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Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game.

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:

https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/blob/master/docs/...

(Devilution/X is amazing and maybe more interesting than playing the game itself, complete clean-room reverse engineered version of Diablo).

Edit disclaimer: local / in-sync multiplayer is (probably?) not as life wasting

12 comments

I've always loved this series.

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.

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.

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.

yes I totally agree.

> 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.

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.

You can be god-tier in Diablo 3 with a simple autohotkey script. At least with Diablo 4 you have to _sometimes_ evade. ;)

Didn’t all of this literally just happen?

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.

> Really these posts that call one kind of game time wasting or drug-like but not another just miss the brutal irony.

I think you're spot on.

> > To me there is just "no there there" - and that's probably the point?

In some ways I've always felt Diablo is just more honest about what a video game is.

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.

I guess the difference is grinding against a challenge and grinding against RNG

How is that material in any way?

> 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.

There is a lot of strategy in Diablo 1. Unlike Diablo 2, you are much less able to just wade into hordes of monsters.

Sure, you camped at doorways and killed monsters as they pathed in front of you individually.

Though, I'm not sure I'd classify that as "a lot of strategy".

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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/449960/Book_of_Demons/

I mostly agree.

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.

I made a post the other day about diablo being a clicker game

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328358

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.

Universal Paperclips is another game like this, although one with more of a clear "ending" than something like CC or Diablo.

That's why I prefer roguelikes. Hoarding and grinding won't save you. Lateral thinking, lots of times.

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.

> the lacking of significant strategic elements

Planning for your gear and doing sims / optimizing are strategic elements, though potentially a meta-strategy?

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.

> all the builds are all discovered

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.

> 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.

> casualize(? is it a word)/simplify mechanics

'streamline the fun out of'

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.

Sounds hellish to me.