Games In Depth: Diablo II

[Hamumu]

For no reason, I have decided to start a weekly discussion here on the handy game design forum, which will probably end after the first week. The premise is simple: each week, a new well-known game (indie or not) is selected, and the goal is to dissect what makes it good, bad, ugly, or whatever. The important distinction is this: we are discussing game design here. So I don't want to hear about the art quality, or the demo incentives, or the marketing plans. We're here to discuss what about the gameplay is great or terrible or anything else worth discussing. Not the story, not the characters, but the rules and interface. The experience the designers have made for us. How it saves and loads, the actions the player has to take, the difficulty, the pacing of play, what keys they have to press. You get the idea. GAMEPLAY. What does this game have to teach us as game designers?

The first week's entry is the wildly popular Diablo II, for obvious reasons.

My input: Best game EVER. A perfectly tuned random reward schedule to completely devour your soul. More addictive than real gambling. Several things could have been simplified, but for those who are willing to learn (i.e. not casual gamers), it's very simple to play and do what you want.

One thing about it has always bugged me a lot though: the mouse movement. The pathfinding is good, but I would feel way more in control of situations like where you're trying to keep yourself out of melee range but still shoot at something, or dodging projectiles, if I had direct control. One simple thing could've made this much better: just let the arrow keys also move your character (and disable click-to-move if you wish). I would've really enjoyed it if it played physically more like a Zelda type of game in that sense. Or, since the mouse is so integral, more like Crimsonland! Now, that would've been a huge problem for their netcode, I'm sure, but I only really like to play it single player anyway! I really like that direct control, to really 'be' the character instead of ordering him around like an RTS. What they have works near-perfectly, but a lot of times when playing, I wish I could move directly with the arrows. As it is, in the thick of things, you can feel like you're flailing. Like when a lot of shots are coming at you, if you click the ground to move aside and dodge them, you then have to re-click your enemy to get back to fighting him (and by then, he's fired again!).

Another thing: the stamina bar and stat. Drop it. It is SO useless and lame (and not something Fate should've copied). If you want to have a Stamina bar, use it as the 'mana' for warrior-type special moves (WoW gets into this sort of thing, with different types of recharging for different classes... but don't listen to Blizzard - I invented this concept!! I have dated design docs of my own Diablo clones to prove it). It doesn't make sense that he should be using mana to swing his sword rapidly anyway.

I feel similarly about repairing weapons, though it's not really a big bother in this game. It's implemented in a reasonable way, and never seems to do much other than suck up a little bit of your money. Not bad, but really an unnecessary thing to have the player deal with. For that matter, the stamina bar too rarely has any impact on the game. But the times when it does are just annoying - you're backtracking a long way in an empty cave and your stamina gives out so you have to sit still or walk. It's not even an issue in combat... why doesn't it cost stamina to swing a big poleaxe around? I have a feeling that the answer is that they tried and found it wasn't fun, but yet they still left the stat in anyway, and just removed its effects on combat.

Oh, and needing to carry arrows for your bow. That's also dumb. These three things could all be removed and would streamline the game.

Discuss away! Issues, good or bad, of the game design of Diablo II. Things we can learn from. Also, what games would you like to be going in depth on?

[Raptisoft]

I agree with you heartily on the stamina bar thing. A pure warrior shouldn't have to worry about intelligence at all. :)

Here's my biggest complaint on D2... it's addicting, it's wonderful, I've played it more than any other game I ever had... but it's BORING! Huge open spaces that force you to literally grid-walk the whole thing to find a checkpoint or cave.

Though the concept is good, IMO, it just didn't work out very convincingly. Perhaps if the boundaries weren't so universally square. Perhaps if playing the desert levels didn't mean circumscribing the region you're in to find the little valley to the next area. And the jungle levels are just painful-- combine the dark backgrounds with a hard to see map and everything looking exactly alike, and ugh.

But I guess this is just a manifestation of completely random levels. But I can't help but feel that they could have tweaked this a bit, made it seem a little more like it was human designed.

Oh, and story. In this case, I'll accept John Carmack's statement that story in a game is like story in a porn flick. Leave it out IF YOU CAN! Diablo I felt like pseudo-Christian gothic horror. Diablo 2 just felt like ultra-lame fantasy as dictated by a teenager. In a game like this, just tell me the goal, and I'll provide the story as I go along.

