One Diablo 4 dev wrote a surprisingly heartfelt item description to “help someone remember things will get better”
After player says Mark of the Conclave flavour text ‘brightened up my day’.
The world of Diablo 4 is full of misery and sadness. There are flayed corpses everywhere, fathers are haunted by the ghosts of their dead sons, blokes cram flaming eyeballs into their skulls and sometimes a guy turns up at random just to stomp you (and a lot of other people) into fleshy jam on the ground. Given all the abject suffering that the game and its predecessors make their stock and trade, it was an especially nice surprise to see real, genuine positivity emerge out of the literal hellscape of Sanctuary.
Reddit user Wholesome_Meow stumbled upon an inspirational item description for the rare amulet Mark of the Conclave, which quotes a “recently carved inscription” as saying: “Healing is a journey. A series of steps. Some days you may stumble, but so long as you continue to put one foot in front of the other, you will reach your destination.”
The amulet is given to the player upon completing the sidequest A Series of Steps for Taissa in Hawezar, revolving around helping a character come to terms with their grief at the death of their son.
“As someone going through severe depression, this brighten [sic] up my day,” Wholesome_Meow wrote. As it turned out, they were far from alone in finding the flavour text comforting, with their post on the Diablo 4 subreddit attracting over 1,000 upvotes and dozens of comments and supportive messages expressing similar feelings.
Diablo 4’s senior quest designer Harrison G. Pink took to Twitter to discuss their heartfelt approach to crafting the sidequest and its reward.
“I created this quest to be about overcoming grief and trauma, and how you cannot force healing, or always slay your demons, but by accepting who you are NOW, you can continue to heal and move forward,” they wrote.
“I wrote this flavor text for this person. I wrote it for me and I wrote it for you. I wrote it hoping against hope that it might help someone remember that things will get better.”
Since Pink’s post, the developer has responded to numerous players thanking them for the moving description to wish them well.