State of isometric hack n slash games

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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.

Well a lot of that probably stems from Diablo and it's control method being point-and-click. I'm a little surprised they haven't ever visualized all the abstracts of these games, like dodges and misses being something with there own animations instead of just text that pops up, and those animations creating situations you'll need to deal with. Back when I was playing Nox and Diablo 2 I figured that'd be the next step. That with 3D getting bigger at that time they could just go crazy with the stats and simulate different combat scenarios, and have your character act different depending on how many characters they're taking on at once, what type of character they're fighting, how they're hit, and maybe even what kind of terrain they're on. When your maximum amount of interaction is clicking to tell your character where to go, clicking on which enemy to attack, and picking which specials they do it opens ups of a whole lot of stat driven simulation possibilities...but instead the genre just kind of stopped.

Now it is weird all that stuff you're talking about never really showed up on consoles, at least when it comes to the possibility of moments. The moment consoles got twin sticks you'd think you would've seen more twin stick shooters, and there would've been more isometric games taking advantage of that kind of control method. But weirdly the twin stick shooters went away during that PS2 Xbox era, and the PC Hack n Slash wasn't really something anyone did on the Xbox despite Diablo 2 being one of the biggest games around at the time.

 

[luj1]

Well for me the benchmark is D1 when it comes to atmosphere and the right amount of bloat.

Yeah, what I liked in Diablo were the slower pace (simply walking instead of running has a tremendous positive impact on gameplay) and down to earth numbers. I don't think the atmosphere was hugely different. I'll say Diablo was more depressing and more... demonic. Classic Diablo II also had a balanced amount of stat bloat.

 

[luj1]

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

Exanima looks good.

Looks like that Sui Generis thing which was floating around for ages.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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

Exanima looks good.

Looks like that Sui Generis thing which was floating around for ages.

Looking it up I came across this:

Sui Generis, an open-world fantasy role-playing game, is the first game being developed by Bare Mettle Entertainment, a new independent game developer. The game had already been in development for one year by October 30, 2012, when the developers decided to open a crowdfunding campaign to raise £150,000. The campaign ended on November 30th, 2012, successfully reaching its goal by raising over £160,000. Although the game's release date is to be announced, Exanima, the prelude, intends to feature many of the full game's mechanics so that they can be tested as the full game is being developed.​

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah, what I liked in Diablo were the slower pace (simply walking instead of running has a tremendous positive impact on gameplay) and down to earth numbers. I don't think the atmosphere was hugely different. I'll say Diablo was more depressing and more... demonic. Classic Diablo II also had a balanced amount of stat bloat.

The thing is, while you moved slowly in Diablo 1 it wasn't that much slower paced, because you spent more time fighting and doing shit that mattered. Modern games you spend half your time backtracking through some huge empty level (because quests), grading and selling 400 pieces of vendor trash, and generally just not actually playing the game. A run through of Diablo 1 has you see like what, 10 quests? Not even? And most of those require no backtracking because they're given by the vendors you talk to anyways and get finished in the course of normal exploration.

Playing through Grim Dawn lately and every fucking area has to have like 5 dudes scattered all over the map that want you to clear some minor side dungeon and walk back to them, and the (HANDCRAFTED) level layouts are full of dead ends and such that force a ton of backtracking because you need to scour every in of the map or you permanently cripple your character. In a game with no way to sprint. Urgh. This isn't even a matter of design philosophy, it's just... bad.

 

[Fenix]

And what alternative is?
Make them all right near each other?
They kinda try to give sense of IMMENSE world. Kinda.

 

[Damned Registrations]

They kinda try to give sense of IMMENSE world. Kinda.

I think that doesn't mesh with the gameplay at all though. Making a huge open hack and slash game is like making a tiny cramped RTS with nowhere to flank anyone. Diablo 1 had the right idea. Respawning monsters would work too I suppose; it's not like that's ever really been a restriction aside from Diablo 1 (and even then you can just move the char to a new game.) It doesn't help that Grim Dawn's quests have incredibly disappointing rewards 9 times out of 10. Honestly seemed more like your standard 'wish I were making a movie instead of a game' scenario you see from a lot of developers. Your stupid story about bandits or generic evil isn't interesting, let me kill shit and move on.