[Christian]

Well, i have been thinking about this game, and here are my thought:

The objetive of the game is to make yourself more powerfull, so, you achieve this in an indirect way by clicking on monsters and killing them, wich give you experience, and money. Experience and money can be used to make you more powerfull, and that can make you kill even more powerfull monsters that reward you with more experience and more money, that can be used to make you even more powerfull, its the endless circle of powerfullness.

So, the important thing about this game is that all the separate elements:
-monster
-experience
-equipment
-money
Affect in some way the play of the game. None of them is worthless, all have a function, and i think that thats why this game is so solid.

Another thing...is clicking on monsters that fun?, no, that is not fun there is no challenge to it, the fun of the game is to sense the powerfullness of yourself, so, there is no point on making the battles more complicated, so, the simpleness is a shortcut to obtain the the objective of giving the player the sense of becoming everytime more powerfull.

What would happen if the battle where more complex?, the play of the game would become in a struggle to win (and not die) instead of a growing in power experience. Imagine a balance, in one side there is the feeling of struggle, tension, to win or to die by the hands of monsters, and in the other side, the feeling of beeing more powerfull, the feeling of growing in power. If the fight becomes to complex (like using the keyboard only to defend and attack and make combination to make special moves) the balance would weight more in the strugge side.

[Jack Norton]

The stamina bar is present in FATE a very cool diablo2 clone :)

What makes it so fun?
1) is EASY.
2) is LONG (even if you can object that the gameplay doesn't change much)
3) is REWARDING. Collecting new items and beating new monsters is fun, ask the creator of Everquest about it (even if the game now has started to see some sort of decline, was on the top MMORPG for almost 10 years...!)

Personally, I'd like to make another Diablo 2 clone, if had the time :cool:

[Tertsi]

I also think Diablo II is the best game ever and also the game that I've played the most.

The stamina annoyed me a bit also, but it never was a big deal.

I feel pretty neutral about repairing weapons, as it felt more realistic and was all fine until you became a hardcore Diablo II player when it just started to feel like a minor source of annoyance.

I prefer the realism of having to carry arrows over not having to as it will take a bit of time to manage those arrows that way and slightly weaken archers.

The items, gambling and other areas of character development like carefully thinking what skills to develop are in my opinion what makes the game so addictive.

The most annoying part (still not very annoying) about the game was to find some things in the large areas when you've already searched nearly the whole area and it has become empty of monsters while you were searching.

Also the PVP part was too simple and is handled much better by World of Warcraft.

Next time I'd like to go in depth on Civilization III.

[papillon]

I liked the d2 story, such as it was, and enjoyed watching the cutscenes.

I did *not* like the huge open spaces. I felt like combat had become, in some senses, less strategic than Diablo 1. I missed the excitement of popping my head around corners to peek into rooms, then frantically trying to lure a charging baddie to run the *correct* way down my FireWall spell to fry itself before it could get to me.

Hell (the location, not the difficulty setting) was cool, and a few other places along the way were cool, but there was too much open space and too many bland randomly magical items and bosses. Few small bosses had as much STYLE as the Butcher from D1.

... and those blasted pygmies were too hard to see/click on.

The other obvious problem, that of the hirelings becoming rapidly useless, I hear was somewhat addressed in the expansion, which I never got, so I can't comment much on it.

It was still a great game, though. :)

[Hamumu]

Oh yes, papillon, if the expansion cost $100, it would be money VERY VERY well spent (luckily these days it's only like $15 or something, so BUY IT RIGHT NOW!!). I can't imagine going back! Mercenaries are now semi-cool, the two new classes are great (both of them are almost like 2 new classes each, you can go trap assassin, martial arts assassin, weredruid, elemental druid), 6.8 million new items (and new types of items... were there charms in regular D2?), and act 5, which is far and away the best act (well, I kinda like act 1 too...).

Someone else mentioned the jungles... oh, those are the worst part. What a tiresome slog. I'd say the mistake there was simply in making the levels too big. If all 3 jungle regions were each 1/3 as big as they are, it would've been a fun thing to tromp through and find the different organs and whatnot. I kind of get the "let's drag this out for more game hours" feeling from Act 3.

[Dylan Fitterer]

Diablo2 does many things better than any other game. The one that draws me in most is the integration of player skill and character skill.

