Diablo 4 Season 3: Robot Pets Can't Save Boring Trap Dungeons

January 26, 2024

After Season 2's vampire powers actually impressed players, Season 3 launched January 23, 2024, with ideas that sound cool on paper but play like a chore. Welcome to the Season of the Construct, where your robot buddy watches you die to floor spikes.

Meet Your Useless Metal Friend

The Seneschal Construct is Season 3's headline feature - a customizable robot companion powered by Governing and Tuning Stones. Each Governing Stone gives it a skill, each Tuning Stone modifies that skill. In theory, it's build diversity. In practice, it's a glorified auto-turret that you forget exists.

Players can't even tell when their Seneschal is helping. "Underwhelming," "useless," and "trivial" dominated Reddit discussions. When your seasonal mechanic's biggest achievement is being ignorable, you've got problems.

Vaults: ARPGs Meet Platform Gaming

The new Vault dungeons ask you to dodge traps while maintaining Zoltun's Warding stacks. Take trap damage, lose stacks. Keep stacks at the end, get a Wardwoven Chest with Seneschal upgrades. It's platforming in a genre built around mindlessly blowing up screens of enemies.

The disconnect is staggering. Diablo is about power fantasy - becoming an unstoppable force obliterating demons. Nobody boots up an ARPG thinking "I hope I get to carefully navigate pressure plates today." The traps aren't challenging, they're annoying. They break the flow that makes ARPGs addictive.

Malphas Can Keep The Loom

The story sends you under Kehjistan's deserts to stop demon Malphas from using The Loom to create an army of Constructs. Standard Diablo fare, but at least it's coherent. Too bad the gameplay doesn't match the narrative urgency.

A Great Step Backwards

Season 3 represents Blizzard overthinking seasonal mechanics. Not every season needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes players just want new ways to make numbers go up and enemies go boom. Instead, we got weak pets and Mario Party mini-games.

The season runs until May 14, giving plenty of time to ignore Vaults and pretend your Seneschal doesn't exist. At least the base game improvements from Season 2 carried over. Small victories.