 

[Sykar]

Yeah, what I liked in Diablo were the slower pace (simply walking instead of running has a tremendous positive impact on gameplay) and down to earth numbers. I don't think the atmosphere was hugely different. I'll say Diablo was more depressing and more... demonic. Classic Diablo II also had a balanced amount of stat bloat.

The thing is, while you moved slowly in Diablo 1 it wasn't that much slower paced, because you spent more time fighting and doing shit that mattered. Modern games you spend half your time backtracking through some huge empty level (because quests), grading and selling 400 pieces of vendor trash, and generally just not actually playing the game. A run through of Diablo 1 has you see like what, 10 quests? Not even? And most of those require no backtracking because they're given by the vendors you talk to anyways and get finished in the course of normal exploration.

Playing through Grim Dawn lately and every fucking area has to have like 5 dudes scattered all over the map that want you to clear some minor side dungeon and walk back to them, and the (HANDCRAFTED) level layouts are full of dead ends and such that force a ton of backtracking because you need to scour every in of the map or you permanently cripple your character. In a game with no way to sprint. Urgh. This isn't even a matter of design philosophy, it's just... bad.

There is not really a lot of back tracking in GD thanks to the rift gates. D1 you also went into town regularly in the beginning to sell vendor trash to get you started financially since apart from repairs you also wanted gambling at Wirt who was outside the village and restock on potions which you burn through fast.

 

[Damned Registrations]

True, I'm rose-tinting Diablo 1 a fair bit there, the reliance on potions was certainly a thing. I don't recall visiting Wirt much though, I suppose you had more gold to burn as a rogue or warrior than a mage, spellbooks were expensive. Still pretty sure the time between trips to town was longer in Diablo 1. Vendor trash wasn't really worth selling to begin with vs the cost of a scroll unless it was a magic item, and those were rare.

GD has plenty of smaller scale backtracking. Dungeons often consist of something like a figure 8 with an entrance and exit on opposite sides. So to clear it, you need to do a loop, then backtrack through half the loop, then do another loop, and backtrack through half that loop to the exit. You also get quests like 'break 3 MacGuffins somewhere in this huge map' where said macguffins are in dead ends. And even if they aren't, the map has plenty of them and they might be there so you need to search all the dead ends (which you need to do anyways for the shrines.)

Honestly if I were playing solo I'd just skip all the quests that don't give character points and not bother searching any area without a shrine. Would make the game WAY more tolerable. I've never been excited by anything I've found exploring. There's no equivalent to finding Leoric's Crown in these games any more.

 

[Sykar]

TP scrolls would drop regularly enough that you could usually afford to collect stuff and go to town. Wirt could get you some of the best gear in the game like Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac so visiting him from time to time was worthwhile. D1 also had the problem of no personal stash so you threw your gold right next to Griswold on the ground which always was looking comical.
As to GD, you can often see where you have to go to avoid road blocks so not a big deal. The loot explosions annoy me far more and the subsequent need for a loot filter.

 

[J1M]

Due to D1 being slower and more dangerous, you often had to use the room layouts to your advantage. Fighting in a doorway or even along a wall to avoid being surrounded was a common tactic. There was a little of this in D2, but it's an element that the designers of modern games don't seem to be familiar with. Also, modern games seem to be more about grinding to escape the gameplay loop rather than any interesting actions during the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Also, dozens of difficulty levels is cancer.

 

[Dysterkvist]

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

Grim Dawn and Titan Quest actually run on the same engine, and you can see that some of the skills in GD actually work and bug out the same way they do in TQ.

 

[JarlFrank]

TESTAMENT

http://testamentgame.bibelsallskapet.se/

?

 

[gurugeorge]

Exanima looks good.

I gave it a go again recently. Physics-as-gameplay definitely has its charms, and there's a high mastery ceiling. I think if the developer manages to implement multiplayer he might have a minor PvP hit on his hands.

The problem I have with it is that it's actually an infant sim rather than an adult male sim. You're literally learning how to walk around and cope with physics and accidentally bumping into things, like you were when you were a child. I would rather the game had a tad more AI, like automatically stepping over things when you're simply walking forward. After all, that would just be simulating how lots of movement processes are automated by the time you're an adult.

 

[Dramart]

Sacred has a similar atmosphere to Diablo and the world is one big map. There are also the two Lord of the Rings games for the Game Boy Advance, they are fun.