The Switch version of Diablo 4 has finally united my family

On Valentine's Day 2018, I was on my way down to Joplin, MO, where a woman I recently started seeing lived. Before I jumped on the highway, I was reminded of an early conversation we’d had in our relationship, where she had mentioned never finishing Diablo 3, which she enjoyed, but didn’t own a copy of. I stopped by Gamespot and picked up a copy for PS4.

Almost 9 years later, my wife and I have spent thousands of hours playing Diablo 3 together, with most of our time spent on the Switch version. But when Diablo 4 was released in 2023, I converted to the sequel for work, and have stayed over since. My wife, on the other hand, decided to stick with D3 for a variety of reasons, the largest of which, it turns out, was the game’s absence from a more mobile console, like the Switch.

I’ve been trying to get her to jump to Diablo 4 for years now, but Blizzard has finally done the work for me. She came with me to BlizzCon this year and was able to check out the Switch 2 version of the game at the show. And once we got home and got a copy, she jumped into season 15 with the Warlock class, and has played more of this massive anniversary season than I have at this point.

I didn’t really start my own Diablo journey until Diablo 3 came out in 2012. But I still think of the game as primarily a PC title where I click around and smash my keyboard to blow up thousands of demons. But as the years have gone on, I’ve spent more and more time playing the game on the controller. 

And watching my wife play so much of the game on Switch, it’s been a real reminder how much a company can grow their audience by making a game a little more mobile. We have two small kids, and while Diablo 4 isn’t necessarily the most “let me set this down real quick” game, the convenience of the Switch 2 does make it easy to play while we wind down with some SpongeBob at night, or while the kids are eating in our non-gaming room.

After spending so long trying to get her to give the game a real shot, it’s been fun talking about what build she’s working on, and trying to find a time for us to run some War Plans together once the kids are in bed.

Diablo has always been an important game for us, and now we’re back on the same page again … just in time for Diablo 5 to enter the conversation.