Decline The Diablo Legacy of Fail

[sser]

In a way, I think the real successor to Diablo for me wasn't D2 (which I never quite enjoyed), but Westwood's Nox. It just captured the original feeling of having your 'hero' and going on a singular-minded adventure. D2, D3, expansions etc. were all more about glorifying items and expanding the world. There's a micro/macro increase in mobility. Instead of going downstairs until you hit literal Hell, you're globetrotting from one place to another. Instead of stepping carefully about crypts, you're leaping across the screen and blowing stuff up with near nuclear aplomb.

Not that it can't be fun. I wringed some fun out of D2 and even D3 once it got out of the teething phase. But I don't think either game is really that similar to the first.

 

[Mastermind]

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?

Dungeon of Dredmor is the closest thing to a Roguelike Diablo, although the atmosphere is completely different given that it's a parody (a very good one tho).

 

[Nifft Batuff]

This is another example of Diablo clone:

Why these action games are not considered RPGs as Diablo?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Shitting on Diablo was possible then since the release of classic games was almost a monthly occurance.

Now you cannot afford to dismiss it because it still has many great qualities while modern gaymes have very little.

The soundtrack alone makes the game worth playing.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

How Diablo Evolved
Part 1 the foundation

 

[Butter]

How Diablo Evolved
Part 1 the foundation

A man chortling for 20 minutes about how his game was a decline from all of the games that inspired it.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Yeah, that got annoying. I would have rather seen more vid on the turn-based prototype. There's some pics somewhere.

 

[Darth Canoli]

I was disappointed when D1 came out that I finished it in one evening.

You probably live around the north pole where evenings never end...

This is another example of Diablo clone:

Why these action games are not considered RPGs as Diablo?

A TB and party based cRPG in the Ken universe would be great with some kind of rage and stamina jauge to unleash special moves, there's not enough mad max like settings.
This with a good quest design, prelude to darkness or Dark Sun like and an open or semi open world would do wonders.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

D1 compared to TheHell, Awakening, or Beelzebub shows just how easy D1 really is.

 

[Gerrard]

People calling them "ARPGs" are the real reason for the decline.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

And yet this is the second or third aricle popping up I've seen about a D2 remake.

meh!

 

[Absinthe]

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. You had the core few like killing Lazarus/Diablo but you had things like the Poisoned Water Supply or Ogden's Sign that would only appear on certain playthroughs. Even the Butcher was a randomized quest whether or not you had the dying townsman at the start.

That reminds me, Blade Runner, the adventure game by Westwood Studios, had a similar thing going on. A number of details would shift based on your playthrough and there would be early hints of it or not.

I guess you could also argue the procedural level generation was another selling point at the time since it was advertised as having "tons and tons" of levels which was really just a guessing game of "where the fuck is the staircase?"

Diablo's procedural generation was nothing to sing home about. This was basically shoddy roguelike design.

Edit: And yes, I always saw Diablo as having much more relation to Gauntlet/Rogue than Smash TV. I think it was originally pitched as being a hybrid of Rogue and Doom, though.

It's a shame we aren't having more games try to copy off of the cleverer touches of Nethack, which is surprisingly high on reactivity to player actions.

 

[Lilura]

Instead of stepping carefully about crypts, you're leaping across the screen and blowing stuff up with near nuclear aplomb.

Invented by Diablo 1 Sorcerer.

 

[Absinthe]

In a way, I think the real successor to Diablo for me wasn't D2 (which I never quite enjoyed), but Westwood's Nox. It just captured the original feeling of having your 'hero' and going on a singular-minded adventure. D2, D3, expansions etc. were all more about glorifying items and expanding the world. There's a micro/macro increase in mobility. Instead of going downstairs until you hit literal Hell, you're globetrotting from one place to another. Instead of stepping carefully about crypts, you're leaping across the screen and blowing stuff up with near nuclear aplomb.

Not that it can't be fun. I wringed some fun out of D2 and even D3 once it got out of the teething phase. But I don't think either game is really that similar to the first.

NoX is a legitimately good game with surprisingly fun multiplayer, but it is absolutely not a successor to Diablo. All its similarities to Diablo are really fucking superficial, mostly in the visual design. There is basically zero procedurally generated or randomized content at all, and grinding exp or loot really wasn't part of the game until the NoX Quest patch came out. The combat system is also rather different from Diablo once you get into it. And the multiplayer, which the game really revolves around, has more in common with Unreal Tournament than it does with any isometric game.

