Diablo genre is decline

[PorkyThePaladin]

Let me give you a history lesson:

Diablo clones arose out of roguelikes. Diablo 1 was supposed to be a turn-based game in the vein of NetHack, about exploring a large, multi-floor dungeon. By accident, the D1 designers stumbled onto click-heavy real-time gameplay, and correctly (in the financial sense) decided that this would be a winner. The rest is history.

However, as anyone who played NetHack (or more intelligently, it's isometric version, Vulture) knows, pretty much everything was lost in the translation. NetHack/Vulture are extremely deep games, where you accumulate years' worth of in-game knowledge (if you stay away from online guides), and use in-depth mechanics. With Diablo and its ilk, all of this has been replaced by mindless clicking and loot collection.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I don't resent the streamlining introduced by Diablo 1, there was still a lot of room to incorporate different things under that framework. It was a really brilliant game. I resent what came afterwards as the genre became distilled decline with each iteration and things that should have been ancillary became the centrepiece of every design (namely, item drops and infinite variations of prefix-suffix garbage).

Level design, enemy design, cool interactions with the environment, these are all tertiary considerations or worse these days. It's a pity.

 

[Thac0]

I hate that the average design has all boiled down to practically the same game.
Enemies are incredibly squishy and there are hundreds of them, filling your entire screen. They die in seconds tho.
The few elites among them are the only ones that matter from a damage output and loot side.
You take literally zero damage from normal enemy attacks and can heal up against anything, but stand in one red circle on the bottom and you blow up.

The worst is that there has been innovation in the past, but by now all has been cooked down into the same soup.
If the genre took more inspiration from Sacred, Divinity 2 Ego Draconis or even Dungeon Siege there might have been some more good games there.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Let me give you a history lesson:

Diablo clones arose out of roguelikes. Diablo 1 was supposed to be a turn-based game in the vein of NetHack, about exploring a large, multi-floor dungeon. By accident, the D1 designers stumbled onto click-heavy real-time gameplay, and correctly (in the financial sense) decided that this would be a winner. The rest is history.

However, as anyone who played NetHack (or more intelligently, it's isometric version, Vulture) knows, pretty much everything was lost in the translation. NetHack/Vulture are extremely deep games, where you accumulate years' worth of in-game knowledge (if you stay away from online guides), and use in-depth mechanics. With Diablo and its ilk, all of this has been replaced by mindless clicking and loot collection.

Thought this was common knowledge; Diablo is casualized Rogue. It's obviously decline by any Codex standards. Why is this even a debate?

Part of that Codex posturing mentality: "I am a tasteful gamer, I also like Diablo, therefore Diablo must be a tasteful game." Actually people just need to come clean and be honest with themselves.

It's perfectly fine to enjoy easily-consumed casual products. No one watches Citizen Kane every day, reads Melville every night, listens to only classical music, etc. You all whack off to asian trannies barfing into each other's assholes; playing Diablo is probably the least degenerate thing you do.

 

[Tyranicon]

You all whack off to asian trannies barfing into each other's assholes; playing Diablo is probably the least degenerate thing you do.

Fuck, I thought that was just me. Codex, you are full of sick, sick people.

 

[a Goat]

Quite the opposite. The Blizzard developing geniuses, recognised as they've made Diablo 3, that RPG's can finally move out of turn based or RtWP and move to actually good gameplay - real time. It only took one attempt afterwards - that of Gearbox's Borderlands to finally move away from the shitty over the head camera and give you the best videogame experience ever, improved with each installment. It's first person, almost as if you were there shooting and doing all the awesome stuff.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I always wondered why nobody ever combined Diablo combat gameplay with proper RPG quests and shit.

I guess we have Sacred which has an open non-linear world to explore.

And Divine Divinity is often compared to Diablo because it's Diablo's combat and char development + proper quests and shit, so I guess there's one game like that.

But other than that...

Games like this do pop up every now and then. Shadows: Awakening is a more recent example of this, and not all that bad either. Although I was not a fan of the main gameplay gimmick which was the ultimate downfall of the game for me, the click clack RT combat gameplay was alright and the dungeons were hand crafted with some nice traps, secrets and puzzles to solve for extra hand placed loot to reward crafty players who don't just mindlessly run through everything.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

this is the equivalent of saying that Civilization is decline because is not complex as Europa Universalis. Some people enjoy the simplified gameplay of ARPGs more than any other RPG subgenre. Personally i dislike ARPGs, too repetitive for me, the only ARPG i can stand is diablo 1 because it's short and have great soundtrack/atmosphere.

And there's no decline in that, Diablo and Diablo clones always delivered what they promised: mindless mouse clicks and random loot. Decline is dumbing down a franchise.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Diablo clones are not aRPGs. They are hack-n-slashers.

aRPGs are third or first-person RPGs that have real time player skill based combat, and have largely replaced character builds and stat emphasis of traditional cRPGs with more detailed worlds, better exploration, and more cinematic dialogue.

 

[Sweeper]

Some people enjoy the simplified gameplay of ARPGs more than any other RPG subgenre.

I'd argue that with the various classes, builds and itemization Diablo clones are no less complex than any CRPG, with the exception of some D&D based RPGs.
As for the mindless mouse clicks, there's a lot of trash mobs, sure. But then there's trash mobs in CRPGs as well.
The Diablo clones of this world exist for one reason, to let us indulge in pure combatfaggotry, pure crunch and autistic theorycrafting. And not only is there nothing wrong with that, it's absolutely fucking glorious.

Fuck it, I'm finishing up my NV playthroughs and going back to Grim Dawn.

 

[mondblut]

Yeah I mean it. Hack&slash games are games with every codes of the decline.
In Hack&Slash and diablo games:
-quests are mostly FedEx with no choice (only Grim Dawn is different)and consist in killing things and recolting an item in a dungeon/grotto/place full of monster. All H&S have WoW quest design. And maybe diablo helped to introduce WoW quest design.
- NPCs are uninteresting and have only 1 dialogue repeating over and over again
- Game starts really slow with the gameplay of literally using one button to win, and after that? Well the one-button gameplay loop becomes the 4-buttons gameplay loop at the end.
- There are multiples builds but most of them consist of repeating 4 buttons to win( only skills change and effects too).
- No C&C (except for grim dawn but bad C&C in GD)
-Multiples items in H&S and in diablo but most of them are useless because only dozens of items (out of hundreds)are usefull ( mostly unique items in adequation to the build and the rest are rare items for lower levels).
They are classified as RPGs and as such I analize them like other RPGs. And What do I find? Well they have everything codexers dislike.
Diablo was decline from the beginning and helped decline as well.

How did you manage to put a correct thread title only to name everything wrong?

Reasons diablo was decline from the beginning and helped decline as well:

- it's a single-character action clickfest for twitchy retards

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

If you like Diablo, you are Pavlov's dog.

 

[Sweeper]

If you like Diablo, you are Pavlov's dog.

You are as well, you just don't have the balls to admit it and the natural instinct of a red blooded male to embrace it.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Vivisection is a little much, even for me.

 

[NerevarineKing]

This thread is incredible. ARPGs have fundamentally different purposes and design philosophies than CRPGs.

 

[Ol' Willy]

So you are saying Diablo 1-2 has nothing to do in the RPG genre and therefore the 101 RPGs list is wrong?

RPG Codex 101 list has Oblivion in it. Oblivion, Karl!

 

[Dramart]

They are fun games and with a great atmosphere and the story was told in an interesting way. Other games tried to copy them but weren't that good. I recommend LotR 2 and 3 for the Game Boy Advance.