The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it.
That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - and that's probably the point?
So I agree on many fronts with this article.
Diablo could have been so much more but they turned it into a highly engineered form of drug that can potentially destroy you, with little to nothing to gain for it. Nicotine? For sure it's more gambling than gaming - again to me mostly timeless yet inherently toxic coating - down to the systems level. So in a way, it's the original "mobile game", the ultimate computer based life waster.
So depending on the person and with the right .mpq file in hand this could either mean getting addicted to or maybe getting off of "cigarettes" completely:
The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the "endgame." I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of times, all for an item with slightly different numbers. In Diablo 1 and 2 the item often doesn't even look different.
But I've always found the base game to be excellent. Fun, exciting, and a blast with 4 people.
I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.
> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.
They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind.
Diablo 4's greatest flaw, IMHO, is that they apply difficulty scaling across all areas. At level 1 it can take two or three single hits to kill a goat man, and at level 60+ it can take two or three hits to kill a goat man; because the mobs scale to your power level.
If they'd simply allowed some areas to be level-restricted with difficult mobs, then there would always be a sense of reward and victory. A player tired of the grind need only hop over to a slightly easier zone to feel like a god among mortals. But you can't do that in Diablo 4, so it just remains a slog.
After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way.
You can lean into it, like Disgaea, which just embraces the brokenness and writes them into its mechanics. You can just sort of write a standard game, but then, in the end, the solution to all problems is grinding. You can scale the challenges with the level, but then, what's the point of leveling? In fact all you're doing is running the risk of showing just how busted the mechanic is when you have a hard time matching the levels correctly because of the exponential power gains; see Oblivion, for instance. And even after such a mismatch, the solution to all problems is still grinding.
Obviously many fine games have used this and I still play some to this day, so I'm not saying it's never ever fun. I'm just saying, the ways in which it's kinda broken seem fundamental and there seems to be only so much you can do with them. Were I designing a game today, rather than treating it as a default as so many designers still seem to, I'd want to take a careful look at the disadvantages and be sure I'm comfortable with them before proceeding. And as a gamer I do have to say more and more I'm starting to mark a game using level-based mechanics down a point when I'm figuring out what to play.
There’s multiple ways of handling scaling, but all games need to deal with the player gaining skill even if their character doesn’t. FPS often have have player selected difficulty settings not because people want to suffer, but because skill is makes such a huge difference.
RPG mechanics are generally meant to minimize the impact of player skill. A Skyrim stealth archer doesn’t benefit from hitting the enemy in the head, instead aiming is closer to target selection and their perks determine how well placed the shot was. This actually simplifies game balancing because players can self select challenges based on their character’s abilities. Though Skyrim also includes a difficulty slider, it’s not meant to offset endgame gear.
Dark souls is generally considered difficult because the RPG elements are minimized. Speed running the game doesn’t require people to hunt down a huge list of gear it’s just not that important.
> After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way.
Hero stories need to have a satisfying end, and I don't think many ARPGs acknowledge that this is even possible or design to allow it to coincide with the end of the story.
I imagine an ARPG designed to _end_ characters would level-gate content in such a way that unlocking, and defeating, the final content would be a satisfying end to the character. You would certainly be encouraged to start afresh, NewGame+ style, with a new character but it would be made clear that the character at the _end_ is also _finished_. Completed. Over. Done. The hero has finished their journey.
Ie, lock the character and have them just lounging around in a hub/town for your new characters to see.
There are games where the final score is primarily based on taking as little time as possible (e.g. the Heroes of Might and Magic series, which had its debut around the same time as Diablo); this tends to keep exponential leveling mechanics in check.
I like to play my own challenges now for minimal leveling; not formal ones for speedrunning purposes, just running more often and not grabbing all the resources. Due to the exponential nature of the game, generally if I do throw in the towel and level, by definition, the best place to grind is the latest possible place. Numerically you actually aren't missing out on much by trying to speed through the game and stopping only when necessary in most games.
The latest updated tried to address this somewhat.
> Level scaling inside dungeons and most overworld territories has been adjusted in World Tiers III and IV. Monsters will begin to trail behind the player in Level after a certain point (up to a maximum of 5 Levels behind). This change does not affect World Bosses, Legion Events, Fields of Hatred, Helltide, or Nightmare Dungeons.
Due to the nature of level scaling, if you're 5 levels over an enemy you basically vaporize them. There is still level variance among the world zones as well. So with the combination of the two, you should always be able to find someplace a bit more challenging and when you're higher level you can find areas with lots of enemies lower than you. I haven't played enough post-patch to know if it's made the experience any better, but I'm not the type of Diablo player to seek out areas with weaker enemies.
