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State of isometric hack n slash games

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,870
Location
Eastern block
I played Path of Exile on and off over 2.5 years and the biggest issues for me were,
  • game is ugly
  • it has no style
  • it's not SP viable
  • animation is stiff
  • enemy design is shit
Grim Dawn was the same, except that it was SP friendly.

Titan Quest I never played, but it always looked second class to me.

Diablo III is dumbed down, geared towards online play and looks like WoW.

Lost Ark does some things right (?), but is a furry MMO.

Torchlight I-II are OK mechanically, but I can't stand the cartoony art direction.

Diablo IV got the art direction right, but is even more dumbed down than Diablo III.

Incredibly enough, Diablo II is still the benchmark. Despite being 20 years old, this 2.5D game still feels incredibly crisp and boasts an intricate gothic horror atmosphere with a great attention to detail. So what does the future hold? Diablo II: Ressurected has an uncertain destiny, since Blizzard didn't bring back original devs and community doyens like they did for SC:R.

Sykar Gregz Lilura octavius
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Well for me the benchmark is D1 when it comes to atmosphere and the right amount of bloat. Starting with D2 we have gotten some seriously retarded power creep and it has only gotten worse over the decades. Currently my favorite game os Grim Dawn which pushes the right buttons though it has its weaknesses like too much loot and somewhat dated engine though they were good at hiding it.
 

Keye_

Educated
Joined
Dec 5, 2016
Messages
78
Titan Quest I never played, but it always looked second class to me.

Titan Quest is actually good. Give it a try.

looking at your problems with PoE, Titan Quest:
  • looks good
  • has a distinct mythological style
  • is SP viable
  • animation is ok(?)
  • enemy design is ok, but not very varied
 

Cat Dude

Savant
Joined
Nov 5, 2018
Messages
497
The last time a hack and slash won Game of The Year was in 2018. And last year Devil May Cry 5 won best action game. Diablo is just the benchmark for old school top down hack & slash game.
 
Self-Ejected

Thac0

Time Mage
Patron
Joined
Apr 30, 2020
Messages
3,292
Location
Arborea
I'm very into cock and ball torture
Did anyone here play Wolcen?
I considered buying it when it was the new big craze on Steam and YT, but held off due to reports of extraordinare instability and buggedness.
Now that the hype deflated like a popped baloon is it a good game?
 

PrettyDeadman

Guest
Did anyone here play Wolcen?
I considered buying it when it was the new big craze on Steam and YT, but held off due to reports of extraordinare instability and buggedness.
Now that the hype deflated like a popped baloon is it a good game?
It's alright.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,661
Torchlight III is close to release I think. One to keep an eye on as TL2 was leaps and bounds above TL1. Maybe they look at D3 and POE and find a medium between them.

Grim Dawn is really enjoyable, but that company needs to figure out how to do more procedural content. I didn't mind redundancies with Titan Quest cause I'm a nerd for the setting, though.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
The most obvious flaw with all of these games is that they give the player unlimited health and mana regen, whether through a billion potions with no cost or cooldown, or ungodly amounts of lifeleech, or both. And then they balance the game around this, so everything is just unavoidable damage you're expected to regen through. There's no mechanical gameplay, no moving back to make space, no dodging attacks, no strategic use of defensive buffs. None of that shit mattes. Just spam every button in your hotkey bar and overwhelm with sheer stats while stuff blows up around you. A boss fight should not consist of me standing toe to toe with something and hitting all my abilities as often as possible.

Path of Exile avoids that in the late game, but at that point everything dies in 10 seconds and you move faster than a fucking sports car so 'dodge' isn't really the applicable word.
 

flushfire

Augur
Joined
Jun 10, 2006
Messages
771
Diablo 3 (at least at the time I played it) wasn't like that. Belial required constant movement. Even D2 had some places where standing in place will get you killed.

Frankly I prefer if survivability depends on stats/skills rather than twitch. It sucks when a character built for survibability plays the same as a glass cannon because of some arcade boss bullshit.
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Did anyone here play Wolcen?
I considered buying it when it was the new big craze on Steam and YT, but held off due to reports of extraordinare instability and buggedness.
Now that the hype deflated like a popped baloon is it a good game?

