Diablo 2 is a 9-year-old game, and yet, there are 25,000 games of it going on right now on Battle.net.
D2 encompasses many of the design flaws I’d call out as horrific. The entire game mechanic is grindfest. Success is driven enormously through random loot drops. Min-maxing is arguably the core gameplay mechanic. You really ought to read/study/calculate in advance, too, because you can’t unmake decisions and character regret is easy. There’s almost no “social” mechanic for casual play (although it IS quite enjoyable if you can gather a core group of players).
And yet, 9 years later, I still play several times a week.
Shows what I know. I’d be happy to be part of developing a Diablo 2 any day of the week.
By Makaze July 16, 2009 - 1:56 pm
The lesson here is that while all of those traits may be bad in and of themselves, individually making the game less fun in the moment, they give the game staying power.
Grinds – Longterm by definition
Min/Maxing – People love it and as long as you’ve got enough complexity to make a massive amount of variations it keeps them entertained. Plus every time you patch, even tiny things, you just added a ridiculous amount of min/maxing content.
Pre-knowledge required – I’d say not really, you can play through D2 normal without ever checking a faq. It’s only the higher difficulties and the people that really want to min/max that need the extra knowledge. Which brings us to…
Starting over – Since you can’t respec everyone just starts over. Which pisses us off to no end but we do it anyway and once again it adds longevity.
No Social – Neither does TF2, Counterstrike, or a host of other games. Social bonds only retain social people which modern MMOs have taught us are in the minority.
It also helps that D2 is/was a great game and hit a sort of critical mass whereby enough people are playing it at any given time that you can always find a game, and so people keep playing it.
And the final factor is of course that no one has done D2 better than D2 (though I’d argue Titan Quest was pretty damn good and Mythos might have if it hadn’t been dragged under by Hellgate)
By Tachevert July 16, 2009 - 3:09 pm
Great analysis. And if I didn’t make it clear enough in my post — I LOVE D2.
I like having the example to keep me honest. It may not require breaking all of the molds to produce the Next Great Cool Game. (In fact, it very likely will require NOT breaking some of them.)