What Blizzard wanted to avoid is having 4/5ths of the map no longer relevant because you're so far above the area level that you no longer get usable XP, loot or gold. In D3 there wasn't much to do at the high end other than run rifts. In D4 the entire world is a viable place to spend time during the late game.
> What Blizzard wanted to avoid is having 4/5ths of the map no longer relevant because you're so far above the area level that you no longer get usable XP, loot or gold. In D3 there wasn't much to do at the high end other than run rifts.
Alternatively, they could have:
1. Distributed high-level dungeons across the map
2. Unlocked high-level quests across the map
They have an open world with dungeons and "caves", and an open world quest system; they could've leveraged that to get high level players to return.
It be nice if they split the game. They already have a Hardcore mode, so they could just split the ruleset. "Normal" could have things like level-gated areas, unlimited respecs, and a stronger focus on group play and HC could remain an infinite grind… which I think HC players would enjoy, since it would give them more cred and let them look down on mere casuals.
> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions.
Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons and what builds are necessary to push to the true "end game". Diablo, the campaign, is and has always been trivially easy. Super high levels of these dungeons stack up so many resistance penalties and the level difference adds so much damage reduction (for enemies) and increase (for you) that it becomes much more of a skill based game. This is what I play these games for. Not the campaign that you can sleep through.
For my wife, the game ends when we kill the big baddie together on normal difficulties. For me that's when the content just starts getting interesting. There is a lot of grinding involved, but you're having to pay so much more attention to what abilities / upgrades / paragon selections you make none of which are important at all for the main campaign.
I don't know how you do it, but I'm actually fascinated by it. I like watching Diablo players rant on YouTube, but for me the game pretty much ends after the campaign too. I wish it didn't because I find the campaigns great. Even just exploring the map and all the different atmospheric elements. It just feels too short.
I don't want to optimize my character. One thing I loved about D3 was that the entire skill tree was accessible to you. In D4 that's true right up until around 50 when it becomes cost prohibitive to respec.
One way I look at it is by the time you beat the game for the first time unless you've done quite a bit of side content, you still may not be a high enough level to unlock all of the abilities. You've only seen a fraction of the unique items floating around since most don't even drop until World Tier 3 or 4. You've likely only gotten the chance to play one or two themed builds based around the items which have dropped. You've probably not touched the paragon board or glyphs which can change things up quite significantly and enable a number of other builds that aren't really viable without the boost. I'm "only" level 78 on my main and I'm still upgrading glyphs and working my way through the paragon board. Or I was before the season started, and now I'm playing a fresh barb instead of sorc.
I wouldn't mind more free respec opportunities, but I don't think it's exceptionally expensive. Just verified on my 78 sorc that it would cost just over $1MM gold to reset all of my points. That's maybe 3-4 dungeon runs. However to reroll an attribute at the enchanter, it's now costing me above $1.5MM for a single role, it also requires forgotten souls. Refunding skill points is much cheaper than upgrading end game gear! It also took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize you don't have to reset all skill points. If you right click on a skill it'll remove it one point at a time for under $20k / point.
I don't understand the appeal of these things. For games that are not skill and/or reflexion oriented like Diablo once you've finished the campaign you have experienced what the game had to offer, a good hero journey. Replaying for other classes, missed side quests or simple monster bashing can be fun too. But what you describe seems not to be the satisfaction of discovering, only on collecting and checking boxes for the sake of it. This is akin to trying every parameter on a slot machine and trying to get every combination. That's very close to gambling addiction or OCD for me.
Forget the endgame, how many hours of my life can I spend comparing one piece of equipment to one very-barley-sort-of-slightly-better piece of equipment until I've cycled through literally hundreds of pieces of equipment, each promising an imperceptible improvement to my ability to kill another thousand samey bad guys?
I don't know how many hours exactly, but I know I hit that limit sometimes in my early 20's.
With Diablo 3 they added so much QoL and grind protection and then people flipped their shit. So for Diablo 4 they discarded everything good from Diablo 3.
By and large, Diablo players want to be flagellated by the RNG.
> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.
Sort of, but not really. The real grind kicks in around level 50… so again, after you've already beat the game. I don't really care about the "endgame". I think this game would be much more fun if it was a bit more like am MMO, where you are maybe looking for a group to do a dungeon.
Below 50 is, IMO, the best part of the game, especially because respecs are essentially unlimited.
I agree that's what it's evolved into for the most part, but also consider the point of Diablo is to "defeat Diablo." Simple as that. The endgame of min/maxing came because people continued to play after the main objective was done.
This is a strange post to me. You can immediately see that you value soulslike as a superior genre, yet to me I see those games are just as grindy. Die to a boss a million times to learn the timings -> finally you beat it. Not that much different than ARPGs where you kill lots of stuff and die infrequently. It's just two sides of the same coin.
