Diablo IV and the re-Diabloisation of the series...

Diablo IV was announced during this year's Blizzcon in a beautifully-produced CG trailer. I have to say that the game looks really nice, though it is important to remember that this is baically Alpha footage of a game that is not meant to be released any time soon - so anything could change in the intervening period.

I am quite hopeful because the direction of this game is already leaning more towards the aesthetic spirit, if not the identity, of Diablo and Diablo 2 than Diablo 3. However, these early indications really show that Diablo 3 still has its claws deep in the series' beating heart.

So let's take a brief look at what we've seen and why there might still be reason to worry...

The angle of the camera is a little more top-down compared to D3 but (at this early build) is also pulled in much more closely to the action, giving a claustrophobic feel to the action... 

First thing, first - The colour palette is much improved over pre-release Diablo 3 and the more toned-down released version. This, in and of itself, is neither good or bad but it matches the more gothic-looking aesthetic seen in the art direction. As you may recall, there was a significant backlash over, specifically, the colour of the game when it was first unveiled. However, I never felt that the colour itself was the problem but the art style. Diablo 3 had the "chunky" design seen in the Warcraft series and MMO combined with, what I would call, a painterly style for backgrounds. This naturally lends itself to a more colourful palette but it doesn't make the use of colour a bad thing.

Having said that, the use of colour filters and, specifically, some sort of fog-like filter that was placed as a final pass across the entire screen ended up making the visuals a little washed out and smeary. I think this was added as an effect to help convey the distance within a single screen because another big difference Diablo 3 had over the previous two titles was that the perspective of the camera was lower to the ground, lifting the far edge of the screen towards the horizon.

Diablo 3 had a very painterly aesthetic which doesn't look bad, it just looks more like the Torchlight series than the first two Diablo games...

Diablo and Diablo 2 had a very hard isometric view and therefore the farground and/or horizon would never be lifted into view so there was no need to help display the fact that those places were further away. I also think it was intended to give the visuals a more dream-like quality, emphasising the fantastic nature of the game world. Unfortunately, I think this decision was a poor one because that sort of fantasy setting does not fit with a gothic-styled environment (which, in fact, the game did not posess) and thus changed the entire visual tone of the game along with the character art and model style.

I think one of the difficulties talking about these aspects across the Diablo series is that players will undoubtedly have some sort of nostalgic effect ocurring in their memories of the first two games. Whilst Diablo had a very strong and simple gothic architecture and medieval style on display, the flat lighting, camera angle and perspective didn't really convey gritty and/or horror but more muddy and dark. Don't forget that later enemies encountered as the player ventured deeper into hell ended up being brightly coloured palette swaps - some of them literally luminously hued.

Diablo 2 was also quite a big departure from Diablo in many visual aspects as well - the primary one was the pulling of the camera back from the action to emphasise the larger world that the gameplay took place in. Diablo's camera was relatively close to the character which created a claustrophobic atmosphere which fitted well with the "low-ceilinged" vaults of the catacombs beneath the cathedral in Tristram. You can also see that the UI was pulled back, revealing far more area around the player than in the first game - which had almost a quarter of the screen taken-up by the UI.

Part of that was down to the jump from the 640x480 to 800x600 aspect ratio and part of it was the overall design choice to show the player more of the world they were playing in. Artistically, Diablo 2 was also less gothically-styled in terms of architecture but it was still quite a dark and gritty game - potentially reinforced through the use of sprite-based artwork.

Diablo 1 had a more flat isometric perspective but had very gothic stylings...

The other big difference between Diablo and its sequel was that Diablo 2 was relatively colourful compared to the muddy, desaturated style of the first game. The colours of enemies "popped" more (you can compare the difference between the Fallen Ones in the screenshots above and below this) in contrast with the more muted background palettes. 

