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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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 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.
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.
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!
If you enjoy base-building at all as well try Rift Breaker. It’s basically Diablo with tower defense, great 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.
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. 🙃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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s horrific . It represent the putrid state of video game industry
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.
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.
