Absinthe
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2012
- Messages
- 4,062
This was originally going to be posted as a reply to the Can we please stop calling RPGs without gameplay Adventures? thread but I feel it deserves its own thread, since this is an entire topic unto itself.
The reason people hate on Diablo is because it (much like WoW after) reduced the RPG genre to nonstop filler combat and little to nothing else, which is a plague that has continued to this day. Originally RPGs were more inclined to have Adventure-genre elements, environment interaction, exploration elements, and C&C then Diablo came out and people were like "BRILLIANT! ALL YOU NEED FOR GAMEPLAY IS SKELETONS TO MASH ABILITIES ON, LOOT, AND AN ENDLESS AMOUNT OF SKELETONS AND BOSSES!" which is pretty much shithole design for something you want to call a RPG, just pure hack & slash. Even now popular RPGs thrive on extended bouts of pointless filler combat as their "gameplay" vehicle while doling out the story in tons of fucking cutscenes and a pointless levelup and loot design system the game's makers do not fucking understand. Morons with no fucking clue of how to make a game, who are basically shoving a B-movie "cinematic" plot at players while making people click to explode shit along the way so they can still call it a game.
It's not a surprise that Diablo caught a lot of flak for basically shitting up the RPG genre with Hack & Slash grinders that pretend to be RPGs because they think the presence of combat, levelups, loot, and story is all it takes to make an RPG, but I'm willing to give Diablo itself some slack. Diablo was actually decent enough in its own way, even if it was a stripped-down version of a Roguelike. The big problem was just the giant wave of derivative retards who didn't understand game design for shit, mindlessly copied shit, and frequently shat it up further in the process with excessive conveniences that trivialized elements of gameplay (like movement abilities that remove the importance of careful positioning, easy availability of super-gear that makes almost all regular loot into vendor trash, removal of resource management pressures, etc.) and other copycatted shit that wasn't a good idea (like the infodump school of storytelling, especially through audiologs; linear level design; overreliance on automap to compensate for bad level design by autopiloting players; garbage MMO quest design; etc).
I don't really regard Diablo-likes as RPGs either. They're just Hack & Slash and Diablo isn't even very good at the Hack & Slash elements. I enjoyed Diablo well enough, but it's also one of those games many people never bother to finish because it's kind of dull after a while. It's mostly the atmosphere design (the best part of Diablo, and also what all the fucking knockoffs fail at) that keeps you going. The sad part is that the Diablo-ish followups didn't even expand on the dungeon exploration elements, the interactivity of combat, or resource management aspects either but instead just turned into giant click to explode lootwhoring grindfests. NoX is an exception, but only because it wasn't actually trying to be Diablo.Not sure about BG, but I can distinctly remember how Morrowind was received by then-oldschool gamers as huge decline and disappointment compared to Daggerfall.
Even more so, Diablo - that was a swearword back then, the epitome of decline. And now you have folks considering it a classic of ARPGs.
The reason people hate on Diablo is because it (much like WoW after) reduced the RPG genre to nonstop filler combat and little to nothing else, which is a plague that has continued to this day. Originally RPGs were more inclined to have Adventure-genre elements, environment interaction, exploration elements, and C&C then Diablo came out and people were like "BRILLIANT! ALL YOU NEED FOR GAMEPLAY IS SKELETONS TO MASH ABILITIES ON, LOOT, AND AN ENDLESS AMOUNT OF SKELETONS AND BOSSES!" which is pretty much shithole design for something you want to call a RPG, just pure hack & slash. Even now popular RPGs thrive on extended bouts of pointless filler combat as their "gameplay" vehicle while doling out the story in tons of fucking cutscenes and a pointless levelup and loot design system the game's makers do not fucking understand. Morons with no fucking clue of how to make a game, who are basically shoving a B-movie "cinematic" plot at players while making people click to explode shit along the way so they can still call it a game.
It's not a surprise that Diablo caught a lot of flak for basically shitting up the RPG genre with Hack & Slash grinders that pretend to be RPGs because they think the presence of combat, levelups, loot, and story is all it takes to make an RPG, but I'm willing to give Diablo itself some slack. Diablo was actually decent enough in its own way, even if it was a stripped-down version of a Roguelike. The big problem was just the giant wave of derivative retards who didn't understand game design for shit, mindlessly copied shit, and frequently shat it up further in the process with excessive conveniences that trivialized elements of gameplay (like movement abilities that remove the importance of careful positioning, easy availability of super-gear that makes almost all regular loot into vendor trash, removal of resource management pressures, etc.) and other copycatted shit that wasn't a good idea (like the infodump school of storytelling, especially through audiologs; linear level design; overreliance on automap to compensate for bad level design by autopiloting players; garbage MMO quest design; etc).