In comparison, Diablo 3 had more visually distinct backdrops which required even more colourful and well-lit (or highlighted) enemies to draw them out from the increased amount of graphical noise. On this particular topic, all three Diablo games have approached this differently; Diablo had hard-colourisation of enemies that were lurking in the dark; Diablo 2 had enemies highlighted through the use of point light sources, centred upon them; Diablo 3 used colour and edge-lighting effects which gave those enemies a more cel-shaded look than in the previous games - perhaps adding to the tonal shift that players observed and reacted to.

Diablo 2 didn't often have huge numbers of enemies on-screen all at once. These situations tended to be reserved for the elite/special enemies and bosses...

Looking back at my mid-thoughts on Diablo 3, I had quite a few complaints about how the game felt to play. I levelled a character to around level 50 in the end and my feelings on those issues didn't really go away. The two main issues I had were surrounding impact of player's skills and the unlock skill/rune system. In the first two games, the player can one-shot many enemies right off the bat. However, they can quite handily damage the player and potentially overwhelm them in very limited numbers because most of the player's skills aren't area of effect or based on crowd-control.

This also is reflected in gameplay and balance as well - there are relatively few enemies on screen at any point in time in the first two Diablo games, punctuated by the elite groups and surprise encounters with a sudden mob. This gives the game a cadence. In Diablo 3, I often felt that the designers were trying to overwhelm the player nearly constantly and this fed into the first point: player skills don't have a big impact in the game because they must manage mobs of enemies. Any skill that isn't an instakill/area of effect is almost pointless because the player character needs those skills to deal with overwhelming odds.

Let's put it this way, playing as an Archon in Diablo 3 made me feel like a high-level character should feel. It was disappointing to have to go back to the weak normal skills that the sorceress usually had. It didn't make feel too overpowered in its short duration (which of course it would if it was part of normal play) but the power differential between a normal high-level character's skills and the Archon was immense. I'd go from whittling down a relatively minor enemy with my strongest attack to annihilating them with the archon abilities. It was ridiculous. In fact, I can safely say that Diablo 3 was the least empowering empowerment fantasy game I've played and I wonder if it was like that because it was expecting everyone to play together...

Back in Diablo and Diablo 2, hitting an enemy caused them to flinch and/or be knocked back when killed. Diablo 3 did away with these physical indications of the player's power and instead made the enemies much less responsive whilst also making them more bullet-spongy*, requiring a lot of player time to kill each individual. In my opinion, this made the encounters more boring to play through as there weren't really interesting decisions to be made, though each player skill was nice and splashy with lots of particle effects.... Which, I actually think was a poor design decision because the skills LOOK great but act like a weak poof of smoke when you're expecting a big burst of fireworks.

*For the record, I couldn't find a non-derogatory link to specify that a bullet sponge enemy is one that takes an inordinate amount of ammunition/firepower to kill. Three quarters of the links I found were to do with the US military which operates on an inverse definition, appropriate to the particular station of the personnel and a quarter were derogatory towards certain player bases who are "unable" to understand the reason and joys of grinding and farming...

Of course, this all carried over to multiplayer. In Diablo and Diablo 2, you would realise that certain character classes would be able to destroy all enemies on screen before others. The paladin, for example, was poorly suited to close ground and deal damage. In this respect, I think that Diablo 3's skills and their relative effect on enemies was designed to allow all players to have a visual and engaging effect on the combat taking place in every encounter as opposed to being more support orientated. This might be the primary reason for many of these prior observations.

Loads of enemies!! Just watch that health bar trickle down slowly... SO exciting!

So, in my opinion, Diablo 3 got the challenge, look and feel of fighting the hordes of darkness completely backwards. People defend this by saying that the end-game is where the action is at and where the game is best balanced... However, forcing players to endure the entire campaign as a pointless exercise or to group with higher level characters in multiplayer in order to quickly bypass all the pointless levelling begs the question: "What is the point in the whole game?" In that case, why not start with all the skills unlocked? Why not start at level 50?!

