I’ve been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them… irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that.
I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing.
It’s not a hunting game, it’s a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log.
The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn’t the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy’s skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it’s the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work.
And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn’t sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that’s where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams.
In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I’m so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers!
But of course you’d see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least.
But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren’t very fun.
Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they’re clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I’m guessing that’s going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you’re basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone’s analyzed already… any ideas?)
And hey look, there’s the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they’re confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god’s sake, if we’re going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it)
Item sets! Because there’s nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you’ll level out of before you ever complete; it’s so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade.
And on and on, there’s so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can’t just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you’d be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy.
How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit?
I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly.
Thoughts?
You call them obfuscations, I call them fun. Having different ways to scale my killing machine is fun. having to design different and new ways to becoming a mowing machine is fun. I’m with you with the “endless progression” thing, that’s what I prefer from D2 and PoE, once you reach the top tier content there’s no infinite content.
Oh come on, you don’t really need to optimize that much to have a viable character!
You don’t plan for all, you just pick the ones that are useful. I enjoy using out of game tools to optimize my in game characters.
It’s a different kind of fun. Stardew is fun not really because of the farming gameplay loop, but the farming gameplay loop within a town with character interactions and tbh, I haven’t really finished all the content it offers because its simplicity bores me.
What you need to ask yourself is not how to remove those obfuscations, but what each game offers to the player. I assure you that neither SV, PoE, LE, GrimDawn, even D2 are designed to offer you the simple gameplay loop of “mowing the field of vegetables and monsters and getting the produce aka loot”. Stardew offers a chill experience with a simple gameplay loop so you don’t feel pressured into being good at it, alongside with a story around the townspeople and the farmer. D-clones offer a multi layered toolset with complex interactions to prepare better for the mowing, a big big part of the fun is in the preparation, for a lot of people the “mowing” process is more there to test the machine than to enjoy the game.
I honestly think that if you don’t like the layered design space that most ARPGs offer, it’s not your genre.
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don’t like :)
Also I’m not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn’t sit quite right in my head.
It’s just… sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It’s certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there’s some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there’s one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let’s see, I do have a helmet that …
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
… but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn’t make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn’t feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can’t really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you’re going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It’s like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn’t feel like that’s really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where’s the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where’s management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where’s the sort-rank-and-filter, where’s the multi-axis comparisons? Where’s the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that’s just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let’s make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that’ll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just… didn’t make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do… I’m just surprised that we haven’t got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.