Really these posts that call one kind of game time wasting or drug-like but not another just miss the brutal irony.
It's the difference between spending a lot of time at the slot machine vs becoming good at chess. It's s massive difference. You don't "grind" chess, you learn from your failures and get better at it. Sure, you can get lucky sometimes if your opponent blunders but the strategy to wait for that to happen is a failing one.
The analogy with Chess does not work: I can go on YouTube to watch how a pro player beats a specific boss, then use that to massively shorten how long I need to beat that boss.
Watching a lot of grandmasters play Chess will minimally help me beat a Chess AI that was better than me (excluding the beginner level).
I think that someone could have fun playing a Diablo-like RPG because they enjoy feeling powerful while they mow down a lot of enemies. And someone someone could enjoy a Soulslike game for the precision they need to apply to beat a boss.
Maybe it is somewhat similar to the difference between an arcade/fun racing game and a professional track racing game.
I wouldn't consider one to be "better" than the other. They simply have different objectives.
> You can immediately see that you value soulslike as a superior genre, yet to me I see those games are just as grindy. Die to a boss a million times to learn the timings -> finally you beat it. Not that much different than ARPGs where you kill lots of stuff and die infrequently. It's just two sides of the same coin.
That's not the same at all. The grind is built into Diablo, there is no way to avoid it. I regularly play souslike, it has been years since I needed to grind out a boss.
In Diablo you click on things to increase your avatar power, eventually if you click on enough things your avatar power will have gone up enough you can complete the challenge of the day. There is skill in crafting a build, and some builds and abilities do require some thought to deploy well, but at the end of the day your personal skill level doesn’t matter, its not like you’ll need to hone your clicking ability.
In soulslike games there is typically some amount of avatar power and it is possible to grind up such that your avatar power trivializes the game but that isn’t actually necessary, its possible to beat the game with a naked level one avatar. The challenge is more about you the player getting better at the mechanics of the game, not your avatar.
Both styles of game design can be enjoyable, but many find the latter more fulfilling.
Consistently defeating the Dark Souls boss requires skill. You have to learn how to beat it. The improvement comes from within yourself, and your ability to recognize what you are doing wrong. Knowing how to beat a boss is like a puzzle or a skill, even if it's a trivial skill less useful than a party trick. You have to analyze the boss, form a strategy, and adjust your strategy until you reach the desired outcome.
Diablo progression is just beating a pinata until it pops. You do the same thing over and over again until you get the outcome you want. It's about as intellectually engaging as cookie clicker.
That’s what superficially different about them. But in both cases you’re just killing time playing something fun. The difference is only whether you prefer rolling dice or learning some useless skill.
Transferable skills. I don't die frequently to Souls or Monster Hunter bosses. I beat many of the Bloodborne bosses on the first try. Not because I'm a god gamer but because I played a LOT of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter as a kid.
Every new ARPG (or ARPG league) requires many hours of grinding regardless of skill.
It feels very different and appeals to different crowds. I hate grinding against a challenge because I have to do a lot of that in real life, whereas blazing through the hell levels with my Diablo 1 Sorcerer was more like a relaxing stroll than much of a grind, with the occasional little reward from the RNG. Other people get a kick out of dying 83 times in front of the same boss, but that has never been me.
Maybe I just don't see the point. They are different in the sense that the actions are different. But they are the same in the sense that they are both useless activities you do for fun. Some people can have more fun playing diablo than they would ever have playing a dark souls game. I'd even dare to say that more people prefer diablo over dark souls by the sole fact that diablo is the more popular game.
Anyway, my point is that they can look different in the surface, but they are not truly very different. They are just a pastime.
Sure, in the sense that eating a new cuisine or a favored dish and eating a block of tasteless protein is "just eating". Some folks are eager to say "whatever makes you happy" to which the extreme counterexample is why not just get strung out on heroin.
To each their own, but it strikes me as a squandered opportunity.
That comparison is absurd. We need to eat. The only reason to eat tasteless protein is because you have to. No one needs to play video games. Unless they have some addiction problem, people play video games for fun. And people have a lot of fun with diablo. Given the user base, I'd say that more people have fun with diablo than with dark souls game. Dark souls is a pretty niche game. Elden ring sort of the odd one out of the franchise and, even then, it was not as popular as easier games.
Rolling dice is obviously a reduction of the Diablo gameplay. Just because you don't like the mechanic, doesn't mean other people don't find it better than a skill based game. The skill in question is pressing a button quickly when something happens on a screen. Which is the only real challange of any dark souls game. Both are fine distractions. But it's very obvious that one is not objectively superior to the other in any way.
