn't have it any other way.