Character Skills:
1) How much damage does a Firewall do
2) How much damage can Bone Armor take
3) How much damage does Molten Boulder do
4) How many arrows does Multi-Shot fire
5) How much damage a martial arts attack/finisher delivers

Player Skills:
1) Placing Firewall on the right monster to maximize damage
2) Keeping an exit direction to flee towards when Bone Armor fails
3) Herding monsters into single-file so Molten Boulder hits them all
4) Choosing a spread size so Multi-Shot hit all the monsters you want it to
5) Attacking monsters in the best order to optimize a finishing move

Other games that integrate player and character skill well are: Deus Ex, Guild Wars, and Magic: Battlegrounds.

I guess what I'm really talking about is games that combine character BUILDING and player skill. Otherwise Mario would fit here too (he has Jump and you must time them). It's the combination of strategy and action that's compelling.

Diablo2 is a fairly simple action game. Layer a deep meta-game on top and it becomes something special. Duelling in Magic (the CCG) is fun. Building decks in Magic is fun. The two together is what makes it great.

I think adding keyboard control of characters would throw the character/player balance too far to the player. Bows would certainly become more powerful. You wouldn't play a Barbarian unless he was a thrower. It would ruin the game for me since I like to play with just the mouse, but couldn't settle for that if the keyboard would allow me to dodge.

------------

Something else that really stands out about Diablo2 is choices. You make choices with great frequency and you're given many options. Shopping with the random item generator is the obvious example. There's many other frequent choices:
-(likely) waste an Identify Scroll on this magical club?
-Pick up this Pole Arm (takes 6 inventory slots)?
-Get swarmed by Fallen in order to try and kill their leader first?
-Give this great armor to my mercenary or sell it for the cash?
-Save this chipped ruby for a better weapon or use it now?
-Imbue now or wait?
-Carry this charm or keep more inventory room?

----

Waypoints are probably the most addictive aspect for me. There's two types of waypoints: randomly placed and fixed location. The fixed location waypoints are the spots in the game where you can safely stop playing for the night without losing any ground. In Act1, I frequently stop at Outer Cloister since it is a fixed location waypoint.

It's mostly my own foolishness that makes the waypoints so addictive. I'll hit a waypoint and then play for another 5 minutes. Stupid! Now I'm stuck looking for the next one in order to not have wasted time! This is an illusion of course because it's much too late to prevent myself from having wasted time :)

What's most frustrating about Act3 (jungle) is trying to find a stopping point that won't leave you repeating exploration for an hour next time you play. Also the fact that there's a Spider Lair and an Arachnid Lair. Which one has the organ again?


EDIT:
Why is that useless Stamina bar so much bigger than the experience bar?

[dislekcia]

I've also sunk many many hours into D2 and LoD and think they're excellent games (or really, single game, Blizzard has a habit of making it's expansions indispensable).

Hamumu, your point about wanting more direct control made me think. I know that once a character of mine gets to the higher difficulty levels, I'm switching skills constantly with the f-keys. I think that having to use the keyboard to move while I'm trying to switch would be murder for me because I've never gotten the hang of using the mousewheel to switch. In FPS games I don't have a problem with the mousewheel weaponswitch, but I think that's because in D2 the skill order is completely up to you as opposed to fixed ala-FPS.

It would perhaps be nice to have "special" movements that would allow characters to do immediate things via the keyboard (WASD), but still have most of the movement be mouse-driven. That would allow more immediate optional control whilst spicing up combat and not "breaking" the skill-juggling that takes place at later levels. Assassins could roll in a direction, warriors might duck or disarm, paladins could angle their shields to deflect projectiles, necromancers might be able to direct their minions, etc... Hey, that's a really good idea. I'm going to test it out in a space setting I just happen to be working on ;)

---

Dylan, well said on the waypoint incentive. I have exactly the same seperation into fixed and random points, act3 for me is a run through the swamps (hopefully finding the flayer jungle waypoint) until I hit lower kurast and its fixed waypoint. For some reason I feel "safe" after that and don't mind re-exploring the jungles.

-D

[Pyabo]

By far the best aspect of Diablo 2 for me is the sheer number of choices in character skills, weapons, armor, etc. And then the satisfaction of seeing them implemented and making a *difference* in the game. Variety is what makes it interesting.

This is exactly what DungeonSiege did wrong, to provide a counter-example. Nothing you did to your characters actually had a visible effect... your weapons got a little better bit by bit, and your healing spell got more powerful, but the game basically stayed the same from beginning to end.

In Diablo 2, your strategies changed radically depending on what skills you had worked your way up to, or what kind of character you were playing.