Really NoX just went in a very different direction from Diablo and mostly just looks like a Diablo-ish game.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I don't get this bitching about Diablo being a RPG, or it being called a RPG, or it being some kind of decline of RPGs. Nobody was calling Diablo a RPG or a Action RPG when it came out, or even by the time Diablo 2 came out. These are very recent modern things. They were always call Hack N Slash games, which while being a sub genre of RPGs, was also understood to be an combat focused variant of what had become the norm in CRPGs of the time. Action RPGs instead where things like Arcanum, which had Action combat, (as opposed to just having turn based combat) but also all the other stuff you'd come to expect from a CRPG. Although Arcanum's action combat wasn't good, and compared pretty unfavorably to games like Diablo and Nox.

Someone brought up Smash TV, but I don't see it. Smash TV is a twin stick shooter. Sure, you could make something like Diablo as a twin stick shooter, but even in it's most action based iteration (Console Diablo 3 [and PSX Diablo] when you're given direct control over the character as opposed to point-and-click) it doesn't play anything like a twin stick shooter. What Diablo reminds me most of, at least once you're given direct control over the character as opposed to how it traditionally controls on PC are the beat em ups with RPG elements like Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons games and Data East's Wizard Fire...although not having direct control makes it a completely different gameplay experience.

I am a little surprised how rigidly Diablo, and I guess the hack and slash genre as taken after Diablo, has stuck to Diablo 1. When your method of control is "click on enemy and watch player character walk over and attack automatically" there's a lot of room to insert all kinds of thing. Fights could actually look like proper fights, you could have animations for blocks, misses, and dodges, you could have skills that determine how good the character does in one-on-one, one-on-two, and so on. By the time of Diablo 2, I figured by Diablo 3 we'd have completely stat driven fights that looked like a fight in a movie, kind of like how fights in Assassin's Creed games have a very cinematic look to them.

 

[sser]

In a way, I think the real successor to Diablo for me wasn't D2 (which I never quite enjoyed), but Westwood's Nox. It just captured the original feeling of having your 'hero' and going on a singular-minded adventure. D2, D3, expansions etc. were all more about glorifying items and expanding the world. There's a micro/macro increase in mobility. Instead of going downstairs until you hit literal Hell, you're globetrotting from one place to another. Instead of stepping carefully about crypts, you're leaping across the screen and blowing stuff up with near nuclear aplomb.

Not that it can't be fun. I wringed some fun out of D2 and even D3 once it got out of the teething phase. But I don't think either game is really that similar to the first.

NoX is a legitimately good game with surprisingly fun multiplayer, but it is absolutely not a successor to Diablo. All its similarities to Diablo are really fucking superficial, mostly in the visual design. Until the NoX Quest patch came out, there was basically zero procedurally generated or randomized content at all, and grinding exp or loot really wasn't part of the game. The combat system is also rather different from Diablo once you get into it. And the multiplayer, which the game really revolves around, has more in common with Unreal Tournament than it does with any isometric game.

Really NoX just went in a very different direction from Diablo and mostly just looks like a Diablo-ish game.

Your points aren't wrong in some regard, but if you read:

It just captured the original feeling of having your 'hero' and going on a singular-minded adventure.

It's all personal opinion but I can try to explain more: I don't really consider Diablo 1 a lootfest that D2 and the rest are. I certainly did not play it that way in the 90s. To me it felt like a slow, plodding descent straight into hell with well made settings and often well done story beats like the Butcher, Lazarus, etc. who actually don't drop a pile of random glittering shit, but typically just drop whatever is on them (Butcher drops a cleaver, IIRC, and Lazarus drops his staff). It took me ages to really actually get far into Diablo 2 because it played like such a grindy lootfest that it didn't even feel like the original game to me (and still doesn't). You travel a wide open world that doesn't really infer anything at all (compared to the very ambient D1 descent) and when you do kill a boss all of a sudden they throw out a trove of random items like a slot machine.

Nox had more of the vibe I felt in D1, except it was more fleshed out with traps, puzzles, LOS and sweet lighting tech, etc. So maybe this will make more sense: it was the sort of direction I thought Diablo would go, because pre-D2 in my mind D1 was still an RPG at heart and soul and the ambient nature of the setting was almost half the game to me. D2 was more a blow shit up with internet-printed builds and go item grinding in bland, ultra-open terrain, leaning the series into a direction that eschewed RPG characteristics for something I didn't quite understand yet (looting). And obviously with decades of that being the modus operandi of the series you kinda lose sight of what that first game felt like and wondering what the 2nd could do before the 2nd ever existed.

 

[Sharpedge]

NoX is not a game about chasing randomly generated items and nor is it a skinner box. Its pretty much the only Hack and Slash game which you really cannot call a Diablo clone. Someone did a comparison between NoX and DotA which actually seemed pretty good, multiplayer NoX does have more in common with MOBAs than it does with Diablo.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

NoX multiplayer fucking rules. I used to play it a tonne at my LANs.

 

[Absinthe]

sser, we usually judge genres more by their gameplay than how atmospheric they are.