It is solid. Combines the good aspects of D3 (skill runes) and PoE (passive skill tree), expanding on the former while trimming the bloated monstrosity that is the PoE passive skill tree. Already comes with a form of endgame unlike D3 and PoE which had nothing until a year or more after release. SP only has 3 acts though and the ending is lackluster though they did announce that a 4th act will come "soon".

The most obvious flaw with all of these games is that they give the player unlimited health and mana regen, whether through a billion potions with no cost or cooldown, or ungodly amounts of lifeleech, or both. And then they balance the game around this, so everything is just unavoidable damage you're expected to regen through. There's no mechanical gameplay, no moving back to make space, no dodging attacks, no strategic use of defensive buffs. None of that shit mattes. Just spam every button in your hotkey bar and overwhelm with sheer stats while stuff blows up around you. A boss fight should not consist of me standing toe to toe with something and hitting all my abilities as often as possible.

Path of Exile avoids that in the late game, but at that point everything dies in 10 seconds and you move faster than a fucking sports car so 'dodge' isn't really the applicable word.

That is not entirely true. PoE and Grim Dawn have plenty of builds which need proper piloting or you will eat dirt. There are build specifically designed to be able to face tank everything though they tend to not be the highest damage builds. The biggest problem is usually that life leech scales with player damage. I feel that life leech is a lazy design choice and shoulld be far more limited and not scale with player damage.
 

Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
8,511
Location
The Desert Wasteland
I played Path of Exile on and off over 2.5 years and the biggest issues for me were,
  • game is ugly
  • it has no style
  • it's not SP viable
  • animation is stiff
  • enemy design is shit
Grim Dawn was the same, except that it was SP friendly.

Titan Quest I never played, but it always looked second class to me.

Diablo III is dumbed down, geared towards online play and looks like WoW.

Lost Ark does some things right (?), but is a furry MMO.

Torchlight I-II are OK mechanically, but I can't stand the cartoony art direction.

Diablo IV got the art direction right, but is even more dumbed down than Diablo III.

Incredibly enough, Diablo II is still the benchmark. Despite being 20 years old, this 2.5D game still feels incredibly crisp and boasts an intricate gothic horror atmosphere with a great attention to detail. So what does the future hold? Diablo II: Ressurected has an uncertain destiny, since Blizzard didn't bring back original devs and community doyens like they did for SC:R.

Sykar Gregz Lilura octavius

I agree 100% with all of your points, except to add that I have played Titan Quest to completion twice, and it is as mediocre as Grim Dawn.

So what does the future hold?

The absolute peak of these games is Diablo II Median XL mod version 1.F9, and I highly doubt that it will ever be surpassed.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/median-xl/downloads/median-xl-1f9-latest-version
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

Guest
More of them need to take after Diablo 1. Great atmosphere, non-intrusive storytelling/environmental storytelling galore, a more methodical pace where you're not AOEing an entire screen in 1 second while moving like you're on drugs.

Diablo II was a great game still, but it's where a lot of the genre's bad habits can be traced back to especially by the time of Lord of Destruction's latter runewords. I long for a game like D1 that doesn't obsess with trying to make the player feel like a god and makes them feel like if they don't advance intelligently and go hollering into a new room blindly they'll likely get fucked up.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,011
More of them need to take after Diablo 1. Great atmosphere, non-intrusive storytelling/environmental storytelling galore, a more methodical pace where you're not AOEing an entire screen in 1 second while moving like you're on drugs.

Diablo II was a great game still, but it's where a lot of the genre's bad habits can be traced back to especially by the time of Lord of Destruction's latter runewords. I long for a game like D1 that doesn't obsess with trying to make the player feel like a god and makes them feel like if they don't advance intelligently and go hollering into a new room blindly they'll likely get fucked up.

Someone will probably stumble into that with their isometric Souls-like game...if they haven't already.

Exanima looks good.