[Hamumu]

That's a good point about the keyboard skill-switching. I play with my fingers on the skills at all times (but not the F keys! I have them rigged up to be 6-0, Y-P, H-semicolon, and N-period... more keys, more tightly packed, easier to control, and I can put similar skills into rows, like all my summons are Y-P, attack spells are H-semicolon), and it would definitely have to be a very different game to be playable with arrow keys.

With regard to the skills, that's something I was just thinking about while playing Evil Invasion (and it's one of the reasons Fate's skill system sucks): what's so great about Diablo skills is that upgrading them doesn't just mean +1, +2, +3 damage. Like Chain Lightning. As you upgrade it, the damage goes up of course, but it also chains off of more victims. Or Teeth - fires more teeth as it goes up. Fireball improves radius as well as damage. Those kind of things, where the functionality actually improves instead of just numerically enhancing, are what make it fun. And more than that of course is the fact that you get a wider variety of skills as you level up, so you aren't just dishing out more damage as you go. You're becoming more diverse and can mix things up in more interesting ways.

Diablo 2 fails in that realm in that it has 'useless' skills. That's something I don't approve of. For example, once you have moved up to Fireball, Fire Blast is just a weaker version of it. If you had invested more than the required point in it, those points are wasted (made better in the expansion by adding synergies, though, but still pretty lame). I like it better when the skills are truly different and they all might have uses. Diablo has a ton of that too. One of the best is the Necromancer's Curse tree. There's about 10 or so different curses there, and some are definitely better than others (Decrepify really replaces some of the lower ones), but mostly they have very different uses. You have to decide - do I want to blind them, weaken them, slow them down, make them reflect damage back to themselves, lower their resistance... all these options, and they all are useful in different circumstances.

To go off-topic a bit, that's also something Guild Wars has seriously nailed, with almost no skills that get superceded by others. It's all situational and preferential and depends on the combo you're trying to put together.

The diversity of the skill tree is the best thing in Diablo. There are dozens of totally viable builds you can pursue with any given character class, and each one plays very differently and has different issues they have to overcome.

[Raptisoft]

Something I thought was really revolutionary in Diablo 2 was that they made female characters big busted, and put them in very skimpy, non-functional armor. As far as I know, that hadn't been done before in a game.

[Jack Norton]

Hehe that's exactly how I plan to make my RPG, when I'll make one :)

[Screwball]

Something I thought was really revolutionary in Diablo 2 was that they made female characters big busted, and put them in very skimpy, non-functional armor. As far as I know, that hadn't been done before in a game.

Sarcasm, such a wonderfull tool.

I must admit that I did buy D2 on the back of the original and I never ended getting to into it. I got a little frustrated with the let's try and click on the fast moving mob to try and hit it syndrome and ended up running to mass monsters.

I think that D2 did win a number of fans on these points:

* Simple, easy to learn mechanic's
* Very complex under the surface for people to get in depth with it
* Worked well visually
* Provided growth (percieved or otherwise) of characters and equipment

Personally not my cup of tea, I prefer turn based / convential RPG's rather than the twitch / action RPG's.

[gpetersz]

Yeah, the jungle level was the point where it became so boring that I couldn't endure it, so I always reached the jungle level and then uninstalled it.
The whole game is just too boring. I don't say that I know the solution but Diablo2 never made to my favs... :)

[C.S.Brewer]

I loved Diablo 1.

Diablo 2 was great too, beatiful game, but it lost me somewhere about halfway through the singleplayer. I think it's a matter of my changing gameplaying habbits, and perhaps the fact that I never played multiplayer in diablo2, but somewhere in the second act of diablo 2 I got the feeling that I could tell how the rest of the game would play out.

When I got that feeling it just became boring. find the cave kill a bunch of things, go sell stuff choose a new skill etc. The gameplay didn't feel like it was going to change for me in a meaningful way, other than seeing new artwork. I know that I could have gone back and played a different class, but then I would just go through the exact same story and events as far as I remember so that wasn't a real enticement for me.

I suppose a little more roleplaying and meaningful choices other than financial and combat would have kept me in the game longer. Or perhaps a side level or two that didn't involve clicking to kill hundreds of bad guys...just to mix it up a bit...but then it wouldn't be diablo 2 anymore either. And it would probably lose the exact thing that so many people love it for.

