Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Review: Divine Redemption

Bad Blood

My problems with Diablo IV started well before the base game ever launched. I came away from the open betas with real concerns, and most of them carried straight over into the full release. In my review of the base game, I called it death by a thousand cuts, a pile of small annoyances that added up to the first Diablo game that got less fun the more I played it. Part of me thought I was crazy and just being a hater, because the general media reception painted Diablo IV as a really good game with Oscar-worthy writing. Windows Central’s words, not mine.

What pushed me even further away was the development team’s response to feedback. I legitimately thought the official 1.1 patch notes were a joke when I first saw them, only to find out they were real. Then came the interviews with Rod Fergusson, who was in charge of the Diablo franchise at the time, and whatever hope I had left for the game getting better was gone.

Once all the dust settled, it turned out I wasn’t really in the minority. The overwhelming response to Diablo IV was that it just wasn’t a very good Diablo game, and the team’s reaction to feedback made the reason clear: this was a team that didn’t know what made a Diablo game good, and its vision didn’t sit well with longtime fans. When Path of Exile 2 released, it made Diablo IV feel even more out of touch.

Peer Pressure

I did eventually return for Loot Reborn, and while the game felt better, it still had some glaring issues. Even so, I kept one eye on Diablo IV heading into its first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, mainly because Diablo expansions have historically made these games significantly better. Lord of Destruction did it for Diablo II, and Reaper of Souls definitely did it for Diablo III. If there was ever a moment for Diablo IV to turn things around, that was it.

Vessel of Hatred wasn’t that moment, at least not for me. After reading and watching some reviews, it was a hard skip, and I basically stopped following the game from there. I lost track of when Lord of Hatred was even announced, and I was more excited about the Warlock joining Diablo II than I was about another Diablo IV expansion.

Once again, when Lord of Hatred released, the reviews rolled in overwhelmingly positive, but I stopped believing those the moment the base game got praised so highly. What got me were my friends. Friends who shared similar thoughts on the base game kept messaging me with the same pitch: give Lord of Hatred a shot, it’s genuinely fun, and if you enjoyed Diablo III, you’ll enjoy where Diablo IV is now. So I caved and picked it up.

Paying Respects

Surprisingly, my favorite part of Lord of Hatred is its campaign, which is not something I ever expected to write about Diablo IV. The tone, the story, and the music all made me feel like this was an entirely different team working on the game. A team that understood what made Diablo II, and even Diablo III, special. The further I got into the campaign, the more obvious that became.

So much of the expansion’s story and lore is focused on the past, on the characters that made the Diablo world what it is today. Without wading into spoilers, the culmination of the story felt like it was done by a team that wanted to respectfully say goodbye to the old guard and everything introduced in the original Diablo IV, and then make a statement: we know what makes Diablo special, and we’re going to focus on that. It’s worth noting that Rod Fergusson officially left Blizzard in August 2025.

I can’t go into much more detail than that without spoiling things, and this is a story worth going into knowing as little as possible. What I can say is this: if you were like me and just didn’t like Diablo IV’s base game, give Lord of Hatred a shot. No one is more surprised to be typing that sentence than I am.

New Management

Essentially everything the old Diablo IV team was so passionate and stubborn about has gone out the window. No map overlay? There’s one now. Slower, more deliberate combat without huge numbers? Diablo IV is back to the fast-paced action you’d expect, with damage scaling up to billions, even trillions for some of the broken builds. The game genuinely feels like Diablo 3.5 at this point, and I mean that as a compliment.

The clearest example for me is the Rogue finally getting a proper Multishot skill. Multishot is one of the most iconic skills in Diablo history, and the fact that the old team thought it was fitting to leave it out of the base game just shows how out of touch it was. It did nothing for the player to remove it. I get wanting to make Diablo feel new and fresh for a new age, but you can’t rip things out nonsensically. It’s like adding the Paladin class without hammers, and thankfully, that isn’t the case here. Something tells me the original team would have wanted it that way, though.

This is no longer the team that refused to include a map overlay, a staple in every ARPG out there, in the name of preserving immersion. This is a team that wants players to have fun while playing a video game. It sounds like such a simple thing, but that’s the big difference between the base game and where Diablo IV is today.

War and Pieces

Endgame content is really varied now, and the new War Plans setup is the backbone of that variety. You essentially get to choose your activities and your rewards, which means you can target farm the things you actually need instead of grinding whatever the game decides to put in front of you. Each day of farming can be a different mix of events, and gone are the days of just sitting in Helltides the entire time.

Bosses drop all sorts of great gear now, which gives every one of those activities a reason to exist beyond checking a box. Between the rotating events and the targeted rewards, I always have something specific to log in for, and I’m the one deciding what that is. The base game never once made me feel that way.

Then there’s the Pit, which has fully embraced the philosophy of Diablo III’s Greater Rifts, complete with a leaderboard for players to chase. It’s a familiar loop for anyone who put serious time into Diablo III, and it gives the endgame a long-term hook that doesn’t depend on the loot treadmill alone. Like so much of Lord of Hatred, it’s an idea the franchise already proved works, finally allowed back into the game.

Cube Roots

The Horadric Cube makes its long-awaited return in Lord of Hatred, and it feels like it opens up an entirely new layer of crafting and gearing possibilities. Itemization was one of my biggest complaints in my review of the base game, where the systems actively discouraged you from investing in your gear. Here, the chase finally works the way a Diablo chase should.

Nothing has been more satisfying than building an ancestral rare that rolled the Greater Affix stats I wanted, turning it into a finished piece of gear, and having it transfigured with an amazing affix. Rune words are back, too, and build-altering set bonuses return in the form of charms. The loot game has gone from the thing that pushed me away to the thing keeping me up too late.

Many of these are features the original team was adamant would never make it into Diablo IV. But here they are, and they have made the game so much better. The whole way through Lord of Hatred, I felt like the team was telling me: hey, we know things were messed up, but we’re fixing it. We know what makes Diablo good, and we’re going to double down on that. I don’t know the reality of the situation, of course, and I’m probably making this all up in my head, but Lord of Hatred is what I imagined Diablo IV should have been from the start. In true Diablo fashion, it took an expansion to really make the game good. This time, it just took the second one instead of the first.

Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred has an official release date of April 28, 2026, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X|S, and PC. This review is based on a purchased retail copy of the game on PC. While FullCleared does have affiliate partnerships, they do not influence our editorial content. We may, however, earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links.

Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Review Gallery (possible spoilers!)

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