The Lord of Terror is back! Diablo has taken over the hero who managed to defeat him, and is on a quest to release his brothers, Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, and Baal, Lord of Destruction. You choose from seven heroes to go after Diablo and destroy him once and for all. Through the course of the game you are taken to the ruins of Tristram, destroyed by Diablo, to the deserts of Lut Gholein, and down into the bowels of Hell itself. Aided only by the last Horodrim, Deckard Kain, and a benevolent Acrchgangel, Tyrael, you must find and destroy Baal, Mephisto and Diablo's soul stones and lock them in the bowels of Hell forever. In the expansion, Baal, escapes to Mount Arreat, where the Worldstone, the Heart of the world is kept. He is trying to corrupt it for his own purposes, you have to stop him, and send him to hell with his brothers.
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The campfire scene where you pick your class in Diablo IV isn't just a nice bit of atmosphere, it mirrors the layout of Diablo II's own character select screen, right down to where the Druid and Necromancer are standing around the fire.
Remember Wirt, the peg-legged kid who overcharged you for gambling items in the first game? Click his corpse in Diablo II's Tristram and he drops his own severed leg, which you then need alongside a Tome of Town Portal to actually crack open the Secret Cow Level. Grim way to pay tribute to a character, but it works.
By the time World of Warcraft rolled around, Blizzard had turned the whole thing into a running gag across the company. Somewhere in Azeroth there's an item called Wirt's Third Leg, quietly keeping a decades-old Diablo joke alive in a completely different game.
Head to Thousand Needles in World of Warcraft and you can stumble into a Star Wars-style pod racing event in the Shimmering Flats. One of the racers is Diablo himself, and he does not look thrilled about being stuck in a go-kart instead of terrorizing Sanctuary.
When Diablo II's patch 1.13 dropped in 2009, fans noticed two mercenary names had quietly changed in the game files, from Weohstan and Erfor to Klar and Tryneus. Blizzard never explained why, and since it happened right as Diablo III was in development, plenty of fans still think it was some kind of quiet lore setup.
Cain's 'Stay awhile and listen' became so iconic that Blizzard actually had his voice actor, Michael Gough, record a full rap song built around the line. Not something you'd expect from a wise old scholar NPC, but Blizzard leaned into it.
Deckard Cain isn't just some random old man who happens to know a lot. He's a descendant of Jered Cain, the Horadrim mage who led the original hunt that trapped Diablo and his brothers in Soulstones centuries before the games even start.
