The original Diablo I remember being more thoughtful and slower paced. I liked it. Diablo3 turned into just a brainless light show without much tactics. Less rewarding.
I’m two evenings into a D1 (DevilutionX) single player story run though. Can confirm. Definitely much slower and more deliberate, and not just because they hadn’t invented running yet. Nothing respawns, the world is fixed from the start, so everything is a limited resource. Do I really need to buy this sword now or should I try to hold out for something to drop? Much more strategic gameplay… Slow forward exploration, hiding behind doors and corners letting monsters come to you one by one, stuff like that.
In the later games I’d just whirlwind through everything (spin2win, baby!) and hope for the best. If I need more gold or whatever I can always just save and exit and come back in and run through the area one more time. Definitely not doing that here. Every choice matters, so slow down and make it count.
I agree with most of it, but most players generally would just save and respawn a new map in D1 to get more resources?
Brevik explains that the hordes of enemies take away the personal nature of the ARPG journey. While the enemy count of the original Diablo games were high for their time, the modern takes on the genre have taken the wrong lesson from those originals.
I have to say that that’s a bit of a turn-off for me in roguelikes, too. Like, mowing through hordes of “explosive breeders” – a property that Moria and some child roguelikes, like Angband, had on some enemies – is mind-numbing.
I was thinking that roguelikes are kind of the antithesis to what he proposes, as you’ve got rapid character progression (paired with rapidly rising difficulty) and you certainly don’t want to get attached to your character. Didn’t know there was roguelikes with cannon fodder, though. 🙃
It varies within the genre. Some games try hard to take steps to minimize the ability to sit around and grind, such as by a food clock or lack of respawns. Sil, which is a *band game that tries to be closer to the original style has an XP system that grants XP for seeing an enemy the first time, and the same for killing it, and then 1/n times that XP the nth time you see that same kind of enemy thereafter. Sixth orc you see is worth 1/6 the XP, so it’s not worth farming an area hard, and still rewards exploring a lot. It also eventually just forces you deeper as the desire for a silmaril becomes more irresistible as you become stronger. Seeing 6 orcs and killing 2 is worth 3.95x an orc’s stated XP, seeing 30 and killing them all gets up to almost 8x the stated XP.
Others like most Angband variants or Tales of Maj’eyal made the decision to just let the player grind. Many of the games in that style have more open-ended progression and aren’t necessarily trying to force the player into constantly dangerous situations. The very popular Caves of Qud would fit this category.
