Part Two: A discussion of genre,or, why ARPGs are not actually Action games.

OK... I've procrastinated long enough. With Activision Blizzard having announced that there are multiple Diablo projects in development, and others opining on what the future of Diablo should look like (I have my own thoughts, on that, too, but we'll save that for later), it's time for me to finally write the second instalment of my epic analysis of Diablo III, and where it went so very, very wrong. I guess it's my week for finally getting off my ass and doing some of my long-delayed projects.

So... part two. If you're only just discovering this blog, you probably haven't read part one yet, which was posted a while ago, with many digressions in between then and now. I spend that whole post praising the good in Diablo III (and, yes, there is good in D3 to praise), and you should start by reading that, before diving into the deconstruction that's about to ensue.

We shall start by describing Diablo III's genre. Yes, really.

What is genre?

In order to discuss anything meaningfully, it helps to establish some terms and their meanings in advance, so that we're all talking about the same things using the same language. Genres providessimultaneously the most useful, and most divisive, sets of such terms available.

Useful, because the ability to define and classify anything allows you to talk about the common elements that link members of that class together. Divisive, because genres are, by their very nature, arbitrary and ever-changing, and often vague. Genre is not a great tool; it's just our only tool.

The Wikipedia article on genre will go into this subject in a lot more detail, and gives a decent jumping off point if you want to dive into this subject in more detail, but the basic definition of genre that I'm working with is a set of labels which enable one to categorize various works of media, provided they are all communicated via the same type of medium. Genres in film are different than genres in music, for example.

This brings us to the singular difference between genres in video games, and genres in other narrative media. The mechanics of, say, reading a book or watching a movie remain remarkably consistent over time. There have been attempts to experiment with random-access narrative in books, for example (lexicon novels, choose-you-own adventure, &c.), but in general, the content of most traditional media is experienced sequentially.

This means that one always starts at the beginning, finishes at the end, ad experiences everything between in an order which is laid out by the work's author. Interactivity is minimal, and so classifications tend to focus on the thing that changes most from work to work: the contents. Stylistic elements of plot, setting, theme, and tone can create a significant differences between science fiction and romantic comedy, between historical period pieces and works of pure imagination, and so on.

Games, however, are interactive, and the mechanics which govern that interaction often overwhelm the difference found in the stylistic elements of the content. A puzzle game, a platforming game, a first-person shooter, and a role-playing game can all have science fiction themes, but be wildly different gameplay experiences that a fan of science fiction films, say, may or may not even like.

Games can also be light on narrative, or have branching plot structures which allow the player to determine how the story progresses and ends. Depending on the game's mechanics, a player may or may not experience all the story that a game has to offer, or pay any attention to the details of the narrative at all, in a genre which doesn't put a heavy focus on story development.

So, in video games, genre is almost entirely defined by the game's mechanical elements, with stylistic elements of plot, theme, and setting serving purely as adjectival qualifiers.

What is Diablo III's genre?

Diablo III is generally described as an Action Role-Playing Game; specifically, one played from a 3/4 isometric perspective. This genre was basically invented by Diablo, with Diablo II serving as the genre-defining classic that all other ARPGs have been emulating ever since. But what is an ARPG? What does that even mean?

Enter the RPG...

Well, it helps to look at the origins of the RPG genre itself. RPG video games have their origins in pen-and-paper games like Dungeons and Dragons, which began by adding player-defined and persistent characters to a tabletop miniatures war game. The mechanics of the genre were originally all about the tactics of combat between these figures, but quickly evolved past that to be all about the characters themselves, and their journey from weak, powerless neophytes into heroes (or villains) of epic stature.

RPGs, then, are games of character progression. And, crucially, they're also games in which players are able to play characters that are totally unlike themselves. An academically-challenged player can move through the game space as an extremely-scholarly character, because the game's events are not governed by the players' own skills. Instead, they're governed by random chance, which is the great equalizer of game design.

Random chance, or RNG, essentially makes any outcome equally likely to happen. When RNG rules, developing a character becomes an exercise in influencing the chances of some events to make them more likely, while trying to guard against some of the more likely mishaps that will commonly befall you, all the time trying to balance these two needs against the restrictions that the game's systems impose on the player.