 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
You know, I've tried many times but could never get into this type of games, they just bore me.
The two biggest issues I have with them are:
  • You don't get to really play with gear and skills until you're done with the "tutorial" aka normal difficulty, which takes way longer than necessary;
  • Player's skill doesn't mean much.
This leads to a pretty significant portion of the game being just a snoozefest, where you kill thousands of monsters by farting at them, while not really contributing anything to the later parts, where the game is supposed to begin for real.

What I expect to see from such games is: either frontloading their systems from the very beggining and allowing meaningful interaction with gear and abilities right from the start; or making the progression depend largely on player's skill, where gear and ability progression are either absent or they only serve as gatekeepers to later stages.
The only games I know that more or less fit these criterias are:
  • Diablo I and fan made mod for Diablo II - MedianXL for the first category;
  • Nox and Hades for the second. The guy above mentioned Exanima, I've heard of it before but have no experience with it.
You raised some valid points, but I wanted to add some of my own.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
Wolcen is surprisingly decent, especially first playthrough through SP. Crisp D3 like animations, top notch graphics, cool monsters and acts, and the story is "ok". Sound design gud too and the music

It's been marred by bugs, and lackluster endgame, but what hack n slash hadnt that at the initial release? It's still a fun game.

Wolcen is probably the best newer ARPG i've played. Its better than all of the mentioned games for me. I can't stand Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Torchlight and all those others. Wolcen feeels gothic and epic and cool, even if its still buggy and kind of unfinished end game wise.

Give it a try.
 

ManaJunkie

Arbiter
Joined
Feb 15, 2018
Messages
281
Wolcen is the model example of style over substance. Nice graphics and stuff...buggy skills, meaningless talent tree and itemization is a joke. 99% is trash. After 10 hours game time you have seen everything this game has to offer.
It´s simply boring as fuck for a POE (or Diablo2 or GD) veteran.
Maybe Last Epoch will do better.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/899770/Last_Epoch/
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
Frankly I prefer if survivability depends on stats/skills rather than twitch. It sucks when a character built for survibability plays the same as a glass cannon because of some arcade boss bullshit.
The thing is, you can make a character survivable without letting them heal from zero to full every 2 seconds. Give me 10 times as much max hp, and make healing SLOW and limited. Punish me for bitching out back to town to heal before clearing a dungeon. Make survival a long term prospect of avoiding damage, not a moment to moment affair where anything that happened more than 3 seconds ago is no longer relevant. Make me regret losing a tenth of my hp through careless play.

Hades does this pretty well sometimes, when you're not running a glass cannon build. Though higher difficulty pushes you towards that. But it's not really the same genre, it's more like Binding of Isaac.
 
Joined
Jan 28, 2015
Messages
891
Location
Canuckistan
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Like a lot of genres I think everyone got stuck on chasing the success of the peak title and not really looking at how to move beyond it. Basically everyone copies Diablo II, but no one seems to be interested in bringing in more traditional rouge-like elements or exploring stuff like mixing musou gameplay with iso ARPGs.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
Pretty much. I've seen some console games go a different way (Ergeiz and the original Phantasy Star Online come to mind) but even with the massive number of these games coming out these days they pretty much all play the same way in combat.
 

Goromorg

Savant
Joined
Aug 23, 2015
Messages
278
I don't really care about isometric ARPGs anymore. The future of the ARPG genre belongs to Souls-like games, which combine elements of action, adventure, role-playing, horror, puzzle and platforming.
 

Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
Torchlight I-II are OK mechanically, but I can't stand the cartoony art direction.

T2 has absoluterly outstading (by today's standarts) art and artdirection.
I used to stand on the edge of a precipice in that winter level and just listen music.

The rest games - you said there were ugly. That mean artist was bad. All of them. Which mean troubles in education system for them.
But that's another matter.
The problem with t2 was it's absolute shot targting - target box os how it's called, it target targets (sorry) miles around mouse pointer. Also personal disappointment - two pistols have no sence as two wands much more powerful.

Incredibly enough, Diablo II is still the benchmark.

Absolutely not. The only style is withing D1, and D1 only.
D2 doesn't have it at all.

There's no mechanical gameplay, no moving back to make space, no dodging attacks, no strategic use of defensive buffs.

Yeah, something like Revenant would be neat.
 
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