No one needs to play video games but people ultimately do need to pass time in many cases. Doing something that challenges you or engages with an artist's ideas is rewarding. You need to eat. You don't need to eat with the intention to experience the food.
Again, I don't think dark souls is the emblematic, archetypal, or only direction for artistic video game design by any means. But it's at least something. From the lens of challenging yourself or exploring art, diablo has nothing for the majority of it's playtime in end game where you've seen everything and are just thinking about the numbers imo.
That's not an objective view, but man it sure seems underwhelming otherwise.
> You can immediately see that you value soulslike as a superior genre, yet to me I see those games are just as grindy. Die to a boss a million times to learn the timings -> finally you beat it.
Elden ring is so grindy that it's almost worse than any ARPG. And the game is full with artificially deadly things that should not be there, just to keep up its own meme "lol game hard, player dead". It's comically bad in many aspects.
You can find a balance. Diablo 3 tried. You had a game that you could make significantly hard, and because respecs were essentially unlimited you could reroll your character for any particular fight that was too hard to try and find a new way to beat it. I enjoyed that part.
There is a lot of strategy in Diablo 1. Unlike Diablo 2, you are much less able to just wade into hordes of monsters. Your health doesn't restore, you have less mana, you have fewer abilities and they don't just upgrade. In Diablo 2, some characters get abilities that can clear a whole pack of monsters by level 6 or 12, which you get to relatively quick. Diablo 1 you are much weaker. If theres a pack of monsters, knowing where to position yourself to filter them, or what scrolls to use and when to use them, and rationing your potions is more important. Its closer to traditional roguelikes.
True, D1 involves strategy and resembles traditional roguelikes, yet its tactical breadth feels limited..
So in absolute comparison to other roguelikes it's all mere coating, even on the tactics / strategy side - it tends to be more about positioning and resource management.
This is a highly subjective take of course and its appeal varies player by player..
I'd be in full agreement that Diablo 1 is the "most worthwhile" of the Diablo games and I do have a love / hate / on / off relationship with it (really glad that I'm not a smoker).
The beauty of Diablo is the RNG dungeons and overall feeling of character progression. Souls games are effectively a static level layout with enemies respawning in the exact same place, however it gives the feeling of overcoming hard challenges (more or less by design). So yes it is "anti-souls" but it's because it attempts to deliver a unique experience with every playthrough, although I agree that this has been lost in the ARPG genre in favor of formulaic quests and slot machine mechanics since Diablo 3.
Thank you! I always felt that Diablo was a step backward in computer RPGs, and it never grabbed me the way that Baldur's Gate did; even though the vibe is great as you noted. The randomized dungeons just feel like a treadmill of same art and room layouts, no characters to talk to or memorable events.
Somehow I WAS snared by "Book of Demons," which looks a lot like a diablo clone but with some card mechanics and a unique feature when you can choose the length of a dungeon (specify a number of minutes) to tailor the session length to the time you have.
As a small-scale game-designer I sometimes ask myself: how I could create a Diablo given the right budget? But the problem is that you cannot recreate the magic of Diablo (2). There is nothing inherently magic about Diablo which sets it apart. It's all about the impeccable implementation of a simple idea. A perfect storm.
I think a combination of Diablo and Souls-like would be a fascinating endeavour.
You could take the core souls-gameplay, scale up the enemy count and turn it into an isometric game. High Stakes, high reward.
Or you take a Souls-game and just make it a bit more casual/accessible. On top, Blizzard has the talent and manpower to create breathtaking environments that could shine even more in third-person.
Blizzard should go back to formula. Because their original recipe is still stuck in the 90s.
I feel the same way about Diablo 1. I really like the art style and ambiance (the last Blizzard game for which that is true for me), but the gameplay is basically click on them until they're dead.
No joke, I just discovered Cookie Clicker a couple of weeks ago (sorry, I guess I’ve been under a rock) and it struck me that CC is a greatly distilled and simplified version of Diablo and pretty much all ARPGs. Perform some action to get resources to get a thing that will let you collect more resources that will let you get a better thing etc. A dopamine factory.
The differences are just implementation details and art/style/setting.
i really feel the need to object to calling some grindy trash as "anti souls" as if dark souls is the archetypal game that is not shallow. I like dark souls (and love sekiro, and shrug at elden ring).
But there's a lot of games out there with depth. And frankly, a lot of people get through dark souls with luck and jank. Especially elden ring with its summons. That you can beat the game with sheer grit and dodges is a different thing.
