Diablo 4’s onslaught of MMO features hints at a questionable live-service future

polygon.com:

The first time I see another player roaming around Estuar in Diablo 4, even before their friendly green nameplate registers in my brain, I reflexively open fire with the righteous fury of a mindless exterminator sent to cleanse the land of evil. Sorry, other person, for mistaking you for an abnormally large Fallen; my first reflex is to machine-gun fireball anything that moves because I grew up running away from the original Butcher. Eventually, after a few more violent knee jerks, I start waving at fellow Wanderers instead of trying to murder them. I didn’t realize that adapting old Diablo instincts for an open-world format would be a thing, but here we are.

In previous Diablo games, the presence of other players was a series of announced incursions. Sometimes the visitor ended up being a serial killer, or a silent weirdo who just wanted to do their own thing (which would sometimes mess up your thing). Either way, in that finite expanse, you were always conscious of what the other players were (or obviously weren’t) doing; it was apparent, for instance, when someone joined a rift game in order to quietly open a cow portal.

Intimacy made sense within the context of the earlier Diablo games, which were one-way descents into hell — a small, stalwart party had extremely poor odds against the Lord of Terror, which made things even more fun; in Diablo 4’s open world, though, that claustrophobic, chilling bite is gone. In contrast, traversing this new incarnation of Diablo often feels generic and lonely, with the exception of some strong moment-to-moment warmth from the NPCs that accompany you in the campaign. In Diablo 2, which had a much smaller scope and player base than modern-day MMOs, I’d often log on solo, but ease