I’ve been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them… irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that.
I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing.
It’s not a hunting game, it’s a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log.
The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn’t the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy’s skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it’s the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work.
And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn’t sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that’s where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams.
In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I’m so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers!
But of course you’d see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least.
But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren’t very fun.
Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they’re clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I’m guessing that’s going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you’re basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone’s analyzed already… any ideas?)
And hey look, there’s the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they’re confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god’s sake, if we’re going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it)
Item sets! Because there’s nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you’ll level out of before you ever complete; it’s so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade.
And on and on, there’s so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can’t just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you’d be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy.
How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit?
I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly.
Thoughts?
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Maybe look out for single player games?
Diablo-likes are not good, when the design team thinks about retention and game time instead of accessibilty.
Stuff like Van Hellsing, Victor Vran and other AA release are not about the grind.
Insteaf of 120 hours of PoE you can have 30-40hrs of 3 to 4 different diablo-likes a d I will tell you the difference is greater then within PoE.
This. The stuff OP hates in the games is added as the “endgame content” for people planning on spending half their lifetime in the game. That kind of “content” is generally not added to single-player-first games like those you mentioned.
If you enjoy base-building at all as well try Rift Breaker. It’s basically Diablo with tower defense, great game.
Honestly, I’m more into the progression planning than the fighting itself. I would not like a game where I have to put too much effort in the fight part of the game. Even soulslike games have ways to cheese them and any proper diablolike arpg should have ways to destroy enemies with little thought on the combat.
It IS gory stardew valley, I see no problem in that though? The only reason I don’t play stardew is that the feel of the game is too slow, not because I dislike the gameplay loop.
And that’s entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.
I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it’s that disparity that leaves people jaded.
Stardew doesn’t have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don’t need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head; there’s complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
Why is that?
Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn’t?
How could you make a gory-stardew that’s comfortable in its own skin?
The optimization problems are the game. Figuring out builds you like is the point.
You call them obfuscations, I call them fun. Having different ways to scale my killing machine is fun. having to design different and new ways to becoming a mowing machine is fun. I’m with you with the “endless progression” thing, that’s what I prefer from D2 and PoE, once you reach the top tier content there’s no infinite content.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character
Oh come on, you don’t really need to optimize that much to have a viable character!
drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head
You don’t plan for all, you just pick the ones that are useful. I enjoy using out of game tools to optimize my in game characters.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
It’s a different kind of fun. Stardew is fun not really because of the farming gameplay loop, but the farming gameplay loop within a town with character interactions and tbh, I haven’t really finished all the content it offers because its simplicity bores me.
What you need to ask yourself is not how to remove those obfuscations, but what each game offers to the player. I assure you that neither SV, PoE, LE, GrimDawn, even D2 are designed to offer you the simple gameplay loop of “mowing the field of vegetables and monsters and getting the produce aka loot”. Stardew offers a chill experience with a simple gameplay loop so you don’t feel pressured into being good at it, alongside with a story around the townspeople and the farmer. D-clones offer a multi layered toolset with complex interactions to prepare better for the mowing, a big big part of the fun is in the preparation, for a lot of people the “mowing” process is more there to test the machine than to enjoy the game.
I honestly think that if you don’t like the layered design space that most ARPGs offer, it’s not your genre.
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don’t like :)
Also I’m not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn’t sit quite right in my head.
It’s just… sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It’s certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there’s some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there’s one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let’s see, I do have a helmet that …
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
… but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn’t make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn’t feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can’t really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you’re going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It’s like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn’t feel like that’s really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where’s the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where’s management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where’s the sort-rank-and-filter, where’s the multi-axis comparisons? Where’s the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that’s just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let’s make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that’ll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just… didn’t make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do… I’m just surprised that we haven’t got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.
Regarding your grim dawn complaint, did you not have enough level for augments? Augments and the crafted thingies you put on itels are what usually caps you until you reach suepr endgame in grim dawn. You don’t really need to be 100% capped anyway, I usually pick strong gear and augment/enchant it with resistances where I can to cap myself. The typical constellation paths also have resistances.
Dunno, I usually decide to lose that resistance and risk taking the damage and something else drops, it’s grim dawn, where most mobs die in 2 seconds and you can recover damage very fast.
You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao
Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.
A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.
TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.
I think you should try “The slormancer”. It got the gear quality of life stuff solved. You can go pretty much any spec of whatever you want and make it work. Just have to work a bit to get there :)
I’m all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.
It’s not a hundred hours, I play multiple character for less than 20 hours epr season of PoE.
Sure, if you lack the knowledge it sucks, but that why there’s so much content on guides.
I enjoy having to investigate the best ways to plan and having tools to emulate planning scenarios to be able to take informed decisions in game. It’s cool if you don’t enjoy that but then this genre is not for you.