That was a thing in Diablo 2 and that's when the IP peaked, this got lost with Diablo 3 and, i believe even more so with Diablo 4.. all the builds are all discovered and in front of you, there is no tinkering with incredible skill interaction possible like we used to do in Diablo 2
It's kinda similar to how Bethesda manages the Elder Scrolls IP, ~ a decade between titles and they casualize(? is it a word)/simplify mechanics that made them popular, they became a shadow of themselves, as a result their titles, while successful, doesn't give the same satisfaction, and I don't think it's due to nostalgia, there are specific design decisions that emphasis with my point, lvl-scaling and simplified damage/defense stats in D4 for example
The story and world building are both nailed, hence the commercial success, but the gameplay... what a let down.. exactly like Oblivion -> Skyrim transition
I don't think the game would have been a success if "Diablo" wasn't attached to the name, I'm pretty sure it sold less than Diablo 3
Hopefully they evolve the genre/IP with Diablo 5, perhaps focus as a single player game and explore new gameplay mechanics
This "game as a service" ruins this IP
Hopefully Bethesda don't fall into the same trap and actually move the IP forward, similar to how Fromsoftware evolved their Souls like genre
Dark Souls -> Elden Ring, that's what I expect from both Blizzard / Bethesda, they both play too safe and ends up becoming the shadow of their past..
I don't understand how people can praise the game design of Dark Souls and then say that Elden Ring is better. Elden Ring is the trashy mass appeal cousin.
* Most major bosses are gimmicky
* The open world encourages running past everything across pretty but boring fields and eschewing interesting level design
* The platforming is goofy and bad and relies heavily on awkwardly not dying as you fall vague heights
* There's a huge amount of tedious content. And you're highly likely to encounter enemies that are genuinely too strong for your character that just kind of shits on you for exploring the wrong way; or likewise content that you arrive at and are disappointed to find it's pointlessly easy.
The game was still good but it would have been much better if they cut out 3/4 of the mini dungeons, chopped the map area in half, and put more love and effort into the legacy dungeons.
Isn't that more a feature of the community than the game itself, though? You're always free to experiment and roll your own builds. That's what I'm doing with Diablo 4 and I'm having a blast. I don't care if I push the highest nightmare dungeon or even reach max level. I just want to see what I can do with a build that I come up with out of my own head.
This. There's a lot of room to improve in terms of build variety, and yet my kids and I have been having a lot of fun theorycrafting and coming up with our own builds.
There's a fun loop there in that finding new equipment let's you try new builds which helps you find better equipment. You're hunting enabling uniques, legendary aspects, critical mass of some necessary affix like thorns, crit, cdr, lucky hit, etc.
For reference, I have 3 toons on eternal at about 80, 70, and 60 respectively, with the 80 pushing NM 50 before the nerfs.
If your goal is to look up a meta build and rush Uber Lilith, the game will probably not be satisfying for you.
I think that's more of a side effect of them wanting it to be a "game as a service", they need everything to be streamlined and balanced.. wich removes a lot of the fun..
I wish they'd have made D4 a proper single player game instead of an MMO, and let your community mod your game
Look at D2 and the sheer amount of mods.. same for Warcraft 3..
I can see glimpses of what they were going for with online multiplayer in D4. There's some fun there, but I think it's currently a net negative.
It forces them to balance tightly, but I don't need D4 to be perfectly balanced - just fun. Some of the best games I've ever played have had horribly broken balance - final fantasy 6 (3) and final fantasy tactics just to name two off the top of my head.
World events with online players have the potential to be much better. I'm hopeful it'll evolve over time. That being said, D4 is not even close to being balanced perfectly. There are orders of magnitude of power level in difference between classes and builds. At least if you measure them against "end game content" and not the campaign which can be completed with any class / skill selection.
Right, it's not currently balanced well, and the massive amount of nerfing in the last patch was to work to address that.
Thankfully, it looks like they realized the patch was bad. They just announced in their fireside chat that they were wrong to prioritize balancing over fun, and they're working to fix it.
They addressed that by making my main class (sorcerer) which was already the weakest class even weaker! I'm sure it'll get tuned relatively quickly, but this patch hit hard.
> It's kinda similar to how Bethesda manages the Elder Scrolls IP, ~ a decade between titles and they casualize(? is it a word)/simplify mechanics that made them popular, they became a shadow of themselves
I felt that as well when I played Skyrim after Morrowind. The fact that you cannot sell or drop quest items (even quests you've not received yet), you cannot meet NPCs you've not been talked about, unkillable NPCs, the marker in the UI that tell you where to go... For sure, it's "convenient" and it alleviates a lot of frustration but it also makes the world feel less real.
I employee you to try a "no-town" run. It works in Diablo I and II. Essentially once you spawn in, you have to leave and never return which opens up interesting gameplay.
