Diablo
filfre.net
filfre.net
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
Planning for your gear and doing sims / optimizing are strategic elements, though potentially a meta-strategy?
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..
'streamline the fun out of'
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.
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..
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.
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.
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 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.
* 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.
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
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".
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).
Really these posts that call one kind of game time wasting or drug-like but not another just miss the brutal irony.
Anyway, my point is that they can look different in the surface, but they are not truly very different. They are just a pastime.
To each their own, but it strikes me as a squandered opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
Every new ARPG (or ARPG league) requires many hours of grinding regardless of skill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn’t all of this literally just happen?
Below 50 is, IMO, the best part of the game, especially because respecs are essentially unlimited.
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.
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.
The difference between single player and modern HoMM (it’s a thing!) multiplayer is absolutely stark. Entirely different games, basically.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Spending time doing what? Killing mobs? For what purpose?
Killing mobs should be a means to an end like cosmetics/achievements/trophies and those usually give you bragging's rights.
So ok, all zones are viable to spend time in D4. What do you gain with that?
By and large, Diablo players want to be flagellated by the RNG.
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 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.
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 know how many hours exactly, but I know I hit that limit sometimes in my early 20's.
The differences are just implementation details and art/style/setting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platform...
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.
Endlessly repeating one-armed bandit gameplay, throw battle passes on top and boom Bobby Kotick can show shareholders how successful the game is.
Why gaming sucks in '23 …it's the money.
That Town theme music is just a lovely piece of music. Totally nostalgia inducing.
8-Bit music theory did a nice breakdown of why it's so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_zsDWJyrM
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.
The jungle areas in Act 3 were a particularly weak section, IMO.
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.
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.
But yes, I did play Diablo 1 to completion. With all 3 characters.
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.
> 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.
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?
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!
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...)
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 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.
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
[1] Two rednecks playing D1: https://days.sonnet.io/#:~:text=I%20play%20Diablo%20for%20th... (if not on chrome, search for "I play diablo")
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.
Otherwise it’s just mindless click frenzy.
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.
Some games with 2D isometric setups can have gorgeus graphics.Even libre ones like Flare.
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
So, is Cloudflare blocking archive.ph since today?