I’m guessing you are referring to the passive respects of PoE. Honestly, I pseudo respec and tweak my tree a lot per character and spend a lot of currency for it. But it’s fine, I’ll just farm more currency. Having to start over happens only when I decide that it’s best to do whatever with a different class, that’s the only truly non respeccable part, but that’s really basic, right? Having an inefficient tree is not that big of a deal honestly, it’s usually more about gear and other big decisions that break characters.
That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.
In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.
It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.
Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.
Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.
Guild Wars (not GW2) didn’t have that problem. All of the skills are just available somewhere if you go get them. The only meaningful build choices are which skills you use, a small number of attributes, and how much of the stats from your gear you are willing to sacrifice to obtain other effects.
You get to level 20 (the cap) fairly quickly in each campaign and still have all the rest of the game to play with expanding options instead of increasing numbers.
You can’t just pick a single build and do everything with it, you need to adapt what you’re doing to the missions you encounter, so you’re more than encouraged to play with the other skills.
That game was the most fun I’ve ever had playing a video game. Lots of other great games have happened, but the low barrier to entry (buy-to-play instead of subscription) and the reward for slotting a useful 8 skills that worked well with each other and well with the other 7 or so people in your group cannot be beat.
I was very excited when they announced GW2. Sadly it is a very different game from the first one, and while I can still enjoy the story, it is not really a game for me.
Personally I enjoy the complicated character building of Grim Dawn way more than the item hunting. This also means I will play a host of characters and eventually complete item sets and have the resources for crafting after half-completed character number 86. For me the grinding is mostly a test on the efficiency of my build.
Maybe look into Warhammer: Chaosbane. It has a point system that superficialy looks similar to Grim Dawns devotions or Path of Exile, but in reality it’s super simple. And while you do collect items, they don’t matter as much as in other ARPGs. The flip side is that it’s kinda hard to fail because the game is so simple.
I’ve just reinstalled Grim Dawn, having last played it some years ago, and am currently working my way through Act 2. I don’t frequently play ARPG’s, but I’ll try a new one when I get it in a bundle or somesuch. Mostly, they don’t hold my interest. Grim Dawn, vanilla and unmodded (I assume there’s some kind of modding scene; haven’t looked yet) still manages to scratch that itch for me. At some point I’ll pick up the DLC. Right now I just want to find something good enough to replace this crazy caster 2h sword I’m using, so that I can bring Albrecht’s Aether Ray back into the rotation!
Your desire to dumb down diablo-likes is your own and I hate it. PoE and Grim Dawn are about the only games like this that I have truly enjoyed in a long time. Blizzard ruined Diablo and WoW with this bullshit take.
I have absolutely no wish to dumb them down.
As I said, if you just took away all those mechanics, you’d be left with a boring empty game.
What I said was that it would be nice if you could make the combat feel more like hunting than gathering, so you wouldn’t have to make up for it with a:) number-go-up and b:) np-hard - then you could then go for much more enriching forms of complexity.
For instance, making mobs fight a lot more tactically as their level increases instead of just stacking on the HP and damage - and instead of your perks just driving stat inflation, they unlocked new tactical options on your part, giving you a series of new stops to pull out as the battles got more fraught.
Ok, I see where you’re going now, but I’m still not sure I agree with you here overall for the genre.
I think the “add tactics” thing is already done to a degree in these games as early enemies in these games tend to be dead simple since players like likely still acclimating to the game, but I suspect that there is only so much you can do before you end up turning later enemies into some sort of frustrating puzzle. Diablo-likes, for better or worse, aren’t generally mind bending affairs, high skill ceiling affairs.
There is definitely room in the genre for more tactical, skill dependent entries, but I not sure the end result would be as fun for most people as that would be a fundamentally different type game. Hey, maybe I am wrong and this would lead to some sort of souls-like Diablo game where skill and learning are all that matters and items and character building are far less important. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Hades in a way.
Yeah at that point it kind of morphs genre from dungeon grinder to isometric action. That being said I think isometric action is a way better game type due to the level of involvement and a challenge that’s skill based; whereas I find dungeon grinders to boring from overly simplistic controls and gameplay loops.
That being said I am tired of so many game just giving you 3 real buttons, but this is the problem with making games to make money, if you want to market broad you have to keep it simple.
Behind every problem in life lies capitalisms ugly asshole.
Maybe combine the loot fest with some hades difficult combat? I have similar feelings as yours, the genre is really cool but in the end, it’s all just this hidden grindfest? At least with (real) brutal combat, you still need to “make it happen”, big numbers is just the req.
I dunno if it even needs to be difficult; even a bit tactical would change the nature of the thing. As it is the mobs in these things tend to be mindless converging waves; what if they set up set pieces, ran for help, dived for cover, used supporting fire etc etc?
Also perhaps overambitious, but what if the difference between low and high level enemies wasn’t their HP or damage, but how tricky and organised they were? What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?