I really feel that forcing players into multiplayer in order to (relatively) quickly get their character to a high level where the interesting play begins completely undermines the atmosphere of a game about fighting the hordes of hell. To emphasise the point, let me quote Blizzard North in their "thank you" note to the players included with Diablo:

Diablo is a VERY different play experience depending on which character class you choose. The tactics and strategies employed by the Warrior, for instance, would be sheer folly for a Sorcerer to attempt. Many high level items and spells will only be useable by certain classes. After you defeat Diablo, try another game with a different character class.  

Finally, Diablo takes on an entirely different feel when you are in a multiplayer game.  The interaction that occurs, the new strategies and the difference in how you have to think all make for a very exciting and very new experience.

Multiplayer is an intrinsically different feel to playing solo in Diablo and Diablo 2. Further to this, as Blizzard North themselves state: each character class plays differently. This holds true in Diablo 2 as well but there is less definition between characters in Diablo 3 because all characters must necessarily get into the middle of the fray and retreat, kiting enemies and chasing after the health refills that drop. It is an intrinsic part of the combat cycle for each and every character class.

That choice to have literal mobs of enemies more often and to make the player skills less devastating combined with the need to focus on regenerating resources (such as health, stamina and mana) instead of consumables (though these are present on a cool-down basis) and the forced need to harvest drops during combat meant that most characters must adhere to the same sorts of tactics during play (the big exceptions being the necromancer/shaman and their minion builds).

Numbers of enemies and focus on big, flashy power sets.

This scene is simultaneously gothic, dark and colourful as well as adhering to a more realistic art style...

So here's where we address Diablo 4's alpha preview.

Again, I must congratulate Blizzard for nailing the tone of the colour palette with the gothic architecture and more realistic art style. Moving away from the more chunky and cartoony style seen in Diablo 3 is a positive, IMO, since that puts the game back in the camp of Diablo 1 and 2, taking into account the limitations of the graphical abilities available to the designers at the time they were made.

Secondly, the designers have reinforced the design aspects of both Diablo 2 and Diablo in this alpha footage. The angle of the camera is higher up, leading to a more focussed perspective on the action. There's no fog layer and no smearing of details on the environment or character/enemy models though there does appear to be some sort of depth of field occurring at the edges of the screen along with a slight vignette.

It also appears that, in a similar fashion to Grim Dawn, players are able to zoom in and out of the action. Take, for instance, the Druid or Barbarian sections and the Sorceress' section - the Sorceress' camera viewpoint is akin to that observed in Diablo 2 whereas the other two are much closer and more claustrophobic, as was used in the original Diablo. It's that or the camera will dynamically move in and out of the scene based on what's occurring (Or the developers haven't nailed it down yet).

I won't miss the World of Warcraft-esque aesthetic and hard character lighting seen in Diablo 3...

What I do worry about is that first Druid section with the 36 skeletons attacking and basically being demolished by him. Of course, this is concept footage - highlighting the experience higher level characters would enjoy. The skills employed by the Druid are all high level - turning into a bear, rushing, stomping, calling down lightning, turning into a werewolf, etc. No low-to-mid-level character would have all of these benefits in a fight in any currently available ARPG I've played. Similarly, the Barbarian features multiple quick-firing attacks that are chained in this introduction footage which decimate the opposition.

And that's what worries me the most. That's what was on display in the Diablo 3 videos at or before launch and that is not and never has been the experience of any players in the Diablo franchise at higher level. This is where the disconnect happens between the developers, marketers, and the players.

The developers and marketers say, "Hey, see all these cool abilities you can do and see how they annihilate the enemy? Heck, we better throw huge numbers of enemies into the fray because otherwise it's going to be a cakewalk for the player!". The player says, "Wow! Those are cool abilities, look how empowering they are and, once I attain them all, I'll be able to demolish enemies like in those videos..."

Can you see where I'm going with this?