Waypoints? They're essentially useless. You can't return to town and why would you warp back to a cleared area?
Why go to the Den of Evil? You can't get the skill point from Akara anyways...
Town portals become useless, however, identify scrolls become one of the most valuable item. Do you hold onto the unid'd gloves that take up 4 inventory spots or drop it?
Do you equip the javelin that has 4 durability, or do you save it for the boss?
Do you remember where your cache of health pots were?
It's really hard and really fun. If you've tapped the Diablo reservoir and looking for something new, I'd try it
The gameplay was fun to me when I was literally 5 years old and playing my first ever computer game. I can't understand how an adult would find the Diablo games fun. The atmosphere and art and whatnot are great, though.
Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful.
I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's obviously been really successful for them, but I have absolutely no want or need to play through the game again. It's a slog, running across the map, equipment with so many stats that I don't know what's actually better or worse, fighting monsters on the surface and in dungeons that all feel the same. There's hardly any time journeying into the depths of hell, or into deep, deep dungeons, but a lot of the plot instead revolves around the jungle for some reason and how the "jungle gives and takes". A big focus on builds and grinding as opposed to fun. It's been sacrificed on the altar of "live service" and, unlike Diablo 1, you won't be able to play it in 25 years, nor will you really want to.
I love Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, I don't care much for what the genre has become though (Diablo 3/4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, etc). The genre of loot focused ARPGs really took after the worst aspects of Diablo 2 LOD end game. An extreme focus on grinding and optimizing builds to maximize your ability to grind, so you can get gear to beat end game content that is otherwise impossible, to repeat the process. The genre took this and ran with the concept and brought it up, but also kind of killed the simple parts of the game. A lot of older 90s / early 2000s games had this game first, that then maybe had this end game aspect which some communities played towards. But now the industry plays towards the end game aspect, and neglects the person that just wants to sit down and fight into the dungeon for a while.
I'm in the same boat. I loved Diablo 1 and 3, but Diablo 3 is just meh and I haven't even bothered with 4. The first two games it could be fun going through loot you'd found and try to optimize your character. There were only a few dimensions to each piece of equipment so finding the "best" a relatively easy. Even if you didn't have the absolute best stuff you could still play the game. The character optimization was an emergent part of the game, not the core focus of the game.
Diablo 3, especially with real money used to buy equipment, turned the CharOp into a core aspect of the game. If you didn't pay attention to that aspect the game could be mercilessly hard. So I couldn't just mindlessly play, I had to pause half way through the dungeon to go further tune all my gear across a dozen different dimensions.
The extra cognitive load means there's more steps between me sitting down and engaging something fun. If I have an hour to play a game having to spend ten minutes out of that time dealing with loot is just a tax on fun. It's bad enough that unless I play every day I have to wait some unbounded amount of time waiting for updates because of the forced online component.
I think the loop that hooked me on game such as Diablo 1, Valheim, Subnautica, etc, is that cycle of safe place -> adventure -> "safe place, recharge, upgrade". The grindey aspect of Diablo 4 totally turned me off and if I buy the game it'll only be for the couch coop aspect.
Just an fyi - the couch coop for Diablo 4 is a little more work to get going than Diablo 3. Requires that the second player sign into their own PSN/XBL account and have that account tied to a Battle.net account:
Even Diablo 2 felt a little bloated to me - it's so much longer, and I burned out on all the click-click-click way sooner than most people. It felt like slog.
But the original Diablo...man. What a game. It feels "perfect" to me, in the same way that Scheme (the programming language) feels "perfect". Tight, hugely playable and replayable, atmospheric, unbelievably compulsively addictive. I maintain an personal list of best games ever; it's unranked, but D1 would be near the top.
Diablo 2 is the only one I played deeply, it seems fresher since it has many acts/environments. Even though any single one of them could have boring parts.
Act 3 has a large difficulty spike and is frustrating (especially due to the dolls, etc.), but Kurask is a favorite farming area. Act 4 is boring, though easy to get rewards in due to how open the spaces are.
I really feel like they shot themselves in the foot making the Spider Forest so windy. I get it thematically-- getting lost in the forest fits, but not all sections of the act are like that and to make it the "first impression" is what makes everyone remember that they hate act 3.
Once you get to Kurast it's ya pretty linear. I think they should have stuck the easy-to-get-lost-in Spider Forest between lower and upper Kurast, and eased the player in more.
That's what immediately sprang to mind when wk_end mentioned slogging. I was never a serious player, but played through it a number of times and that was always my least favorite section. So repetitive, and the river maps often included long sections of back-tracking if you got unlucky with the procedural generation.
