It’s happening on my small timeline, it’s happening in the real world. My feed is filled with my usual slate of Destiny streamers, but a large number of them have converted, a minimum of temporarily, to d4 gold. They can’t stop playing, they are saying, even when it may be their first Diablo ever. “Should I try it?” one says, having a million replies saying yes. “Obsessed, addicted” he admits that a day later.

In actual life, my pal is texting me at 7:30 AM to allow me to know a global boss is going to spawn in fifteen minutes. We log in, we kill it, and we start work. We take a rest from work and kill more stuff. My other friend who rarely plays anything now's texting me nearly every day to experience co-op with him on PS5, and he’s playing loads the off-hours too, as I can easily see in my Battle.net launcher.

I am no exception to this. I possess a level 66 Barbarian along with a level 50 Rogue and am considering starting a Druid. This is after I beat the whole campaign and reached 50 on the Necromancer for my review build, a character who had been sadly deleted next build from the game transpired.

This is Diablo 4 addiction, the sequel to Diablo 3 addiction, which was the sequel to Diablo 2 addiction. Veteran players have found this scratches the old itch again since the game isn't just good, it’s great. New players have found themselves not able to stop.

I’ve previously discussed my history with Diablo, the only real series I can say I have been utterly, fully hooked on. Even as somebody who has played several thousand hours of Destiny 1 and a pair of, I still can’t say it’s exactly the same kind of thing. This was an obsession, I had to experience. And I’m beginning to feel that again.

Why? Why is Diablo such as this? Somehow, a way, Blizzard has determined essentially one of the most perfect reward loops in gaming, a mix of slowly leveling your character as well as in D4’s instance, building elaborate paragon boards to master your build and forever grow stronger.

But the loot. The loot. That sound of the legendary drop, and today, the look of that slightly lighter text of the unique drop. There’s nothing that can compare with it in gaming, even just in other games that have loot drops. Exotics in Destiny don’t compare. Maybe Pearlescents in Borderlands did, but even still, Diablo wins.

It’s the sensation of just yet another thing. One more Baal run, which converted into one more Greater Rift, which has now converted into one more Nightmare Dungeon or Helltide or Legion event. Sure, individually this stuff can take between 2-fifteen minutes. But when you’ve “just yet another-d” about 20 times, whoops, there goes your whole afternoon. Or evening. Or morning. Or it’s 2 AM and you're simply dead the following day. But hey, you have some good drops. 2% damage increase, baby!

It doesn’t end, especially now with buy diablo 4 items and its absurdly long level 1-100 grind. If you’re not being ultra-efficient, it’s probably a minimum of 100 hours per character to obtain that high, which is before any from the seasonal stuff has begun, a procedure that insists upon starting leveling a brand new, seasonal character on your own again. God assist you if you do hardcore and spend a large number of hours on the character that may be erased forever with one bad stun chain or perhaps a surprise Butcher appearance.

My advice is…be careful. Past Diablo addiction caused several rough times for me personally in college, and even just in the years that followed. One time the only real way I could force myself to prevent playing Diablo 2 ended up being to throw my gear on the floor to be collected by some random stranger, and I quit, irreversibly losing everything I’d spent countless hours getting.

Hopefully, I won’t go fully down that road again. It’s been almost two decades since I did that. I’m older, more aged, I possess a one-year-old.