The horse, a new feature in the series Diablo IV Items, was a luxury I tried to avoid, because I wanted my Wanderer to fully engage with her material environment like a fragile little meatball. This is, after all, a game about treasure hunting, and while you can still loot chests while riding, skirting monsters conjures a very specific kind of Diablo FOMO. Still, given the size of Estuar, once you’re past the initial leveling and basic gearing stages, four legs do help to speed up the drudgery.

With more real estate comes more busywork, like one-off stronghold challenges, world bosses, Legion events, and a random world event on Nightmare difficulty called Helltide, which is the only source for certain rare materials. Nightmare dungeons are the new rifts — they’re ordinary dungeons “enhanced” with Nightmare Sigils, and they allow you to improve your Paragon build with a rather obtuse glyph system that I still don’t fully understand (I did my first Nightmare dungeon a few hours before the review-period server went down). All the events and dungeons reuse the same handful of mechanics to deadening effect: fetch an item, activate a pedestal, and so on.

Certain quest items will pop out of your inventory onto the ground if you leave the quest area (not great for a series where users can infamously disconnect at the worst times). The long arm of the law has finally come for town portals — the portal will now close as soon as you leave town, so you can’t experiment or “bookmark” a location for later. It feels a little sour in the context of an open-world MMO where player creativity should, theoretically, be encouraged.

On the unintentional front, the review build was spectacularly buggy — I had to re-clear several major quest areas multiple times for the game to log my progress. Events also glitched out, and I helped a colleague fix a bug that required him to party up to leave his server. Occasionally, you’ll come out of town and see someone riding an invisible horse buy Diablo 4 Items. It was half amusing, half frustrating waiting to see if I was lagging or the game was crashing; the silver lining was that I was using a temp account for this review and going to lose everything anyway.