Diablo 2 || ThinkThank #2

Summer 2001 in Washington D.C.

My oldest brother, newly sixteen, was charged with taking care of me for the day, but he was faced with a near-perfect sitcom dilemma. He had been planning on sneaking off to a party his friend was throwing in celebration of their parents absence from town, only for his chance at a sweet rager to be thrown off by the task of looking after his kid brother. I'll spare you the whole episode, as it diverges from its daytime television-readiness pretty quickly. He opted to take me with him. Arriving at his friend's house-- early, as I assume my brother was helping get everything ready-- his friend looked down at me with surprise. She clearly had not anticipated that I would have been there too. I missed the specifics, but they quickly agreed on a plan, and a moment later his friend brought me upstairs to her bedroom, where she had her very own tower desktop computer station. She sat me down, booted it up, and told me I could play any of the games I wanted. With a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, I think she said something about staying put, but that's about where my memories of her, the house, or the situation end. I had already spotted a forbidden game's icon on the desktop: Diablo 2.

Remember, this was at a time when the cultural fire around gaming was probably at its worst. Games were a major form of entertainment, but they could still be halted by the then-powerful concerned Christians, convinced that video games were the devil. When in this case they could be forgiven a touch, even if that designation was a bit more on the nose than usual. I was old enough to be aware of culture, to a certain extent, and I had heard plenty about how video games were turning children into monsters, and that this newest devil spawn, Diablo 2 was about as literal an embodiment of that as possible. This sequel was rumoured to feature the previous game's protagonist, now slowly losing themselves to madness and erupting into the monstrous Diablo. I didn't really know that part, but I did know that Diablo 2 had violence, magic, and mature themes, as I had recently come to learn 'blood and tits' were categorized. This would not be allowed in my house, I knew. But here I was anyway, in the presence of the forbidden game with no one to stop me.

Quill rats are basically Diablo's "Slimes"

I also will spare you the play by play of how that went, as I was a bit too scared to really progress the game in any meaningful way. I played a Sorceress because she was pretty and ran around a field shooting quill rats with fireballs for several hours. None of the progression systems, differing enemy types, or even the story reached me at that time, as I was content to whack the same old quill rats time and time again, scandalized and titillated by the blood that pooled beneath each upon defeat.

About six years later, I picked up Diablo 2 for myself, kicking off my first incredibly unhealthy relationship with a video game. That is a story I'll completely spare you from. Unreasonable volumes of play aside, I want to mention the important parts of Diablo 2, so far as it affected my perception of design.

A New (Old) Take on the RPG

Now that so many video game genres have been codified to the point of inflexibility, its hard to remember that when Diablo 2 came out in 2000, "Hack and Slash" weren't the first words out of people's mouths. The view on Diablo was that it was a combat-oriented, dungeon-crawling, roleplaying game. These days, Hack&Slash and Loot Grinder are more commonly associated with the series. Which is not to say that loot grinding wasn't an element of Diablo back the, no no-- nearly every step you took you couldn't avoid another pair of magical, unidentified pants. But I'll get to the loot in a moment.

Back then, the design ethos around Diablo was an iteration of RPG, and as such, the character sheet was meant not simply to be a menu, but a place where Gameplay took place. We could argue all day about whether or not that gameplay was fun to most people, but the intention was for one of the "loops" of gameplay to take place in a menu screen.

Skill points were few and far between, and their allocation was permanent, making each visit to the Character Sheet a deliberation; at least, this was the case if you went into the game cold, without guides or other meta-analysis. This design choice is one of the most-discussed points of contention among Diablo fans to date, as the hardcore nerd drumbeat laments the loss of the trial-by-fire that left them branded as "real" players, while those who prefer the subsequent games' scrapping of the system with an easy swap system wonder how there can be any fun found in permanent choices, especially if those choices can be objective mistakes.

Nearly the most common sight in the game

But looking back with a lens focused on context, looking back without the aggressive adherence to genre, and at a time in gaming when designers were exploring and developing new methods of play, Diablo 2 can be seen as an enthusiast experiment. That experiment had a few quality-of-life rough edges, but seen holistically, you can see that Diablo's design was in service of getting the RPG experience to more types of people than games like Ultima or Wizardry. Those hardcore nerds today, gleefully praising any inhospitable mechanic for its service in separating out the 'casuals', failed to understand that Diablo was an exercise in turning down the Stats & Menus dial on the RPG GAME switchboard, while turning up the Tactile Arcade Combat dial, oft neglected by this point.

The result was a game where you could no longer detect digital dice rolls clattering in the game's backstage, but instead feel the changes to your character mechanically. Where once a javelin throw or bolt of electricity would stagger a foe, after a few smartly-invested skill points and the equipping of the right weapon, you'd watch as the same ability you had used before reduced an entire platoon of goblins to puddles of goo. However, because failure to invest smartly is so easy, it is all the more gratifying when a player cooks up the correct conditions to dole out such massive heaps of damage, as they know that it was their own doing; they learned about the game, planned ahead, and reaped the fruits of their labors. In so many ways to the modern eye, this reads as almost ground-zero for decent action-rpg design, but as I keep banging on about: don't forget the time when this game released. If you have never played Diablo 2, you have certainly played a game which it influenced.

How about that Atmosphere?

