Diablo 4 – Vessel of Hatred review: From the weeds to wonderful

I liked Diablo 4 enough to sink over a hundred hours into it, but as a longtime fan of the series it’s something of an understatement to say I had some feedback. At launch, the bosses felt like a grind, the story felt over-wrought and the endgame loot grind was as unsatisfying as it was uninteresting.

I’m not someone who hasn’t just played a bunch of Diablo. I’ve read multiple books on how each installment in the series was made and interviewed some of those involved. All this is to say, it was hard to shake the vibe that the team tasked with making Diablo 4 revisited many of the big swings that Diablo 3 took and then doubled down on exploring what the opposite direction might have to offer. Given the legacy and pedigree of the franchise involved, this experiment was undeniably fascinating. 

At the same time, the finished product – not to mention the significant gameplay and balance changes that Diablo 4 has undergone in the seasons since it released – acted more as a reminder of why the Diablo 3 design team made the choices it did rather than a rebuttal of them. All this is to say that the fourth installment of Blizzard’s iconic monster-slaying action RPG has come a long way and the arrival of the game’s first expansion pack is a capstone to this process of refinement. 

For all that separates it in feel and scope from every other Diablo game before it, Diablo 4 is finally coming into its own. Even if the end result is not as transformative as Reaper of Souls was to Diablo 3, Vessel of Hatred more-or-less completes the righting of the ship that Blizzard has been working away at over the past twelve months. On some level, all this expansion really had to do was be more Diablo. But what you’re getting here is so much more than that.

The setup for Vessel of Hatred is uncomplicated but compelling. The expansion picks up right where the base game's story campaign leaves off. 

Your former companion Nyrelle has gone rogue and taken on the burden of bearing a soulstone containing one of the three Prime Evils, Mephisto. The similarities between this doomed endeavor and the pyrrhic path taken by The Dark Wanderer in Diablo 2 are easy to see, so you’ll quickly find yourself racing southwards to find Nyrelle before history repeats itself. That journey will take you through the southern parts of the existing map in the game, predominantly occupied by the dense and tropical jungles of Nahantu. 

If you’ve played Diablo 2, this won’t be your first venture into this corner of Sanctuary, but Vessel of Hatred brings this region of the setting to life with more care and fidelity than predecessors. Now known as Nahantu, the version of Torajan seen in earlier Diablo games was originally inspired by the Indonesian tribal cultures of the same name. 

In line with the new name, Blizzard has gone to lengths to steer its depiction of the region away from its real-world namesake by integrating its depiction more tightly with the series’ mythos and cosmology. As with the other regions in the game, your time in Nahantu will see you embroiled in a variety of local conflicts as often as you’re dealing with the power vacuum left by the aftermath of Diablo 4’s story campaign. 

The line between pulpy fantastical tropes and more problematic ones can often be thin and it’s dangerously easy to end up on the wrong side of it even with the best of intentions. Still, the thorny setting that Vessel of Hatred is working with largely comes off better than the caricature-like depiction of Diablo 3’s Witch Doctor. 

Even if you come away with a different read on Blizzard’s attempt at greater cultural sensitivity, it helps that  what’s here largely meets the brief of being more Diablo. If all you’re doing is sticking to the critical path or playing on the normal difficulty, you can expect an extra seven or eight hours from Vessel of Hatred. There’s ample side quests and other timesinks on the map that add to that hourcount though. 

In terms of overall length, the expansion is on par with Diablo 4's meatier sections. Vessel of Hatred is a serving of additional stuff to see and do more so than a Shadow of The Erdtree-style supplement of the base game. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. As someone who felt like the main campaign in Diablo 4 was somewhat bloated, this relative restraint went a long way to winning me over on the expansion. 

This willingness to not overstay its welcome extends to the quality of the content and the quantity. For instance, in-engine cutscenes are used more sparingly but are more effective as a result. Expansion or not, Diablo 4 feels a lot more respectful of your time than it once was. If you want to jump straight into Vessel of Hatred with a fresh new character rather than continue with your existing one, you should pretty much be at the same level you would be after playing through the base game at the end of it. Since the expansion is a significantly smaller time investment than the main campaign, this makes the idea of trying out a new class like the Spiritborn feel much more feasible than it might be. 

