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Decline The Diablo Legacy of Fail

Unwanted

a Goat

Unwanted
Dumbfuck Edgy Vatnik
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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.
And they're proving their inferior-brain. Real superior gaming game gang weed gamer based gamers don't have space in their brains for anything else than that. They see their videogame activities as pure heroics, with no abstract thought. This sets them apart from decadent fake, "monocled", "resolute", "adult", <add whatever shitty name they call themselves by> non-based, cringe gamers who's endless drivel brought us nothing good, just endless stream of garbage like planetentius boringshitcrap borement torment urself fucking piece of crap, dragon gayge, shitcher and other garbage.

The brainlet dichotomy:

"smart gaming" vs. real superior gaming game gang weed gamer based gamer gaming

Actual dichotomy:

STORYFAGGOT, retarded, turd gaming vs. real superior gaming game gang weed gamer based gamer gaming of which they will sing songs about forever.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
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Jan 6, 2012
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Are you from 4chan, goat? Because you write like a 4chan shitposter.
 
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luj1

You're all shills
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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.

Diablo and Diablo II were not just 'decent'. They revolutionized system design, everything would be different without them

Obviously that pushed the genre in a certain direction. But you cannot blame Diablo if people are being unoriginal and unwilling to come up with their own stuff.

So whoever gives Diablo 'a lot of flak' can go suck on a tail pipe.
 

Machocruz

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Hyperborea
Sounds like you'd love an actual roguelike then. ADOM is very accessible these days, the built-in tileset is pretty good and it even has proper mouse UI.
The game really has it all, apart from a bunch of areas related to the main quest and the dungeons are all randomized. You have magical items with hidden properties (discovered by magic or by using),
perhaps that potion you drank last time that got you sick will have a different effect if you did an item into it? There are character race and class combinations that all play differently, etc.

Makes me wonder what might have been if the genre had moved towards 'losing and figuring stuff on your own is fun' rather than the loot casino.
I do love actual rls. I play DCSS, Brogue, Cataclysm, Nethack, Qud, DF adventure mode. I tried ADOM a few times, the ascii version. Always kicks my ass, I never get far. One day I'll put in serious time on it and git gud.
 

Mastermind

Cognito Elite Material
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Bethestard
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What was considered decline were all the clones popping up

Diablo clones have only recently started popping up en masse. Many of the older ones have been very good games (Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, POE, Torchlight, etc.). At no point have any of them actually dominated the RPG genre. RPGtards just have trouble coping with the fact that the RPGs they used to like were not that deep or complex to begin with (see: fallout, goldbox games)

and the design principles being shoved into games fitting or not.

It's Borderlands that's to blame for that. A decent RPG shooter that was fun DESPITE the diablofied loot was copied relentlessly by retarded moron developers who didn't understand what made Borderlands a good game.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
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.

Diablo and Diablo II were not just 'decent'. They revolutionized system design, everything would be different without them

Obviously that pushed the genre in a certain direction. But you cannot blame Diablo if people are being unoriginal and unwilling to come up with their own stuff.

So whoever gives Diablo 'a lot of flak' can go suck on a tail pipe.

I like Diablo 1 and 2, they got me into the genre after all.

Then I started playing other RPGs but never stopped liking Diablo.

Played plenty of Diablo clones over the years, and there are a bunch that I enjoyed. Sacred was pretty cool with its more open exploration and persistent handcrafted world instead of the roguelike-style procedural levels. Some people call Divine Divinity a Diablo clone because it uses the same style of combat, but it's a full-fledged RPG with towns, NPCs to talk to, quests to do, etc.

The problem of most Diablo clones is that they just blindly copy Diablo's structure instead of doing something different with it.
3 to 4 acts.
Each act is a linear romp through procedurally generated dungeons.
After winning the game once you can progress to a harder difficulty that's just a repeat of the same levels except with buffed enemies.
 

PapaPetro

Guest
The $billion dollar question is how do you fix a stale formula?
Can you transcend Diablo and make a new genre or is it a dead-end where you just staple illusory gimmicks onto it and hope players don't figure out.

