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 you’d be happier playing Diablo’s parents, a proper rogue-like?
Perma-death provides quite the incentive and intensity you seem to want.
It also doesn’t lend itself quite so much to “builds” since you’re relying mostly on whatever you find, which is randomized, so you can’t “solve the game”.
Ah, perhaps a slight miscommunication.
though I do enjoy traditional roguelikes, I’m not looking at the stakes or the intensity, but rather the kind of itch that’s being scratched in diabolikes, and it feels a lot more completionist/procedural in nature than it does adversarial.
Both are good, but dressing one up as the other can lead to an underlying sense of disappointment.
Action Roguelikes solve the grinding problem of ARPGs because you can’t grind. So instead of farming for the set piece you need, or to optimally fill your stat boxes, you’re trying to just use the things you find the best you can. There’s no “I completed my ultimate build and enemies are trivial” because at the start of the next run you won’t have your Uber build and will need to find a new one from the pieces you collect.
Hades is a well known success. I’ve recently started playing Hand of Fate 2 again, and it has a unique system that I really like.
The feeling of defeating a powerful enemy pales in comparison to the feeling of opening a log and a unique item falls out of it.
I still remember the thrill when I was a teenager when I clicked a random corpse in Diablo 1’s hell and the unique staff Mindcry popped out.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
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.
The optimization problems are the game. Figuring out builds you like is the point.
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.
Hades filled a Diablo shaped hole in my heart, after being disappointed by D4. Highly recommend the Hades games.
Would you recommend it to the current price (24,50€) or would you recommend to wait for better deal?
If you like rougelikes then you’ll get your money out of it. Honestly it’s worth more than that, but it does go on sale occasionally and they’ve already released (in early access) a sequel Hades 2.
Al’right, thank you. I have it on my wishlist, it’s just that I don’t trust games anymore, which is why I wait for better deals. But the positive reviews speak for themselves in this case
If you played and liked any game like dead cells or rouge legacy, then Hades should be worth it.
Its basically an action rpg rougelite with a lot of unlock ables, story directly tied to the die/repeat cycle, and lots of interesting challenges.
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!
You specifically called out PoEs passive tree, but honestly the tree isn’t the crazy complicated part of making builds–its finding combinations of mechanics that synergize above average. On the tree sure, but the gear and actual skills are really what makes it crazy. Planning around what items can have what mods and what you can reasonably expect to get on what budget is the real brain disabler for me. I love build crafting, but fuck I hate planning rare tier gear.
You gotta have a crazy amount of hours in that game. That tree is complicated to read, nevermind to understand.
I had to take another look to see if they’ve shat the tree up worse somehow. But, no, it’s the same. The tree isn’t complicated to read or even that hard to understand. It’s a tree: you start at the base and make decisions at the branches.
Perhaps it’s an extension of people getting paralyzed by decisions, which I don’t experience, but it’s only difficult if you are in the strange position of “knowing enough about the passive tree to know a build/specific passive exists” but also don’t know the tree enough to figure out how to get there.
If you simply start at the base and just get going, the branching paths quickly add up to an enormous amount of options. If you don’t get any decision paralysis from a tree with literally over a thousand nodes, you might just be a superhuman being.
Not superhuman, just very simple. I pick what I want most at the moment, especially in a game where I can refund points if my decision wasn’t great.
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?
What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?
Horizontal progression is pretty cool .
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want that. They want to feel cool and competent without actually doing anything. That’s not to say like you need to “earn” your fun or whatever. But that the progress quest number go up don’t think too hard is immensely popular with a lot of people. They don’t want to be challenged.
And that’s fine. It’s a game. It’s just not a game I want to play all the time.
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.
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!
+1 for Halls of Torment
It’s a really solid entry in the rogue-lite vampire-survivors-like genre that Diablo enjoyers could pick up really easily
+1 for Halls and Death Must Die is also quite fun.
I’ve played the crap out of both; they’re really good.
I’ve been hopping back and forth between the two quite a bit while replaying last epoch.
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.
I get bored of games were you have to make your character better and better and that’s it. Now I’m playing games were I have to get better and more knowledge of the game, like shmups.
It’s horrific . It represent the putrid state of video game industry