Billed as a hybrid between the Druid and Barbarian, the Spiritborn is the first “new” class since the introduction of the Monk in Diablo 3 (so long as we’re pretending Diablo Immortal doesn’t exist). In action, this class darts around the battlefield and uses smaller and faster strikes to build up energy before cashing it in on bigger and more flashy mystical ones. If that description sounds familiar that’s probably because it kinda feels like the design team just tripped backwards into making the Monk again. 

I don’t hate this though. The Monk was a lot of fun to play and so is the Spiritborn. I’m sympathetic to the problem though. There are already so many ways to build the current roster of classes that it feels genuinely hard to not encounter overlap between what’s already in the game let alone what’s been done before. At least, until you unlock some of the more advanced class mechanics and get to add some spice.  

Despite those caveats, the Spiritborn is an absolute blast to play and a fantastic complement to the deeper and more systematic changes that Blizzard has made to the itemisation and loot since launch. Where my experiences with earlier incarnations of Diablo 4 felt like a raw and predictable game about numbers going up, Vessel of Hatred was often punctuated by me finding gear that genuinely changed the way I was building my character.

The expansion’s other big value-add is the new Mercenaries system.

While Vessel of Hatred doesn’t let you get as granular with kitting your companions with items as you can in Diablo 3, the quartet of freelancers introduced here do come with their own respective talent trees. The more time you spend fighting alongside a given companion, the more you’ll be able to do with them. The companion questlines in Vessel of Hatred also account for some of the more chewy side content in the expansion. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to use these companions in the base game as you can’t unlock them until you reach Nahantu. 

In addition to having a set companion roll around with you, Vessel of Hatred builds on the legacy of the mechanic by letting you temporarily tag in a secondary companion like you might an assist attack in a fighting game in Marvel vs Capcom or Dragonball: Fighterz. The logic behind this system is fairly simple. All you have to do is set up one of your abilities as a trigger for one of your companion’s skills. Despite that simplicity, it feels this small tweak on the formula gives you a ton of new options to work with when it comes to refining your build. It also gives you a great incentive to experiment and level up each companion rather than just stick with the first one you find. 

It’s a similar story when it comes to the new runewords system. Where the old one felt like socketing gems by another name, Vessel of Hatred’s runewords let you program your own modifiers for gear. For instance, you could set up an ability to trigger whenever you evade an incoming attack. During my time with Vessel of Hatred, I can’t say I found a huge amount of variety in terms of the runes I was encountering but it’s easy. That said, the ones I did encounter had a big impact and it’s exciting to imagine how this system could evolve and give you fresh new avenues for boosting your in-game damage output.

While the new region, class and the gameplay mechanics above are the headliner here, it’s the smaller changes that really make Vessel of Hatred sing. When I first booted up the expansion pack, the thing that delighted me wasn’t the lavish pre-rendered cinematic. It was the fact that Blizzard has abandoned the Diablo Immortal-style difficulty tiers that Diablo 4 launched with for a more traditional and sensible one that ramps up the rewards with playing on a high difficulty. 

There’s so much here that’s not necessarily new but a better or cleaner realization of what Diablo 4 going for but didn’t quite nail at launch.The return of the killstreak score-counter from Diablo 3 had me cheering and the boss fights are a less of a grind this time around. Likewise, the story dungeons feel less scripted and better paced. Finally, the new Undercity Dungeons finally make for an endgame with a worthy analogue to Diablo 3’s rifts.

It’s possible that I would be even more impressed if I hadn’t been checking in and keeping up with Diablo 4 over the past year but even so Vessel of Hatred corrects so much of the things in Diablo 4 that didn’t quite click with me at launch while staying true to the broader vision for a more evergreen and open-world experience that separates it from its predecessors.

Once it launches, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred will be available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.