Here's something whacky: invert the gameplay loop. You start off godlike and get weaker the more you delve.
Story wise, you are some deity and as you make your way closer to Earth, you start losing your almighty powers, you divine equipment degrades and you have to find sub-par mundane replacements, monsters that trivial to you now become more of a threat and the difficulty/resourcefulness curve increases the closer you get to mortality.
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
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I remember playing Diablo thinking: nice atmosphere but shallow, repetitive and incredibly boring gameplay.
The games that followed it obviously ditched the atmosphere part.
 

tritosine2k

Erudite
Joined
Dec 29, 2010
Messages
1,465
Diablo had proven that real-time combat is a way to go, procedural generation and grinding are great, and C&C are vastly overrated.
It strikes me rather as "barebones" , than "good enough" .
 

Darth Canoli

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Diablo 1 itself was never considered decline. That's horseshit.

What was considered decline were all the clones popping up and the design principles being shoved into games fitting or not.

In a way, I see Diablo more as introducing RPG and rogue-like mechanics into Smash TV than being a dumbing down of the RPG or rogue-like genre.

The reason why diablo started the era of decline isn't the game itself, even if its itemization is pangolin shit, it's the way its retarded dev presented it like the new evolution and the RPG revolution, there is videos about it so you can be sure he did this a lot before it was even recorded and presented this garbage as the fourth coming to the suits over and over again.

And then the decline was upon us...
 

Thal

Augur
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Messages
413
Diablo 1 itself was never considered decline. That's horseshit.
People who actually played RPGs back then would disagree. Not necessarily pnp, but stuff like Ultima, Daggerfall, Might and Magic, etc. etc.
Now, there were plenty of of people back then for whom Diablo was their first RPG, or even the game that got them into gaming. I am sure the filthy casuals didn't mind and didn't knew any better.

Thing is, the RPG genre (and pretty much every other niche genre) back then was all but buried by the diarrhea of dune and doom derivates.
Diablo was something that made the masses notice, hey, RPGs can be cool too. Some would go as far as say that it revived the genre,
though I am more of an opinion that it supplanted it with something else.

I remember when Diablo was released, and it was definitely considered massive decline by crpg enthusiasts. The issue was that it axed the tactical turn based combat and extensive character development in favor of real time mouse clicking. In fact, many didn't even considered a real rpg, because the gameplay was so different and simplified.

You got to understand that this was the time when computer games transitioned from a nerdy niche hobby to something socially accetable. The biggest culprits were Doom, Command and Conquer and Tomb Raider, but Diablo was seen as part of the same casualising phenomenon. I have to say it's kind of funny to see that the grognards of today hail them as timeless classics.
 

V_K

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at a Nowhere near you
Diablo 1 did something interesting that I don't think has been done since to my knowledge and that is they had different groups of quests.
Darkstone, one of the earlier (and better - as in, better than Diablo - not a high bar, I know) Diablo clones, arguably went further. You have to collect 7 crystals as your main quest, and each crystal has a quest (and a separate dungeon) associated with it that is randomly picked from 4 (IIRC) different options. So you get 4^7 different permutations.
And then way, way before Diablo (in 1990), DarkSpyre had its dungeon alternate randomly generated combat levels with DM-style puzzle levels that were manually designed but picked at random from a very long list.
 

Apostle Hand

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what I believe Diablo 1 only quality is going through those levels getting closer to hell. I would call it claustrophobic RPG in a good sense. There is just too many agoraphobic RPGs that I really don't like, so Diablo 1 hit that claustrophobic G spot with me.
 

Azdul

Magister
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It strikes me rather as "barebones" than "good enough".
Warren Spector copied Diablo inventory system in Deus Ex because "Diablo did inventory right". Deus Ex inventory system works, and is inoffensive, but nothing to write home about. Everyone in games industry should treat Diablo features like that - as minimum required competence level.

Diablo achieved commercial and critical success not because it was shallow and boring, but despite it.

For example - it offered emergent gameplay and player's agency not on the level of Unix roguelikes, but well ahead of 'narrative experiences' of some later CRPGs. The same can be said about many other Diablo features. It started as turn-based game, and was switched to real-time later on during development. In the hindsight it is pretty obvious that turn-based Diablo would be unbearable - but it does not stop some JRPGs from trying.
 