Any person that's played through a Diablo ARPG will know that the only combat that happens similarly to that observed in these videos is when a high level player goes back to the starting regions in the main campaign. It is the one big failure of the series, in my opinion - the games do not balance well from the mid-point to the higher levels.

At the lower levels, as I previously noted, the player can almost one-shot most enemies in D1 & D2. That communicates the feel of a powerful, but human, adventurer heading out into battle against the peons of evil. As they progress, they gain skills and, of course, face more difficult enemies. However, at a certain point, those enemies become damage sinks; they become bullet sponges that just soak up the player's time and damage output in a way that is not realistic for similarly-levelled combatants.

Once every enemy becomes akin to a miniature boss fight, there's little power fantasty left in the game.

Torchlight had a similar cartoony aesthetic with big, chunky mesh designs which lent itself well to the colourful cavalcade of effects produced through spells and skills...

Diablo 3 had this problem in spades, Diablos 1 and 2 less so but it was still there to a degree. However, let's compare and contrast this with competing products: Torchlight*, Titan Quest and Grim Dawn.

*I didn't play enough of Torchilight 2 to be able to include it in this comparison. This was mainly due to the fact that I didn't really like the classes on offer in that game... That's just personal preference rearing it's head.

Torchlight had the chunky/cartoony aesthetic that embodied World of Warcraft and eventually permeated down through the development layers to Diablo 3. You'll also notice that it embodied the flashy, particle effect-driven skills that defined D3's screenspace. However, even at higher level, most  non-elite/boss enemies could be defeated in 3-5 hits. Sure, you had to have the correctly levelled equipment, but you didn't require epic level or completed sets in order to achieve that. You could also attain that immense power without customising your character skillset to work with a specific set because you didn't have the ability to just switch your whole skillset without any cost.

This reflected the experience in Diablo and Diablo 2 as well - whilst you could develop a character that would be useless in ranked play and on the higher difficulties, it wasn't a prerequisite for normal or hard for the player to progress.

I actually think Diablo 3's stance on immediate and free re-spec'ing of a character was a positive move but ultimately pointless because of the relative weakness of most character abilities compared to the hitpoints and resistances of the enemies. Re-spec'ing in Titan Quest and Grim Dawn cost some quantity of resource - but it wasn't impossible to perform. In fact, Diablo 2 also had the ability to enable character skill respecialisation though it didn't exist at release.

I don't know if you can really see it, but this saty was catapulted into the air with my level 2 character because of the combination of the shrine I touched and my active skill...

Where Torchlight was basically a low-budget Diablo with modern sensibilities, Titan Quest was pretty much an evolution of Diablo 2. Aside from the lack of randomly generated world areas, the game made great strides in the customisation of characters through the mastery system. This basically doubled-down on the Diablo-like ability for players to branch their character off towards an unintended build - something that was lost in Diablo 2. Players were able to focus on a single mastery or effectively dual-class, bringing in further variation in how each character played. 

Character skills were not only predicated on cool-downs but also on resource locking whilst in effect - effectively reducing your total pool of, for example, mana for other skills or by causing a constant drain on those same resources. Therefore, active skill management by the player in Titan Quest was required in order to optimally utilise builds.

The combat was also quite kinetic in action too, where enemies could be thrown far and wide with the right killing blow and skill combination. However, individual hits tended to not be too physical, only the death blows. This was something I felt that Diablo 2 really excelled at. 

As with Grim Dawn, Titan Quest allows players to zoom in and out of the action but the presentation of this 2006 game is pretty flat and this even extends to the UI.

Grim Dawn utilises a similar perspective but allows the player to pull the camera out further...

In comparison, Grim Dawn is the game that the developers probably wished they could make back in 2006. The lighting systems are far better than the original game and the advancement systems are also further improved, though little different. One big thing I would say about the game is that it is undoubtedly easier on the base difficulty than Titan Quest, though in that game, a large proportion of difficulty comes from the vast difference between Diablo 2 and itself.