Diablo 1 has a single town, but there is a similar "new environments" part of the gameplay since as you go into the dungeon it changes. So theres the church -> catacombs -> caves -> hell. Though the whole game is maybe just a little longer than Act 1 in Diablo 2 (but its tough to say because its a much slower paced game).
This game murdered me. I discovered Diablo a few months after it came out and played obsessively for a few weeks. I had lots of cool stuff. Then one day wandering through a dungeon minding my own business, someone invisible killed me. Boom you're dead. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they just went away.
I really felt murdered. I read mystery books with murders in them all the time, but the punch never connected like that. Video games really are a uniquely expressive medium. I closed the game and never went back to it.
Back when Diablo was released it wasn't uniformly praised like it is today. Aside from caricaturised RPG fans' scoffing there was a lot of criticism of its what we call today streamlining and what we used to call dumbing down. Interestingly back then there wasn't yet the research or even the vocabulary of addictive dopamine hit mechanics but there was already a not very well articulated feeling of a hamster wheel experience.
But yes, I did play Diablo 1 to completion. With all 3 characters.
Jimmy Maher's writing on old PC video games continues to be some of the best around, at least if you are of a similar age to Jim. When the site recovers, I highly recommend reading his back catalog - one of the best collections of articles on 90s PC gaming I've seen. The site is especially great because Jimmy writes so well and he has obvious passion for the period.
I bought Diablo in 1996, I stayed up about 40 hours playing it. To the point that I started to literally hallucinate and click on things that weren’t actually there.
I downloaded the relatively new iOS Diablo game a few months ago and sank tens of hours into the game before waking up and putting an end to the madness. I’m morally opposed to “pay to win” games and wasn’t tempted to buy anything, so fortunately I escaped without financial damage (but the time I put into the grind can’t be replaced).
Granted, there are people who are more susceptible to addiction, and I appear to be one of them (thankfully, I was raised in an observant Muslim family). But that doesn’t absolve Blizzard of responsibility for what they’ve unleashed.
This quote resonates with my experience playing Diablo (though as a teenager I definitely couldn't put my finger on it):
> One nice thing about getting older is that you learn what makes you feel good and bad. I’ve long since learned, for instance, that I’m happiest if I don’t play games for more than a couple of hours per day, even on those rare occasions when I have time for more. But I want those hours to have substance — to yield fun stories to tell, interesting decisions to remember, strategies or puzzle solutions to muse about while I’m cooking dinner or working out or taking a walk, accomplishments to feel good about. For me, Diablo is peculiarly flat; I went, I saw, I clicked on monsters. For me, it feels less like a time waster than a waste of time. I almost find myself wishing the game wasn’t so superbly polished in every particular, just to relieve the monotony.
[edit]
And it's not due to an inherent grindy-ness of Diablo either (as one comment on TFA suggests). I have enjoyed other games that were about as grindy before and since.
I tried to leave a comment on the article but it's down due to the hacker news hug of death. I wonder if the author plays new games and what their opinion is on Diablo 4.
It's interesting to me that hacker news has become a place for this kind of niche content about old video games. Who would have known there is such a large audience that is willing to pay for magazine length / quality articles about the history of games?
Speaking of, I subscribed to this magazine for a few years (yes, on paper!) and I highly recommend: https://www.retrogamer.net/ They have a lot online but there is something very enjoyable about getting an actual magazine in the mail. They have a ton of glossy images and in-depth, well-researched articles - a breakdown of how Pitfall! was constructed for the Atari 2600 is a memorable one.
Bonus (or negative): it is from the UK and living in the U.S. there is a whole alternate dimension of retro games they feature that I've never heard of. But I enjoyed reading about those, too!
>Poor character-building choices or a general lack of skill can, in other words, always be compensated for with patient grinding.
This is why I fell in love with JRPGs. Generally most of them allow endless grinding and for me, and for a lot of people, grinding itself is relaxing and on top of that it's fun being strong. It's fun being a demi-god and just kill every boss in 5 seconds or less. And even better when you can exploit some janky game mechanic to become strong (which nowadays would be patched 1 week later by the devs...)
I played a lot of Diablo in high school while listening to Alice in Chains. For what it was, it was quality, different, and addictive. Modem and local IPX play with friends was interesting.
D2 was a letdown IMO. D3 is pretty good overall but lacks the charm of D1. I haven't tried D4 because it's $$$ and I'll wait until it's sold on sale.
During the pandemic, I bought CD copies of Diablo and Diablo: Hellfire because I wanted to patch, nocd, and mod them without intermediary tainting of modern distributions.
I caused physical damage to my hand with Diablo 1 and all the incessant clicking (vs the "hold to attack and keep attacking" mechanic in D2 and D3).