[Hamumu]

It sounds like a different type of interest in gaming - I don't care about the story at all. I'm in it for all the options of developing my character (get a new skill... and you yawn!?), and trying new ways of taking on enemies with the insane variety. While other people seem to be thinking "you're just clicking monsters endlessly from one plot point to the next, and it's all the same". Totally different perspective! I wonder if it has to do with gambling. Because every kill to me is another pull of the slot machine, another slight chance of getting a new unique or set item. Might be interesting to see if the people who like it are gambling addicts and the ones who don't are not. Not that I'm an actual gambling addict. I've hardly ever gambled in my life, but I can feel the lure of it very strongly. But there's also the skill thing above, so it's got a lot of very powerful draws for my personality type.

It's an interesting example of how there isn't something for everyone. Your game will appeal to certain human impulses, and everybody has a different rating in each impulse stat.

[C.S.Brewer]

I love the slots...I like to play nickle slots so I can sit there and do it for a long time and smoke ciggarettes with an fever eyed old lady next to me and get tiny free cocktails before we go play bingo. so that' can't be it :)

and it's not exactly that I yawned, I did enjoy the parts I played, I just got this feeling that I could see how the rest of the game would play out already and why sit through it. heh. I think as I said it's just really a matter of my changing game habbits. I do the same thing with lots of games. It might be that the type of challenge diablo2 puts forth is less interesting to me these days.

[dislekcia]

I've always wanted to implement a skill system where each skill had multiple improvement paths that you could invest points into. You could simply upgrade the damage if you felt like it, or you could upgrade your projectile-count, homing ability, lower your cost, etc (obviously with a limited number of pre-selected paths per skill). I'd like to make the customisability of each skill become something that the player gets control over and thus invests more time in their characters.

In a system like this it would be important to keep your skills useful and differentiable, but being able to customise another similar skill along a different path would allow some more leeway...

In my mind this is something that GuildWars missed out on: The skills themselves are very seperable, but it would have been great to have a single skill affected by multiple attributes. Eg: Divine favour affecting the number of allies you can heal with Heal Party, while Healing spells controls the actual amount. The trade-offs between the various skills would be even more interesting in that case ;)

-D

[gcarlton]

D2 is probably the all time top game for me. Rather than looking at everything they did right, here's my take on flaws:

1.) There are many skill "traps" which make it easy to create a worthless high level character. Fixed in 1.09 with synergies!
2.) Hoarded gems and runes are a bit weak compared to random drops.
3.) Swords trump axes, polearms, and clubs in pretty much all aspects. Also some categories of weapons are just worthless.
4.) The xp slows down a bit too much for SP, because its balanced for addictive MP time sinking. I'd rather have a SP character I can level easier. After a while it stretches pretty thin.
5.) Open environments, as has been pointed out, have a lack of gameplay. The original d1 actually felt far more strategic in this regard. OTOH, D2 was one of the first RPG action games to successfully incorporate outdoors, so its a fair enough effort!
6.) There just isn't any tactics when playing MP. The monsters get tougher, but you don't really have to play smarter. Also, 8 player games tend to turn into a mass of vacuuming up items, in many cases you are better off leaving the group if you can hack it.

I think 4-6 are really the same issue - mainly that its a game about collecting items, without needing a great deal of strategy. That is exactly the thing that makes it appeal for casual players, and can keep you hooked, but you do get the feeling its useless work after a while.

It would be interesting to see a UFO-D2 hybrid that has the addiction & real-time combat of D2 with focused missions that take some planning and tactics. It wouldn't be easy, because the real "objectives" in D2 are vacuuming items and progressing to new areas to continue the same. That itself would clash with any external objective, such as "defend an area", or "infiltrate a base". You'd probably have to award items as mission complete, which misses out the hook for each kill (this guy might be the one to drop something!).

[Pyabo]

3.) Swords trump axes, polearms, and clubs in pretty much all aspects. Also some categories of weapons are just worthless.


You think? When I was still playing D2, my favorite char was the Barbarian, and I would swap to whatever category of weapon I had found the best magic item for. I distinctly recall a particular polearm that was utterly devastating as soon as I got the Whirlind (?) skill. I think this is one of the skills they later nerfed with a patch.

[gcarlton]

Although some instances of weapons can always be exceptional, I have found that many swords beat the other types in both average damage and attack speed. Using a barbarian, like you did, I have tried specialising in axes and also another character in polearms, just for fun.

Thats not a proper statistical analysis, so maybe I just got unlucky those games (or the grass was greener on the sword side). And it did make it more of a challenge, so I can't complain too much. :)