Occasionally I feel the desire to spend a week playing a Diablo style ARPG, have some fun, and then hit a wall that keeps me from enjoying the game further. This mostly has to do with how Diablo style ARPGs have not changed much in the last 20 years. The majority of improvements are related to UX decisions and player retention with end game systems and not the actual game mechanics. Let’s break down the best and worst parts of these games and see if there is room for improvement.

Best Mechanics of Diablo ARPGs

• Awesome skills to fight hordes of enemies 
• Large skill trees giving freedom of choice
• Finding rare and cool loot out of the piles that are dropped by enemies
• Events that change up the gameplay, even if only a little bit
• Learning to kite enemies and not getting overwhelmed
• Difficulty scales with the player and the player gets rewarded for the difficulty
• Optimizing builds and making something broken
• Option to refund skill points/levels to try new builds or make a failing one better
• Health potion restrictions and mechanics
• Structured goals and rewards for playing the game and grinding
• Playing with friends

Worst Mechanics of Diablo ARPGs

• Skill trees mostly only contain small negligible bonuses the player needs to get through to reach the more interesting abilities and bonuses
• 99% of the loot dropped is pointless and only there to be turned into secondary resources. Only so many items are usable and having massive amounts of loot becomes a chore to sort through; it requires more external systems such as loot filters to assist the player to find what they want.
• Not leveling fast enough
• Unfair non-skill based effects that lead to death such as stuns and stopping movement. 
• Death consequences can be very heavy sometimes and usually waste the player’s time
• Shops are mostly useless for buying items, only exist as a way to dump loot

Let’s go through each of the worst mechanics and look at how it could be improved.

Skill Trees

Skill trees tend to have filler stats to pad out progression as fully designing a skill system where every choice has impact is fairly difficult. It’s also a way to make smaller steps of player engagement, players getting things constantly while playing will give a sense of progression and reward, despite the reward not giving them anything significant. Let’s say we make every point on that tree very impactful to the player’s character. We speed up the process of discovery and reach the end goals of the player a lot sooner. It is very exciting to the player and they will likely hit the peak of their enjoyment a lot sooner. Additional time spent playing that character might become repetitive but the player can start a new character class and experience more of the game with their limited time. Overall it’s about getting players to the content they want to experience.

Loot Drops

This is the primary mechanic for all Diablo style ARPGs but it is possibly the largest restrictive factor in them. The idea of finding something powerful is great and leads to the player trying new things. Most of the time though it provides very minimal value and likely doesn’t add much to the game experience. Path of Exile has tried to create a variation where the loot turns directly into crafting materials that help develop the character rather than turning it into a middleman resource like gold. This is a step in the right direction but could be taken even further. Let’s say the majority of loot that drops from enemies is crafting resources of various rarities and the few items that do drop are immediately impactful to the player. Now the player is very excited to see item drops and isn’t highly dependent on randomness to see improvements to their gear as they can spend crafting materials on improvements they want if the game doesn’t generate the right loot for the player.

Slow Leveling

This was a particular problem related to Grim Dawn. The game’s pacing was fairly slow and didn’t really have enough to keep me engaged as a lot of levels were just small stat bonuses and nothing that makes the gameplay more interesting. The game was much more enjoyable after installing a few mods that added faster leveling and more skill points. Other semi-modern ARPGs like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile have good leveling curves that keep the player engaged. Diablo has a strong linear progression, constantly giving the player new options for many of their abilities at each level. Last Epoch has similar skill trees to Grim Dawn but simply gives the player more levels and more choices at each level to keep players engaged. The games in this genre are about creating an ultimate character build and should really push towards getting players to that point.

Unfair Enemies and Death

Death is a strange mechanic in these games. Generally the player is either perfectly fine or instantly dead, there is rarely an in-between where the player has a chance to recover from a mistake. Sometimes games in this category have enemies that can instantly stun the player or stop their movement without player interaction. Enemies are always chasing the player, so if their movement completely stops for even a second it allows all of those enemies to reach and complete attacks on those players. These effects are fine if there is a skill based way to avoid these effects such as a dodge roll or movement ability and even enemy tells or ability targeting circles that show where the effect will hit soon. When they don’t have any of the above it is very frustrating to die from something that can’t be prevented. Sometimes when players die they get reset to the start of the level which is fine, but the enemies are no longer there up to the point where they died so the player is wasting time returning to the actual gameplay. Respawning enemies will simply help them get stronger to progress further into the level. 

Useless item shops

Majority of item shops function as a way to offload loot and it’s incredibly rare that they offer something worth buying. Instead, what if they occasionally alerted the player that they had high tier loot? This could even be expanded further by letting the player tell the shopkeeper what types of items they are looking for, and the shopkeeper only presents those items to the player. There’s a lot of potential for improvements here as the idea of an item shop could be something entirely different. At a certain point, is it even necessary for a player to return to town to offload loot? Perhaps they can summon the shopkeeper directly to them. If selling items is only a means to get crafting materials, perhaps the player doesn’t need a shopkeeper and can just break down items into materials at any time.

Is the genre already reinvented?

Looking over all the good and bad mechanics, a different genre comes to mind that solves these problems but changes the gameplay entirely. Modern ARPGs that are not based in stats or loot but more in player action and skill such as Hades and Curse of the Dead Gods. The roguelike formula offers the player choices at each step but keeps the game refreshing by ending the game just as the player reaches broken levels of gameplay. They start again always looking to optimize their builds throughout a run much like players do over an entire season of a Diablo style game. Players get secondary resources but they are spent on impactful choices at shops throughout their run. They also get player progression resources that act as experience to fill in permanent progression that functions much like a skill tree. The action mechanics make sure the player always has ways to prevent the worst to them by player skill and health becomes a valuable resource to be managed. These games compress Diablo style ARPG mechanics down into a smaller package that can be experienced in a short amount of time.

That said, there is still space for Diablo style games to exist because a lot of players really enjoy the grind of building up their character. The genre can be further streamlined to get players into the groove of playing and grinding without a lot of downtime from actually playing the game.