Diablo 4 is free to play this weekend via Battle.net

From now until Monday, Diablo 4 is free to play. The trial is available via Battle.net and includes the entire game. If you want to keep playing past Monday, it's currently 25% off, too.

Depending on your temperament, a free dose of Diablo is either a "first hit's free" trap, or an invitation to click your mouse and dissociate, which frankly you could do while running Notepad.exe. For me, a lapsed Diablo player who was never convinced the latest sequel offered something worth returning for, it's a pretty tempting method of satisfying my curiosity.

Although Diablo 4 launched on Steam a few weeks ago, the free weekend is limited to Blizzard's own store, Battle.net. The discounted price is on Steam, however.

Alice B was firmly in the "dissociate" camp in her Diablo 4 review, damning hell with faint praise as a "beautiful, frictionless grey toybox that puts nothing in the way of you playing it for hours and wondering what you've done with your life."

Since then, Blizzard have cocked things up with patches that nerfed players' fun, then apologised and gradually reversed them. Responses from its dedicated community remain mixed. Running free weekends usually suggests a certain confidence that a game is good enough to sell itself to players - although perhaps keeping the free weekend off Steam conversely speaks to its "Mixed" user review rating on that storefront.