Sadly for Diablo 4, Diablo Immortal, the mobile spinoff, halted Diablo 4 Gold  that momentum. Diablo Immortal's ridiculous microtransactions were criticized from the announcement through development, launch, and beyond, angering the community. The same community that demanded Loot2.0, the updated loot system that gave Diablo 3 its name, was also responsible for driving Blizzard out of their real-money auction house. The best action-loot game of the past was Reaper of Souls.

Blizzard left them, and they still feel that way in many ways. Things can start to get better in Diablo 4. Blizzard is in a state of change. Diablo 4 could be the last game made by "Old Blizzard," right in the middle of the Microsoft merger, and there is a lot of pressure to give fans what they want, especially since other games in the genre, like Path of Exile, have tried to steal Blizzard's crown since Diablo 3.

Diablo has a core loop that is crucial to the game's success or failure. Is it satisfying to randomly enter the dungeon, kill enemies, and collect items? If so, Diablo 4 is on its way to becoming a fan favorite. We're in trouble if the team has altered the loot system once more, as they did in the original Diablo 3 release.

The story of how one Blizzard developer played Diablo 3 for literally hundreds of hours before finding one piece of legendary loot is told in the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels' chapter on the launch disaster. He approached the loot only to discover that his character class was unable to use it when that orange light finally emerged from a random enemy. The plunder framework was so generally broken that the pressure of crushing for a really long time, trailed by the help of truly getting something uniquely great, was broken.

Eventually, this was fixed so that you could only ever find certain levels of  buy Diablo IV Gold loot that were appropriate for your class, and the rate at which legendary items dropped in the early game increased. So even though the legendary items you were getting didn't break the game, you still felt like you got a small dose of dopamine every now and then to keep you going.