Are We Still Doing the Diablo 4 Pile-On?

When you attempt the impossible, you're going to run into a bit of trouble.

Diablo 4 is about killing this lady because she’s bad. I kept thinking the story was about how she was a complex character with nuance, but then she’d kill like 80 first graders and I stopped caring about her motivation.

My wife and I finished the main story of Diablo IV and started the endgame just as the number of people who played went right into the dumper.

Diablo IV has been piled on a lot lately. It's been your standard-issue Internet rage swarm, which is always going to be at least as much fun as the game itself. If you want a summary of why people are mad, this video is a good summary. The complaints are generally valid.

(At this rate, YouTube videos whinging about Diablo 4 are going to earn more than the game does. Heck, I’m just here shilling for my next game.)

I don't care about joining in a pile-on. I always have more fun trying to be positive.

So I want to focus on the instructive part. It's kind of fun to pick apart Action Role-Playing games (ARPGs for short), games where players are meant to spend 1000 hours and up killing bad guys to get the best loot. (If you are killing foes with pew-pew guns instead of stabby-stabs, you can also call them "looter shooters.")

These games are big, BIG business, and there are a lot of things you have to get right to make them work. I want to break down some of the key things that seem off about Diablo 4 and dig into your game is gonna need if you want people to give it the SERIOUS hours.

When You Are Talking About Diablo 4, You Are Talking About Two Games

Diablo 4 has two parts.

The first is the main storyline, the part almost every purchaser will play. You go through the standard-issue Diablo fantasy grimdark "All the nice people get murderated." somewhat incomprehensible storyline. You go out and get the five magic maguffins and then slay a demon while everyone whines at you.

It gets pretty gruesome Saw-movie in there, but it's functional. (I've seen a lot of people online call this story "great", which is incomprehensible to me, but whatevs.)

Meanwhile, you play a very simple, fast-moving action game. You upgrade your loot and train your skills a lot. It's brisk and varied. You get lots of sweet gear upgrades. This part of the game is not great, but it's fine. If you want to play an RPG with your wife/partner/dog you trained to tap the 'X' button, you've done worse.

Endgame training of Diablo 4 is about spending points in this gigantic, labyrinthine “Paragon Board,” and there’s something beautifully pure about how confusing and convoluted it is.

But That's Not What Diablo 4 Is REALLY About, Now, Is It?

But Diablo 4, like all ARPGs these days, wants to be more. It wants to be a PLATFORM. It wants you to play it for a decade.

It wants to be a thousand-hour game.

It's fascinating to think about aiming for this sort of goal, to take over a human's life to such an extent.

I've gotten this addicted to RPGs. (Everquest and World of Warcraft in particular). I spent SO MUCH time in these games. And I did have fun. But, looking back, I'm not 100% sure I couldn't have found a better use of my time. I certainly can't do that anymore.

It's kind of an unnatural thing to do.

You Can’t Go Home Again

I’ve seen so many people complaining that Diablo 4 doesn’t give them the same thrill Diablo 2 did.

Of course it doesn’t. If you played Diablo 2, you can never get that thrill again. You are no longer the same person you were when you played Diablo 2.

ARPGs are addiction traps, designed to appeal to certain receptors in the brain. Those receptors get overloaded and burn out eventually. (This is a good thing.)

I suppose most gamers will get caught in an addiction trap at some point in their lives. It's OK, within reason. And if people are walking into money traps, why shouldn't Blizzard make their own money traps?

But it's such a hard goal! Getting someone ensnared for a 1000 hours is really, really difficult. Creating a game that enthralling is a miracle, lightning in a bottle. Your game has to be compelling, seamless, and completely free of the aggravations that would drive a player away at a mere 200 hours.

But this is the goal. When a company sinks hundreds of millions into an ARPG, the income from long term addicts and whales are the goal. They're what make the business model not explode.

So, right now, how is Diablo 4 set up to hold people in?

This character is called “Lightning Boi.” He is a good guy. Or a bad guy. He same some sort of highly emotional relationship with bone-horn-head lady, and they like or hate each other very much. I REALLY had a hard time following the story.

The Long and Long Of It

This was a really expensive game worked on for a long time, and there are things they got right. Like, the environments are incredibly pretty. Insane amounts of work went into crafting this world. If you're going to look at something for 1000 hours, you want to like looking at it.

But the gameplay is really a grind. It's very bland and samey. There are few surprises. (This is based on my experience and a bunch of Twitch watching. When I watched high-end Diablo 4 players on Twitch, what really struck me was how dead the players' eyes were.)

If you're trying to play for 1000 hours, you need to change up what your character does sometimes, or it's too boring. However, retraining your character is really expensive, which limits player variety and experimentation.

The screen becomes an illegible mess of particle effects during battles. Often I'm playing Where's Waldo to figure out where my stupid character is. These sorts of aggravations are tolerable in a 50 hour game, but any friction will wear and wear over 1000 hours.

Getting loot upgrades is mostly searching through tons of trash in the hope of finding a mild side-upgrade. Proper, dopamine-increasing upgrades are worryingly rare. Remember, if you are selling the chance to get candy, at some point you do have to hand out the candy!

But to be fair: They do have to make it hard to get upgrades. Remember, this game is meant to be a thing for a decade at least. They can't hand out power too quickly, because otherwise what will they offer in five years?

However, while you can get away with making upgrades rare, you have to hand them out in a satisfying, enjoyable way. You want the speed, satisfaction, and addictiveness of a slot machine, and that just isn't there right now. The tempo is wrong.

But here's the thing. This is all FIXABLE. They just came out with a new patch that already makes a lot of things better.

Diablo 4 is a marathon, not a sprint. A lot of money and time is going into improving it. It's possible that everyone will suddenly love it in three years, if it figures out what to fix and how.

But is there a Cow Level?

What Does a Game Like This Need To Work?

This was an expensive game. If it wants to make the sort of money Activision expects, it needs a core of hardcore players. Willing suckers who buy all those sweet season passes and asinine armor skins.

That's why the complaints about the game, trivial as they seem to normies, matter. Sure, you can piss off a lot of people. But you can't piss off the whales who pay the bills. You have to figure out what product they want to buy and, one way or another, deliver it.

But again, the race is long. If Cyberpuck 2077 and No Man's Sky can turn things around, anything can. I wish them all the luck putting some spice in the Diablo 4 experience.

I'm about to take a LONG break from it, but I'm not going anywhere, I hope. Diablo is an institution. If they figure out how to bring the goods, people will come back. I will too.

But what does it actually need? For fun, I came up with a list of four key things an RPG needs to hold interest. A shorter game should have most of them. A 1000 hour game needs all of them.

Since this post is already super-long, I'll break out my list for next week.

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