Mastermind

Cognito Elite Material
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Diablo clones have only recently started popping up en masse
:what:

Last couple of years we've had last epoch (technically still early access but with more content than a lot of finished games), chronicon, torchlight 3, wolcen just off the top of my head. Previously you'd get one maybe once every 2-3 years on average

older ones [...] Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, POE, Torchlight
:backawayslowly:

How is a game every 2-3 years "en masse" retard?
 

slymer

Augur
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
How can you say Diablo is a game that people don't finish? Players spend more time playing the endgame in a lot of these ARPG's than the actual campaign.
 

V_K

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[lotsa butthurt]
https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/diablo-variants/offset,50/so,1d/:
image.png
And this list doesn't include even half of Diablo-like crap that was released at the time - Restricted Area, Broken Land, Dispel, Space Hack and others whose titles I can't even remember. If anything, the number of Diablo clones has fallen drastically in recent years compared to the first decade after its release.
 

Mastermind

Cognito Elite Material
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.

Garbage list. Isometric perspective under "other characteristics"? No mention of single character at all? No random item stats/bonuses?

image.png

And this list doesn't include even half of Diablo-like crap that was released at the time - Restricted Area, Broken Land, Dispel, Space Hack and others whose titles I can't even remember. If anything, the number of Diablo clones has fallen drastically in recent years compared to the first decade after its release.

most of these aren't diablo clones and not a single one of those had any impact whatsoever on the RPG genre.
 
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Serious_Business

Best Poster on the Codex
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Frown Town
Originally RPGs were more inclined to have Adventure-genre elements, environment interaction, exploration elements, and C&C

The first element is especially rotting, in my opinion. The adventure genre is especially minimalistic and linear in how it designs its systems. I think it has limited crpgs as much if not more than the focus on combat. The current joke is that tactics is the new rpg ; I would say because a lot of the old adventure tropes that old school design has held onto are dying out. It's not that interesting to figure out exactly how a developer wants to realize an objective, even if there is no quest compass to tell you how to proceed. In pen and paper terms, this would be the equivalent to having the storyteller not reacting until you do exactly what he wants (versus telling you exactly what he wants). There needs to be an interaction with systems that is somehow "free" beyond the realization of objectives : you need to be able to set your own objectives. That's emergent gameplay. I'd say emergent gameplay is what the rpg genre is leaning towards right now, if not tactics. The design of AoD, to me, proved that crpgs didn't even worked that much as an ideal - the continuation of Fallout ; the way character strategies and builds are handled in an non-emergent system is always going to be following the lanes the developers have thought out for you ; the gameplay ends up linear beyond the choice you make when creating your character. Skills are used where they're supposed to be used, etc. Ultimately it's all scripted content. Dialogs are especially scripted affairs. It could be argued that they have no place in rpg design ; I'm saying this again to especially attack the idea that combat-heavy games would be the bane of rpgs. I suppose to make dialogs really reactive you have to make them so expansive that they become mazes of interactivity. If you poured enough resources into it, just like devs poor resources in animation and graphics, maybe you'd get an interesting result. But it'd still only be following nodes in a script.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
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Nov 23, 2016
Messages
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I was disappointed when D1 came out that I finished it in one evening. Sure it was the titty-rogue but it was still pretty fast.

I played the hell out of D1 and hellfire and several several several mods. I evrn bought a second copy of each to play multiplay via ethernet with my Pa. Later, learned if the No-CD hacks and enjoyed that. Did all of that with D2/LOD as well. Good mindless times.

I even bought the PnP WOtC 2e/3e modules/accessories and toyed around with the wotc online random item generator. Later, I tried mods like TheHell and Beelzebulb and the like. I doubt I ever played all the mods.

Decline was D3 and the online only bullshit. Not everyone has stellar internet or net at all (even today). Some rural places just suck..... and burnout happens. Diablo, Doom, Hellgate London, etc etc burned me out. You start looking at all games and seeing the little dopamine triggers or what should be. A true burnout looks at them like blah! New fixes via clones barely do anything. I don't even jones for it anymore. Maybe its age.


I recall the original concept for diablo was a turn-based grid. I wonder if anyone redid diablo in that fashion instead if a ARPG?

Note: was anyone ever pissed they couldn't go up in the cathedral/church and explore that or go into the houses and loot their belongings. I had alwYs eondered if the first diablo couldn't have had more modules added around the town of Tristram.
 

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