I had some good times in D2, played it pretty deeply until I got to the Physical Immunes. That's when I gave up because I didn't want to have to level up, regear, and respec a new character.
I played D3 when it first came out, the Real Money Auction House destroyed that game as it became a game of "gold", not gear. The "world wide" loot table just wrecked it. When you have a 1 in 10M chance of getting the right weapon drop, that's only "1 in 10" across a million players, but it's still 1 in 10M for you. You also had to become knowledgeable about not just your own class and gear, but every other class and gear so your Barbarian doesn't salvage some random Staff that may have been one of those 1 in 10M drops for a Sorcerer, and thus worth a heap of currency.
D3 rewards time invested, especially later on. It rewards skill to a point, but in the end, it's determination to grind long enough to get enough gear and to get the right level to clear the content. You watch videos of someone clearing high level content, and it's almost always the same map they're clearing as some maps are outright impossible to succeed on compared to others. When it's all boiled down, it makes the end game pretty moot.
That said, I like the dynamic playstyle of D3. An "ok" geared Demon Hunter is a cat on fire through the levels, obliterating everything and everyone, and it's just flat giggly fun. And I liked the story of D3, it was a great story.
I remember playing the first demo as a kid[1] and almost falling off my chair when I accidentally triggered the healing spell (I had no idea that I triggered it). It was scarier than Butcher grunting "aaah fresh meat" from a cold dark room, deep in the dungeon.
Then, for reasons not relevant here, to buy the full version of the game I had to drive 60 km to the nearest big city, get it at a shady bazaar, suspiciously only displaying CDROM covers at their stalls, but no disks. The game was so much better due to almost 2 years of anticipation!
And then, a few days later the nanny robbed us (= disappeared), and it took my parents more than a day to come back. So we played D1 for 23 hours, changing seats with my brothers, one of us making tea, another one snacks, rotating every 30 minutes.
The moral of this story is: Diablo was a wonderful game when it came out, but ffs never leave 3 kids at the age 7-10 alone for more than a few hours. xd
The only way to play Diablo is on hardcore mode and multiplayer.
Suddenly you are walking dungeons slowly, waiting for cooldowns to refresh in a corner, planning what area spells to combo with your party, exchanging items that were dropped.
I don’t know if HC players get rewarded in any way, with special dungeons or items but they should. It forces you to appreciate and think about the game much more.
The complex ARPGs have some unlikely competition: rogue-lite bullet-heaven games. The "rougue-lite" gives you short playing sessions where you die, but can still progress for the next game. The "bullet-heaven" turns your character into a source of powerful and explosive attacks, where your actions during the game may be limited to just moving around and selecting upgrade paths.
These lo-fi 5 EUR games give a lot of the monster-slaying fun of Path of Exile, Diablo etc. but with less grind -- and extreme variety. Yet the same idea of killing thousands of monsters with visually and mechanically varied attacks remains. Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Bio-Prototype and Halls of Torment are some of the ugly-looking but addictive games which make me question returning to another only slightly different season of Path of Exile.
This story and many others are captured really well in the Game Developer Conference (GDC) post-mortem talks, heartily recommended if you want to know about the human aspect behind game dev!!
> They knew that multiplayer deathmatches had made DOOM what it was, and they knew that, long after players had finished Warcraft II‘s single-player campaign, it was multiplayer that kept them going there as well, turning the game into a veritable institution
This is what kept me playing for so long. I eventually played solo trying to find better loot when bnet dried up. There is now an active community on discord and plenty of people playing devilutionx. If you have a hankering for Diablo 1 community nostalia, I have over 700 links to current and archived Diablo 1 fanpages on my website https://mgpat-gm.github.io
I got a SSL_NO_CIPHER_OVERLAP for the archive.X links here, which was a first.
Since curl worked, I configured Firefox to use NextDNS instead of Cloudflare for DNS over HTTPS, and it worked.
So, is Cloudflare blocking archive.ph since today?
Diablo it's just a real time watered down Moria :).
Get the real thing and play Nethack/Slashem. Moria feels repetitive in comparison. If you feel combat oriented instead of thinking out of the box a la NH/SLSM, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Tales of Maj’Eyal does a great job of streamlining the roguelike gameplay loop without dumbing it down. And it’s GPL licensed! Amusingly it has some pay to hoard mechanics if you play with the official servers. I’ve thrown about a hundred euros to the author that way because I like the idea of supporting free software game dev and it’s just a fun game.
wait, TOME4 it's GPL, but tome-sx and friends, not :|.
It's a pity, because the older TOME games were Moria like but at least they put some overworld gameplay with several kinds of towns to make it more fun.
On NH/SLEM, you have towns, but inside the "dungeon".
