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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”.
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.
NGL I started Ravenswatch a few days ago and it’s scratching my Diablo and roguelike itch at the same time. Only 6 hours in and I’m hooked, I just want to find a consistent group to play with. The characters are balanced enough that you can play solo as well.
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.
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).
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.
The allure to me is the economy. If it doesn’t have free trading, especially difficult trading (requiring an out-of-game web site like D2JSP), it’s not exciting for me to just get items that only affect me. Diablo II and D2R are the only ARPGs that feel super exciting for me to find something rare, because there’s actually a sense of value to the items.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
NGL I started Ravenswatch a few days ago and it’s scratching my Diablo and roguelike itch at the same time. Only 6 hours in and I’m hooked, I just want to find a consistent group to play with. The characters are balanced enough that you can play solo as well.
Thanks for this.
Curse of the Dead Gods was pretty decent, so I’ll definitely keep an eye on something more ARPG-y.
It’s horrific . It represent the putrid state of video game industry
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.
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).
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.
The allure to me is the economy. If it doesn’t have free trading, especially difficult trading (requiring an out-of-game web site like D2JSP), it’s not exciting for me to just get items that only affect me. Diablo II and D2R are the only ARPGs that feel super exciting for me to find something rare, because there’s actually a sense of value to the items.
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.
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.
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 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.