Depending on the specific game itself, we can boil down the multiple-stat problem in a few ways. If the goal is to get all the stats as high as possible evenly, then we can assign each stat a multiplier based on how low it is. Fixing lower stats becomes worth more than buffing higher stats. That multiplier would depend on the game, on how much it punishes the low stat. The multiplier itself might end up being a whole new problem to solve, but for now I’ll just say its not my problem and call it X.
Whatever X is though, every stat can then be reduced to a single value using it. Super-low fortitude should be buffed over already-high mana according to X, so all of the numerical values in the game become directly comparable at any stage in this problem. Then I expect it will be equivalent to the knapsack problem. Each item in the game will boost several stats in certain ways, and all of those boosts can be combined using X to become our item value in the knapsack problem.
So I consider it to be the knapsack problem + figuring out X (which might be NP-complete on its own, depending on the game).
Have you tried Last Epoch? You don’t need wiki or 3rd party tools at all at least. It’s been great to try different synergies between the relatively simple skill trees and class masteries.
It’s horrific . It represent the putrid state of video game industry
Okay, a bunch of thoughts come to mind.
I love Diablo. However, I think a big part of it is the atmosphere and also me being young and never having seen anything like it. That’s pretty hard to recreate. I heard the game Halls of Torment nailed the Diablo atmosphere, but as a Vampire Survivors-like. Basically it’s focused on the grind and progression. Maybe, that’s something for you? Personally, I haven’t found anything that is as fun as Diablo, so every now and then I play Diablo 1 with a new mod, like the new The Hell 3 Mod. It brings back the wonder of the unknown, because there is lots of new stuff in there. I also loved Book of Demons, which is basically a streamlined version of Diablo 1 with a dark comedic twist.
I think you underestimate the satisfaction that comes from clearing levels in Diablo. Yes, it could be a different theme and still work, but isn’t that proof of how potent it is? So the question is, why does it feel like a grind to you? I wager it’s because the magic Diablo had for you got lost over time. You know how they work now, you’ve seen behind the curtain and thus don’t feel the danger, the intrigue like you used to. Maybe you will find it in games like Elden Ring that you don’t see through right away?
About the stats progression: I think a very big part of the fun of progressing your character comes from doing it the way you want. It’s a form of expression. You want to be a Necromancer that only uses Golems or a Mage focused on ice. I think what a lot of Diablo-likes miss is finding a good way to allow lots of expression in character development. Too often I feel boxed in by the class and it doesn’t feel like it’s my Tinkerer, but the Tinkerer instead. A good Diablo-like has abilities that define the character instead of just simple stat increases and cooldown reductions and all that.
Lastly, if you haven’t seen it there is a great Diablo 4 Critique on YouTube that might give some more food for thought!
Lol stardew vally in doom clothing killed me. Quite the write up but all I can really say is an unhelpful “everyone likes different stuff”. i like twitch and boomer shooters. I had to wait ages for them to come around again. I had to wade through slow shooters like halo, milshooters, milsims, coverbased shooters, and other stuff that I genuinely don’t enjoy as much until the type I liked most started to resurface with Doom 2016 and the now regrettably named “boomer shooters”. Fast, arcadey, dark themed, with health and ammo drops. I’m not big on some of them but overall I’m in an oasis compared to the drought I endured.
My best advice is patience for it to come around again or to make it yourself if you don’t want to wait.
I believe the things you are calling out are an integral part of the ARPG genre so there isn’t going to be much change to the core without fundamentally changing the game you’re playing. Plenty of people enjoy the wanton clicky destruction and seeing numbers rise, just look how popular stuff like cookie clicker is.
Have you tried monster hunter? (Or god eater or wild hearts) Those games sound a lot like what you’re describing. At its heart the core gameplay is ‘Hunt monsters to gather parts to make better gear to hunt more powerful monsters’
Instead of mowing down tones of small things though, you take down a single large and dangerous foe. As you progress, new and more powerful foes appear, but despite the large roster of monsters, they all feel unique. And while better gear certainly helps, a good deal of skill is also required.
This is why I’m looking forward to the first few seasons of PoE2. It sounds like they’re starting out focused on making the moment to moment gameplay more interesting. They’ll cave to the zoom zoom crowd soon enough and ruin the game with power creep within a year, so I’m very much planning on treating it as a temporary game, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.
There’s this open-source, Diablo-like game/engine, called FLARE, which I find interesting in that regard, because the basic gameplay is there. My monkey brain is having fun with it, i.e. getting an endorphine rush, because big numbers go brr.
But they obviously don’t have the budget of Blizzard, to try to hide that that’s what it’s doing.
I think, around 4 times throughout the campaign, you get the same spider model, but this time it’s five levels stronger than last time. 🙃I fucking love path of exile, no other game just let’s you rip though horses of enemies like that one.
Gearing is fun, compared to diablo. The amount of content and mechanics you can interact with is just insane. No map is the same.