NoX multiplayer fucking rules. I used to play it a tonne at my LANs.

By the way, there are still multiplayer servers for NoX. Run NoxAlarm if you want to know when there's a multiplayer lobby going.

http://www.noxcommunity.com/

 

[KateMicucci]

I really like games about killing monsters and taking their stuff. The kill/loot cycle is my favorite part of RPGs.

I also really like top-down action games like brigador, bastion, transitor, hotline miami, mr shifty, etc. I'll play those games on the highest difficulties and have tons of fun.

Yet I have never enjoyed Diablo or any diablo clone. Torchlight, titan quest, van helsing, boringlands.

The combat isn't good (click click click), the loot isn't good (randomized junk), the exploration is all random maps, there's no puzzles to solve, and there's no cool player home base to build improvements on. These faults are consistent among all diablo clones.

 

[HighCalibreWizard]

I really like games about killing monsters and taking their stuff. The kill/loot cycle is my favorite part of RPGs.

I also really like top-down action games like brigador, bastion, transitor, hotline miami, mr shifty, etc. I'll play those games on the highest difficulties and have tons of fun.

Yet I have never enjoyed Diablo or any diablo clone. Torchlight, titan quest, van helsing, boringlands.

The combat isn't good (click click click), the loot isn't good (randomized junk), the exploration is all random maps, there's no puzzles to solve, and there's no cool player home base to build improvements on. These faults are consistent among all diablo clones.

sounds like the rogue-lite genre might be more up your isle: persistent upgrades between runs, a selection of weapon choices with unlocks, often more engaging combat.
Try Hades. But it's reddit tier for sure. I won't judge you

 

[sser]

sser, we usually judge genres more by their gameplay than how atmospheric they are.

Seems like a controversial statement to make, particularly on this site where people are remarkably prognostic about games almost entirely based on how they're presented and previewed alone. The newer gen of Divinity game have okay gameplay but a lot of people ditch them because they can't get past the hacky tone, just for one recent example.

And I thought I was quite explicit in explaining that Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 do not feel or play the same to me, something I've felt since D2's release. Diablo 1 started as a turn-based game riffing on roguelikes and it shows that in many ways. The pacing and gameplay is quite reflective of the setting which tracks as an unbroken path from beginning to end, whereas in Diablo 2 all these concepts are almost wholly divorced and it very much is a vehicle for online multiplayer (read: BNET). The atmosphere reflects elements baked into the gameplay just as any other game. One of the big "huh" moments for me was how wide open D2 could feel despite running a party around its game-space, whereas playing Diablo 1 alone still managed to feel like a very cramp, calculating experience.

Diablo 1 invites a lot of exploration and slow, measured gameplay because it deploys a very finite world right out of the box, which I'm starting to think some people here are forgetting. Grinding in Diablo 1 wasn't possible unless you restarted the game, an action that could devalue your items by the way. You couldn't just do Bhaal runs for a day like in Diablo 2, because Diablo 1 asks of you to be cautious, deliberate, and invested just to stay alive and maintain levels with enemies. You know, like the many roguelikes of that era which inspired it. Diablo 2 is more the 'skinner box' and casino side of things. Those were elements in Diablo 1, just as they were in roguelikes, but they were clearly not the sole design totem because grinding for items and spellbooks was literally prohibitive to your progress both in-game and as a measure of your actual personal time. I think people are conflating the marketability of randomized loot and fast-paced gameplay in regards to Diablo as a profitable series as though it were a running design theme of the original game which spawned said series.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I really like games about killing monsters and taking their stuff. The kill/loot cycle is my favorite part of RPGs.

I also really like top-down action games like brigador, bastion, transitor, hotline miami, mr shifty, etc. I'll play those games on the highest difficulties and have tons of fun.

Yet I have never enjoyed Diablo or any diablo clone. Torchlight, titan quest, van helsing, boringlands.

The combat isn't good (click click click), the loot isn't good (randomized junk), the exploration is all random maps, there's no puzzles to solve, and there's no cool player home base to build improvements on. These faults are consistent among all diablo clones.

Anybody who claims Titan Quest is in any way shape or form better than Diablo is not someone whose opinion can be taken seriously.

Titan Quest can't even be called a game after the first act. More like some kind of test demo of a game that was never actually developed.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

I wanted to like Titan Quest so badly. It had such a good idea for a setting. It just had none of that secret sauce that Diablo (and even Path of Exile) had that gets you sucked into it. It's just so fucking dry, I really have to force myself to give a shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

People calling them "ARPGs" are the real reason for the decline.

I can't refer to action-oriented RPGs as "action RPGs" anymore because people think I'm referring to diablo 2 clones, this shit grinds my gears

wtf am I supposed to call games like kingdom come deliverance? They're action RPGs.