I'll quote the venerable Richard Cobbett regarding the reception of Grim Dawn at release:

There’s a deceptive simplicity to action-RPGs like Grim Dawn, and most that have tried to knock off Diablo’s crown over the years. It’s not enough to simply fill the screen with enemies only to pop them open like a gory sheet of bubblewrap; the artistry comes in honing the atmosphere, the satisfaction of every kill, every stat point, every sound effect, and every splatter. Few can live up to the master in that regard.

Grim Dawn is one of the few that can, joining the pantheon of games that do more than merely hold their own against Blizzard's initially troubled but now might Diablo 3 juggernaut.

What's interesting is that Grim Dawn really straddles the line between Titan Quest and Diablo 2/3. Again, there's the flat UI but the scenes are rendered with varying degrees of distance fog, realistic graphics and point lighting. The game doesn't overwhelm players with too many enemies at a single time but also does give players enough heft and physicality in their attacks to have an effect on enemies both during the "fight" and with the death blow. While it's true that the developers had the advantage of having Diablo 3 release during their development period and they had a lot of feedback during their Kickstarter backing phase, I think that they managed to walk that line between too complex and too simple, moreso than Diablo 3 did.

You can call Diablo 3's level scaling into the discussion but, really, why would you want to? An overly complex system which is mostly locked upon first loading up of the game. Want to push a character to the limit in Diablo 2? Type in "Players 8". Want to crank it up in Diablo 3 to enable levelling more quickly? You're limited by whatever level your prior character was. Oh, you didn't have one? Then you can't crank it up more than "....". Honestly, I wish developers would leave behind the archaic practice of locking harder difficulties behind restrictions. It's annoying when you find the base game easy, it's even more annoying when you're an expert but have to perform a fresh install... and no, tying the game to an always-online account and system is not the correct response to this complaint!

*AHEM*

Save us...

That brings me back around to Diablo 4. 

Diablo 4 is an always online game and will allow instancing with random players within your singleplayer experience. Let me just let that sink in there whilst I copy/paste the blurb from Blizzard North, the original creators of Diablo from above:

Finally, Diablo takes on an entirely different feel when you are in a multiplayer game.  The interaction that occurs, the new strategies and the difference in how you have to think all make for a very exciting and very new experience.

Yes, it seems that, like Diablo 3, the best way to play Diablo 4 will be on a console where an always online, connected experience is not mandatory. I really despise this disparity between platforms but, hey, publishers and developers continue to be tone-deaf to those disparities...

At the end of the day, from a design standpoint, singleplayer and multiplayer cannot coexist in a combined package. Sorry, I mean to say that they cannot coexist in a combined package without drastically affecting each other. This is why even Destiny separates-out the PvE and PvP events and the developers have trouble balancing out the weapons between both (because, stupidly, the weapons span both sides of the game). Let me quote Blizzard's Tiffany Wat:

"When we talk about the world of Sanctuary and the tone we're going for - that feeling of dread, isolation, desolation - it's not a great place to be, so we want to make sure we maintain that feeling as you're adventuring because that's just core to the story we want to tell.

"But if you come upon an event that's more difficult, say like Ashava, the world boss, that is a situation where our engine allows us to seamlessly bring other players in. Whether you choose to group up with them, or if you go there solo, there will still be other people that have chosen to go fight that boss."

Those two ideals do not come more oblique than that. The tone of the world matters even in the boss fights. Worse still, it means that the developers are balancing the world for single player but the bosses and other significant group events for multiple people. It doesn't work like that...

Moving on: from the interviews, it seems that Blizzard have not only focussed on the visuals but on player interaction - allowing dynamic switching between play styles within a single character (dual-wielding/two-handed). I am happy, though, to hear that Diablo 3's rune system is gone. I always felt that it was a system that encouraged "averageness". In their place are new skill trees with a limited ability to fill them out and runewords for weapon and item upgrades - which is similar to Diablo 2's implementation and, having some familiarity with Futhark and Futhorc, might actually improve upon Diablo 2's implementation of the rune system.

