“People have kind of assumed that there’s this great conflict between these two games [i.e., Torchlight 2 and Diablo 3], but you know, there’s a lot of first-person shooters that come out that are very similar to each other,” he explained. “There’s room for more than one game out there. I think, as we’ve gone on, the games have gotten even more different than the appeared a long time ago. I mean, we were just at PAX East demoing it right next to the Diablo guys, so we could literally stand there and watch people playing both of them. The character of the games is completely different. It’s not just the tone – it’s the pacing as well.”

...

“You know, maybe I have no marketable skills other than making Diablo-style games,” Schaefer joked. “But you’re right: [the entire genre] is just kinda riffing off that. But it’s a good thing to riff off of. It’s something that hadn’t been done like that previously, and I think there’s a long way to go before it’s a tired genre. You know, just like first-person shooters. How many times can you be looking at a hand holding a gun in front of you while you walk around in a 3D landscape? Turns out, a lot.”

And so, we circle back around to the beginning: Diablo. Is that it, though? Is this genre doomed to tread water when Diablo’s not playing lifeguard? Is Blizzard’s lord of the damned doomed to be an eternal poster child for a bunch of squabbling me-toos?

“I think [lack of innovation's] due to the scarcity of the games over the years,” Schaefer offered. “Certainly, there hasn’t been one that’s been more popular than Diablo, but [in comparison] there’s been a lot of resetting the standard of, say, first-person shooters along the way.”

“I think [setting] is definitely gonna be one of the ways that the genre evolves over time. You know, people trying sci-fi and other themes for it. But yeah, I’m sort of at a loss to explain why there hasn’t been more [diversity]. But I mean, there haven’t been a large total number of ARPGs that have been big and successful. It’s a tough thing to do.”​