Because a player avatar that can eventually develop to do everything in a game isn't really a character; when weaknesses and limitations are only temporary, them you're not building towards some final result that is uniquely yours. Instead, you're just passing time while eventually unlocking everything in the game, which is less a game about character progression than it is Progress Bar, The Game.

Enter Diablo... the "action" RPG.

So, pen-and-paper RPGs became games in which groups of players worked within the limitations of the games' RNG-based progression mechanics to develop unique characters, which then interacted with each other to generate unique, dynamic narratives. Video game RPGs, however, had to re-create that same feeling of a dynamically-evolving narrative, but without the benefit of having other players to bounce off while doing so.

The result was necessarily more constrained than the limitless possibility space of Dungeons and Dragons, and often leaned heavily on dialogue options to provide things like exposition and narrative branching points. The story was all about its dialogue trees, with combat providing exciting interludes between all that talking. Or, as was more likely early on, reading, since fully-voiced dialogue was rare in early RPGs due to limitations of the early data storage media like game cartridges and floppy disks.

Diablo changed all that.

Much like action arcade titles, Diablo's story was rudimentary and linear; there was dialogue (fully-voiced, too), but it was mainly just the odd bit of exposition. The story was minimal, being just enough to propel the player along a path from the Cathedral of Tristram to the hellish depths, with a confrontation with the actual devil as the game's climax. Diablo wasn't about its story; it was all about its combat, which was the A in ARPG.

Here's the thing, though.... the name notwithstanding, Diablo really wasn't an Action game.

Games in an Action genre are defined by collision detection. Objects on the screen collide with each other, with the outcomes of those collisions being decided base on the game's rules. Jumping across a gap in a platformer, for example, succeeds or fails depending on whether you were moving fast enough when you hit the jump button, and often whether you started your jump close enough to the edge of the gap. If you want to hit an enemy with an attack, you have to time the attack so that it and its target reach the same point in the game space at the same time.

Diablo didn't do this. 

While it had a much faster pace than earlier RPGs, which were mostly turn-based (emulating, as they did, the turn-based combat mechanics of pen-and-paper RPGs), Diablo's mechanics were still the RNG-based character progression mechanics that had defined the RPG genre up to that point; the outcomes of game events were decided by random dice-rolling, and not by anything like collision detection.

Diablo may not wait for you to take your turn, giving it a similar feel to an Action game which plays out in real time, but the turns are still in there; they're just disguised. If you want to jump a gap in a Diablo game, you walk up to the edge of the gap, target the other side, and trigger the appropriate skill; if you can make the jump, then you do so; if not, then nothing happens. This is a start contrast to a platformer, where your ability to gauge that distance against your speed and hang time are crucial elements of the game play, and failure to gauge the jump properly results in your toon's demise.

Action Role-playing Game is something of a misnomer, because ARPGs are not action games; they're RPGs, in which random chance trumps your twitch skills. This continues to apply even to games which incorporate RPG-like progression mechanics and loot-drop systems in the hope of recreating the addictive action-reward Skinner box loop which is a prominent feature of Diablo. If you can finish a game without using its progression mechanics at all, then it's probably an Action game; if you must master the game's progression systems in order to beat the game's final boss, then it's an RPG.

What was true of the original Diablo was also true of Diablo II, and remains true in Diablo III.

Outcomes in D3 are ruled by RNG, so it's not  a "true" Action game... but it's really not an RPG, either.

Every outcome in the game is determined by random chance, to such an extent that the game's players will often jokingly offer prayers to RNGesus when wanting to achieve specific results, and praise RNGesus when desirable results are generated by the game's random chance mechanics. So, Diablo III must be an RPG, right?

Well, not really. Because, while it has all the trappings of an RPG, and game play in which RNG is determinative, Diablo III doesn't actually have any character progression systems to speak of. Oh, the vestigial stubs of those progression mechanisms are still there, but all the progression has been stripped out of them.

Gone are player-assignable attribute points, which didn't work with the gamepads that console players would be using as input devices. Gone, too, were skill points, which had similar issues. In their place are the Primary Attribute system, and an arcade-style skill & rune unlock system in which every character of a class gets access to all of that class's abilities, and the ability to switch them around at will.