This CG trailer was really just spectacular!

Another aspect that worries me, aside from the grouping/shared world Destiny-style game design is the size of the world.

The Diablo 4 open-world will be much bigger than Diablo 3's world - 10 or 20 times bigger, according to the Diablo panel, which Tiffany Wat was a part of and confirmed she'd heard said. It will be so large, in fact, Diablo 4 will need - and has - mounts for you to ride around. They weren't in the demo but were shown in the panel. There will be special dismount abilities for them - the sorceress can launch herself off her horse like an icy missile - as well as armour and Witcher-like monster head trophies, all of which bestow statistical bonuses to things like speed or defense.

I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous. 

I've played Diablo 3 from beginning to end and through the expansion as well. That's 30-50 hours of content. Mostly boring content.... but then, that's Diablo 3 for you. However, I rail against the need for such a large open world. What would you fill it with? I mean, I vastly prefer targetted, curated areas to huge, lifeless tracts of land which have AI-generated spawn systems. 

As a side note, I presume this means that D4 will not have randomly generated terrain and world tiles.... which is a hugely missed opportunity because running through the same areas time and time again isn't so much fun. Added to this, the hands-on description of the play environment is not encouraging:

In Diablo 1, you died. It was hard. So you inched forward, careful to only nibble at enemy hordes rather than try and take them all in one. But Diablo 4 felt like Diablo 3 as I romped, without any real fear of death, through scores of foes. It had none of the tense oppression of Diablo 1.

This reinforces my worry from earlier that the developers want to overwhelm players by putting them into packs of enemies instead of pacing the encounters. If you go back and play Diablo 1 now, it's not so hard. Of course, that's with hindsight and I specifically remember 11 year-old me starting a new game after I'd cleared levels 1 and 2 in order to be able to progress with the same character after I discovered that experience, skills and items held in the inventory carried over.

"In a world as big as the one we're building, there are lots of opportunities for difficult content." There will be areas you can get to where enemies will be much higher level than you, for instance. But difficulty levels themselves: "We haven't announced anything on difficulty levels," he said. Will there be one difficulty for the one shared world? It presents a tricky problem.

Yes, of course it presents a tricky problem - especially when you have multiple players at different character levels inhabiting the same space!!! This is a terrible idea! It's a question you have to answer that nobody asked!

At this early stage, it appears that the developers are against respec'ing and I think this is a grave mistake if true, and if it lasts through to release.

This example of levelling is intriguing but not especially different from similar games out there that do levelling very well...

While Heather Alexandra from Kotaku described the revealed game as "a deliberate response to criticisms, both from players and within Blizzard that Diablo III was too cartoony", she also said that she didn't understand those complaints, thinking that the "game had a solid split between dark fantasy and dry wit". Personally, I cannot align myself with that viewpoint because it appears tonally indifferent to the experiences I had playing the game. Yes, everyone experiences things differently but I encounted no "dry wit" in D3 or "dark fantasy". In fact the game was played toward the more campy humour side of culture - which added to the tonal dissonance experienced by fans of the first two games.

Many reviewers, including those at Kotaku, seem to think that the game, overall, is a safe bet; that it's treading carefully in order to appease fans. I think I agree but in totally opposite ways: Diablo 3 was cartoony in its presentation, the skill system was a simplified mess that didn't hold up over long-term play without severe adjusting (nerf/buff) and the play balance did not work for singleplayer.

In response to this, the developers have corrected the artstyle to one that is more in line with the type experienced in Diablo 1 and 2 and adjusted the skill trees and weapon upgrades in a similar manner. You can call this crowd-pleasing or you could call it course-correction.

As I pointed out before, I'm still worried for the balance of the game... presented, overpowered characters and the hinted-at overworld multiplayer does not bode well for me... but let's see.

Diablo IV has no release... it's a game that has the time to get everything right.