Having spent eight to 10 minutes playing the game on Xbox Series X, I can say that the short amount of time spent playing the game was a bit alarming -- in a good way. Its "Return to Darkness" tagline is more than an advertising ploy. It signals a return to the bleak, dark world of Diablo IV Gold that has been captivating players since the original's debut back in 1997. It was a time when playing an opponent called Diablo was disturbing enough. In 2022, Diablo's envelope is to be pushed more. It becomes clear that loot, the equippable items that transform your character's power, even to the point of altering the way that skills work is deliberately moved off center stage.

For one thing, equipment can be upgraded and the rank is then transferred to another item within the same slot. This means that an important part of your progress has been shifted from collecting exciting drops from monsters and is now a gradual boring, monotonous grind, where you find a huge amount of loot that you don't want to be used in upgrading machines.

Furthermore, your items are now significantly enhanced by adding legendary gems of immense power. This is where most complaints about Diablo Immortal's monetization have been on.

The Diablo Immortal character has six legendary gem slots. Each gem has an amount, ranging from 1 to five stars, which cannot be changed, and has a huge impact on its power; five-star gems are much more scarce than one-star. Gems with legendary status can be upgraded, and the easiest way to achieve this is through consuming other legendary gems. A fully upgraded gem can be further enhanced by a "gem resonance" system that requires -guess what -the addition of more legendary gems that is, up to five extra gems per gem slot.

If you want to maximize your character -- and maximizing your character is really what Diablo is all about -- you'll need plenty of legendary gems: to locate the right gems that match your character, to score high star ratings, to improve the gems you are using, and eventually add gems to the additional resonance slots. It's endless.

Within Diablo Immortal's array of options for upgrading, currencies, and reward methods, legendary gems stand out as the ones where the business model is at its the most. Blizzard and NetEase haven't been as stupid as to sell directly to players through a loot container or gacha mechanism but what they have created are, in its own way quite perplexing. Legendary gems only drop from the bosses of the randomly generated Elder Rift dungeons, and you can only guarantee an epic gem drop by applying a legendary crest modification to the dungeon prior to starting the dungeon. Other than that, drop rates for gems with cheap Diablo 4 Gold legendary status are extremely low.