Primary Attributes:

The Primary Attributes all give damage bonuses at the rate of +1% to damage per attribute point, plus a defensive bonus which was supposed to be different for each Attribute: STR gave bonuses to Armor, which protected against all kinds of damage; INT gave elemental resistances, which was good against some of the highest-damage enemies in the game, but still left you vulnerable to melee attacks and arrows; and DEX gave Dodge, which allowed you to completely avoid damage from a percentage of incoming attacks, provided the attack was targeting you.

In principle, this would characters with different primary attributes to play very differently, with the STR-based Barbarians being tankier than DEX-based Monks, an INT-based Wizards being more fragile in the tradition of all RPG spell-casters since D&D. The system had balance issues, though, which resulted in a clear hierarchy which made STR just straight-up better than INT, which was better again than DEX.

This could have been corrected; Torchlight II has an attribute system in which every stat has some value for every character class, and Diablo III could have implemented something similar. Rather than admit that their design wasn't working, though, Blizzard instead buffed INT to be functionally equivalent to STR, with both now granting resistances to damage of all kinds. and ultimately reworked DEX to be mechanically identical to STR.

That only leaves VIT, which governs the amount of HP that each character receives, but every character gets the same amount of VIT with each level, as they level up, which means that you might as well just be giving players Damage, Defense, and HP directly. The Primary Attribute system may as well not be in the game at all.

The Skill system:

The Skill system, which unlocks everything for every character in a class once after enough enough playing time, is also not an RPG progression system. And the Paragon system, which was added to the game in patch 1.0.4 to help mitigate the game's total lack of RPG systems, didn't provide any character development, either; instead, is just gave each character a fixed amount of Primary Attribute, Vitality, Gold Find, and Magic Find, with no choices left for the player to make, and thus no chance of a unique-to-your-character outcome. Once again, this isn't progression; it's just Progress Bar, The Game, with the player just marking time as their Paragon XP meter fills over and over and over again.

That leaves random loot drops as the game's only remaining RPG-like mechanic... except that they didn't design any system for generating loot, either. The Auction House papered over this lack to some extent, allowing players to pool the results of millions of random loot-drop events into one place, and then pay for potentially useful ones, but in a action RPG with neither action nor RPG mechanics to speak of, the fact that the loot which was the game's only remaining mechanic was mostly being obtained outside of the game is clearly an issue. Only the people who made out like bandits on the AHs were happy.

Reaper of Souls did not fix these problems.

To their credit, Blizzard eventually did acknowledge that they game they'd made had fallen far, far short of players' expectations. They made a big deal of their 2.0 reboot, which was supposed to provide players with the "progression that they'd been asking for from the beginning," while also reworking every aspect of the game that touched on the way characters dealt, healed, or mitigated damage... which is to say the entirety of an ARPG, which is focused almost entirely on those things.

But they tried to fix the game without changing any of the game's core systems. The Primary Attribute system is still in place; the DEX = STR change is actually a post-2.0 change. The Paragon system was moved from the character to the account, and made open-ended, but it's still a system in which the individual bonuses gained each level are basically worthless (they have to be, since the system allows for infinite "progression"), and also meaningless (since you will eventually max every Paragon bonus available, except your Primary Attribute).

The fact that the reboot was called "Loot 2.0" should have been a red flag, of course; that was the way Blizzard attempted to shoe-horn back in all the game play that they'd previously stripped out of the game's other RPG systems. But while a loot system now existed, and the auction houses removed so that you had to play the game to access it all, the loot was still generated by RNG, which meant that gameplay was still 100% about time spend grinding, and not about the player's character-development decisions at all.

Later attempts to fix that problem led to not-the Horadric Cube, which allowed several different ways to access the loot-drop RNG, and ways to slot more items (or, at least, their effects), but didn't address the issue of a dice-rolling game that's exclusively about loot being fundamentally uninteresting.

Oh, sure, there was still some theory-crafting, and some really creative and challenging-to-play loadouts did emerge... but they almost always involved three or four of the game's rarest items, which most players were unlikely to have. And, naturally, any of these builds which became at all popular were promptly nerfed into oblivion by Blizzard.