One of the casualties of modern Diablo is the loss of overall atmosphere. This is something that is very hard to pin down, and its subjectivity makes it doubly so. But there is something altogether more sanitized, anticipated, and rote in Diablo 3 and 4. Some of that was lost simply due to an evolving aesthetic, but some of that atmosphere was also lost when the consumer expectation of Diablo as a loot-grinder became the sole focus of Diablo's design. I would argue that, even while loot was a core component of Diablo 2's design underpinnings, it was in service of character expression and exploration. Because each of the seven character classes could be played in a minimum of three distinct ways, there needed to be enough loot variety to address all of those possibilities.

Ultimately, your goal was to complete each region's quests and defeat bosses, so finding the right loot was essential to completing that task. In more modern Diablo and its derivatives, the act of finding/collecting loot has superseded the story and atmosphere-related goal of the game. You feel less like a hero off to save the land, collecting useful items to aid your journey, and more like a shinies-motivated looter who might accidentally save the world while searching for treasure (Now that I've written it that way, I would  happily play a game with a story explicitly about that...).

Tough to see, but this eldritch land of floating buttresses was a real-mind fuck for a kid

But back to just Diablo 2. From the opening moments, the game is dripping with gothic moodiness, devoid entirely of irony or irreverence. No, Diablo 2 treats itself with almost biblical seriousness. The player characters occasionally bark while exploring, like when you first leave the starting area camp and your character declares, "I shall purge this land of the shadow," and each VO actor sounds like they are reading from Tolkien's letters. When you fight a half-spider, BDSM madame with chained nipples, you may find yourself wondering when the tongue-in-cheek is going to arrive, but no! Diablo 2 continues treating its story and its world as writing a new Book of Revelations in realtime. This earnest delivery, combined with top-notch musical accompaniment makes every session  of Diablo feel like a descent into dangerous and maddening waters. The most damaging element to the atmosphere is probably the constant sound of clicking from your real world mouse, as it drives ever major action of the game. "I have [clickyclick] purged this [click] cave of [clicketyclicketyclick] evil!"

I had never been so frightened by nipples

Lessons

What did I learn from Diablo 2? I learned about the power to be found in expression. When people talk about player freedom, saying that they want more of it, often times what they are really asking for is more expression. A decade of sandbox-game development led people to realise that a big open space for the player to "do anything they want" in is actually pretty lame, and quickly companies like Ubisoft got to work ensuring that their open world sandboxes were littered with useless garbage and busywork, creating a thin justification between the developer and the player for engagement. Ubisoft would create a wide, open city for you to explore and learn, only to then provide you with an objective which requires such specific, railroaded task-management to complete that any accumulated knowledge you have of the open world they created is a non-factor to your goal. For much of the playtime, the player is 'free', but their expression is identical from player to player, as the goals of the game are completed in a way more akin to traditional, linear design.

Look at this Boris Vallejo-lookin' ass shit

In Diablo 2, the plot and objective structure is about as rigid as these things get. Each Act, the player is set in a new hub location, and they are tasked with overcoming a handful of local dungeons, before completing a local mini-boss, which unlocks a plot-dungeon, which unlocks the Act boss. This is what led to the Diablo expectation that, after your first time through the story, players would then do 'runs' of the game, like they were bringing their own strategy to a NinjaWarrior course.

And that's where the expression comes in. The goals of the game are laid out fairly simply and there are no branching narratives. What is different from playthrough to playthrough is how you, the player, choose to develop your character to overcome the challenges ahead. For developing your character, you have Attributes, Skills, Weapons, Armor, Charms, Augmentation Slots, and Consumables to define how your character navigates the world and overcomes challenges. In Diablo, you literally Dress to Kill, with almost as much time devoted to planning how you are going to kill your enemies as time spent actually killing the enemies. That imagination phase, where the player is trying to think through the next few hours of gameplay, strategizing their skills and imagining what an 'ideal' piece of loot would look like for their build, adds a tantalizing replayability to the game, as experimental character builds take time to carry out. And this isn't just my experience-- people are still creating new characters in Diablo 2 to this day, seeing what is possible and what isn't as they speedrun through the Acts of the game twenty four years after its release.

I have long had strong feelings about character expression and freedom, and as I reflect more on my gaming experiences, I think Diablo 2 was the start of that particular pet issue. Diablo 2 was my introduction to character sheet RPGs, even though so many would argue (myself included) against its place as a "traditional " RPG. It was, nonetheless, my first taste of expressing yourself through a character, and expressing that character through skills and equipment. I wasn't aware, at the time, that I was playing what was to become the initial blueprint for ARPGs to come for the next two decades.

Unfortunately, I have fallen out of love with the genre today, as most of that character expression has been replaced almost solely with repetitive Loot Grinds as the goal of gameplay. This is return of the strict, linear, non-expressive design to the ARPG, but without the design confidence to tell the player that they want their game to be played in a specific way. Optimal builds are no longer created, but found. The designers hands are no longer off the game's systems, allowing the players to fool around with them, but instead they are now in on the grind, with each ARPG now having some form of "Mythic" or "Legendary" equipment whose acquisition is the more obvious "real" goal of the game, expression be damned.

But I have so much to be thankful for in Diablo 2, as it provided me with so many hours of delightful dungeon crawling, maddening battles against overwhelming odds which were satisfying to finally overcome, and moody, darkly magical world by which I was equal parts scared and fascinated. I'm not certain that Diablo 2 was doing almost anything particularly new, but the tropes and elements it was working with were employed well, and served to supply a total newcomer with one hell of an introduction to the format (I really didn't think I was going to do a pun but WOW, here we are. But most importantly, thank you Diablo 2 for helping me develop the first tools I needed to articulate my preferences in games. That preference for expression over optimization is absolutely what led me to my next RPG fascination in the coming years, in the form of the Fable franchise. But I'll cover that one soon...