by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

I’ve always thought Diablo 3 was a great game, even if the story mode was a tad short. But story length shouldn’t be a problem, I mean Diablo is meant to be played way beyond the end of the story. We came in knowing that we were going to go through the story many times in different difficulties, and maybe even with different characters aswell. I mean, that’s what we loved to do in Diablo 2 right?

Maybe it is the times that have changed, but Diablo 3’s main value might be its story rather than the endless end-game grind. But why is D3’s grind any different than D2’s? Lets look at a few factors that are key when analyzing this game’s replayability.

Lack of Caps

There is something about gamers and caps, people just like to max things out. I knew a lot of D2 players, and most had one thing in common; they wanted to get their main character to the level cap. And almost all of them had another thing in common, they never did.

In Diablo 3 you can easily beat the entire game for the first time in a few hours, then make it to the level cap in about 10 hours of gameplay. Working your way up to finish the game in T6 will admittedly take longer, but how many people are looking for that challenge?

In Diablo 3, there’s almost no caps. Paragon levels are endless, and for all practical purposes Greater Rifts are endless aswell.

Little Targeted Farming

Back in Diablo 2, you had an idea on which areas, enemies, and bosses were the best to farm when you wanted a particular item. In Diablo 3, unless you want a Cache specific legendary, the “where do I farm?” question always has the same answer, and that’s “wherever you can get the most legendaries/hour”. From here we have two problems, the first is that you will spend the rest of your days farming in the same way, which gets tedious. The second is that you completely remove short term goals. Lets say I really need that Furnace to keep progressing in Greater Rifts, if I knew that the Furnace had a way higher chance of dropping out of Azmodan I’d be more inclined to go on a Sin Lord farming spree until I got my valued weapon. With targeted farming, Goal-Driven players would have much more incentives to put hours into the game.

Irrelevant Bosses

Then again, who farms bosses on D3? Not many people, not any efficient people, This is rather sad because Bosses have a special mystique to them. World of Warcraft raiding is all about beating these cool bosses and tackling  encounters with interesting mechanics to get the best loot avaliable. In Diablo 3, bosses are reduced to a DPS measuring stick (I’m looking at you Ghom).  Diablo 3 has a great boss system, it is the only place in the game where you can literally wipe and reset the encounter, this makes bosses unique and rewarding. Yet, boss battles are criminally underused. Much more prominent are the Rift Guardians, glorified knock-off mini-bosses that lack the lore and significance of their original counterparts.

Do you remember Baal Runs? Meph Runs? As flawed as the “skip everything but the boss” design might have been, I’d rather fight an interesting boss than flop around killing random minions.

Imagine you got a stacking buff every-time you killed an elite, but that buff only increased boss droprates and was consumed when you killed a boss. Now going to face Bosses with their story and their mechanics quickly turns into a nice way to cap-off a good play session, if the increased droprates are significant enough players would finish their play sessions feeling justly rewarded, as the last thing they’d see for the day would be a pile of freshly-minted legendaries.

Useless Legendaries (AKA No Trading)

I like the soulbound aspect of this game, mainly because it makes your loot feel earned. But it also reduces the reward of continuing to grind gear, before drops became soulbound, every legendary drop counted. Even if it wasn’t good for you, you could likely find someone who actually needed it. Trading is not the big problem here, the problem is that you often see a beam of light and get your hopes up. Just for them to be crushed when you get just another Fiery Brimstone Forgotten Soul. Crafting is way too limited, and it feels as mostly a tool to get entry-level items. And while Forgotten Souls see their fair share of use with Enchanting, I’m sure the players would rather have the chance at trading for a fresh new item, specially if it is the one they’ve been targeting.

We don’t really need trading to give additional value to dropped legendaries, there are many uses that could be given to Forgotten Souls. What would you do to make Forgotten Souls worth it?  Leave a comment below and share us your idea.

But that’s not everything, there are problems that Diablo 2 also had. But in a time where your options for endless online gaming weren’t as popular as today’s MMOs, maybe those problems weren’t as important back then, I doubt Ultima Online and Everquest had a player base big enough to skew the gamers’ perspectives on what should be expected of an online game. I’m not even familiar with the mechanics on those games either.

Lack of content

Everybody complains that Blizzard is too slow to produce content for World of Warcraft, but at least they are doing it. Every semester we are likely to have a new set of bosses, new more powerful items, and a new raid area to explore, every two years we get an expansion with new quests, new zones, more dungeons, and even more bosses.

How can you compete with that? Diablo 3 just doesn’t have the resources to keep pumping out content. With no subscription costs, and no micro-transactions, we really can’t expect Diablo 3 to have endless replay value. We’ve all seen it in WoW, the pre-expansion lull is too long and people start getting bored of repeating the same content and they leave, maybe to return when the next expansion hits. The same thing happens with Diablo 3, you can only repeat the same tasks for so long before you get bored by them.

People will say that Diablo is an ARPG, not a MMO. But if we focus on the active player base that waits for the patches, and keeps milking the game’s replay value, you could say that for them the main thing setting the two genres apart is the control scheme.

But when the same players that complain about lack of content are highly opposed to DLC and Microtransactions, there’s not much that can be done there.

Poor Game Balance

A way to keep content fresh, is to relieve it with a different character or a different build. You might be doing the same old tasks, but you are doing them differently. The background is certainly the same, but your gameplay experience is much different. Diablo 3 is perfectly geared for this, the skill and rune system allow for a myriad of builds to be played with in the blink of an eye. Or rather would, if skills were correctly balanced. A player who’s at the point of needing to explore different builds to keep things fresh, can safely be assumed to be on the higher end of progression. This means that they aren’t likely to settle for anything less than optimal.

So even if you have hundreds of possible builds, how many viable builds do you have per class? Not many, in fact depending on your definition of viable; You might find out that the list of viable builds for class might just have a single element on it.

Game balance is not a trivial subject, in fact I’m currently doing academic research on the matter as finding the right values to keep a game balanced is a rather complex optimization problem, and something pretty interesting from a computer science perspective.

Still, Blizzard has shown that they are trying to correct Balance issues. With every new patch, skills get tweaked, and hopefully this results into more builds being end-game viable.

Diablo 3 is worth well beyond its price tag, even if there’s a lot to do to improve its replay value. Now we have to wait and see what’s next for this franchise, maybe Blizzcon will bring us some tasty Diablo news.

Maybe one day Sanctuary will host its own Open-World RPG, wouldn’t that be something?