Worse yet for a loot-centric game, all the game's most interesting loot is level 70, and thus not available at all to players of the basic game (which has a level cap of 60), meaning that these so-called fixes for the game aren't even in the game -- they're behind an expansion-pack pay wall. If you feel like Diablo III was well worth the $60 you paid for it, and RoS truly elevated it to be worth $100, then that's your call, but Blizzard were rebooting this thing because of its acknowledged deficiencies of design. Fixes for the deficiencies of an existing game are not, in and of themselves, supposed to cost extra.

And don't try to tell me that Act V's story was worth $40 by itself, either. For one thing, there wasn't enough of it; and for another thing, the base game's story was another deficiency that needed correcting. Oh, yes, the story... did you think  I'd forgotten about the story? Don't worry, I'll get to the story... next time.

Could D3 have been done differently, in a different genre entirely, and work better?

Why are you even asking? Of course it could have.

Look, as I've said before, Blizzard own the Diablo IP; if they decided mid-stream that they didn't actually want a PC-centric ARPG, and instead wanted to focus on creating an arcade-action title for consoles, they absolutely had the right to do so. They just needed to incorporate Action game mechanics into the mix; which is to say, collision detection. Victor Vran did this, and while the results don't have a AAA level of polish, the mix does work.

They could also have just made a traditional ARPG, and ported it to consoles. Sure, some of the attribute and skill menus would have been a bit of a challenge to rework for a gamepad control scheme, but Path of Exile went exactly this route just recently, and it also works.

They could also have just been bolder about some of their design choices. If the traditional Diablo attribute system was seen as a liability, why not just eliminate it entirely? Items could roll with attack damage, damage resistance, and hit point bonuses (both flat numeric, and percentage), eliminating the need for that system entirely, while also simplifying loot... something which was clearly needed, since the original dev team didn't have time to finish designing the game's loot.

Or course, they could also have introduced something more like Torchlight II's attribute system, which was designed by former Diablo/Diablo II devs specifically to address some of the issues with the attribute systems of those games. Even if the attribute points come entirely from the loot which drops in-game, having any attribute on any loot drop be something which is potentially valuable, regardless of the class you're playing, would have preserved the original intent of the designers, i.e. allowing characters with different attribute foci to play differently, while also providing an enormous improvement over what D3 ended up with.

The same with the skill+rune unlock system. Why not make it a rogue-lite thing, with the player unlocking skills and runes as they first level class, and having access to everything they'd unlocked when leveling later toons of the same type? As it is, the skill system is a boring chore; unlocking everything is a task that must be done, but not a joyful process of discovery since most of it's useless. Why make players do this over an over again, to no gain?

And those are just the first few ideas that I came up with, off the top of my head, while typing this blog post. The thought of what a talnted game development team should have been able to accomplish with six or seven years to work on it... well, let's just say that thoughts of what Diablo III could have been still make me sad, when I think them.

The most important thing, though, whichever way they'd decided to go with the game's development, is that Blizzard should have been more honest with their customers about what the game actually was. Having deliberately stripped out almost all of Diablo III's ARPG elements, apparently to facilitate the process of porting the game to console, Blizzard wnt on to market it as a hard-core, old-school ARPG for PC gamers. They talked up how Diablo III was being developed on PC, for PC, and then released a game which felt like the half-assed port of an unfinished console title.

And, before you say "but the game was developed on PC" -- all software is developed on PCs. You might compile and test a console game using a dev kit, but you don't write code with a game pad. Mobile games are developed on PCs; it doesn't make them PC games. Too many changes went in a console-centric direction, with none going the other way, at a time when Blizzard had already hired Josh Mosqueira to do exactly that, for it to be coincidence.

So, could it have worked? Yes. Would that game, developed to be something other than an ARPG, and honestly marketed as the game it was, rather than as the game that Diablo fans were expecting, still have moved 10 million copies in its first month? Probably not.

I mean, I'd probably have bought it, and been less disappointed with the results, too, but long-time Diablo fans didn't want a dramatic departure from what they knew and loved; they wanted a continuation. Which was why Diablo III was marketed as being exactly that continuation, in spite of actually being a radical departure from what had come before, simply in terms of its mechanics.

And also in its story, but that is a topic for next time...