Diablo 4: Complexity has been confused with Depth

General Discussion
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The word ‘complexity’ has been thrown around a lot like a dodgeball among people talking about what direction of D4 should be like the 2nd coming of the Backstreet Boys, & its arch-nemesis, ‘simplicity’ kicked about like the returned of Brittney Spear.

D4 (IMO & hence truth) doesn’t need Complexity for sake of complexity (unless Blizzard is working for a government branch in Germany). or avoid Simplicity like an unhinged uncle. My bottom line is, they are looking at the wrong thing. They have mistaken complexity for depth. Simplicity for shallowness.

What I think the game philosophy should be:
“Only as complex as needed, but as deep as can be”. Complexity should only be a necessity, NOT the goal. The goal should be depth!

Here are some great real-world examples of things simple, but has depth:

Chess is not complex, you can learn it in an afternoon, yet it has depth. Soccer (& many team sports) are not complex, but there is strategy involved, decision making on the fly (players). Photoshop is not complex, you can learn from an online course within days, even hours, but it has depth because it has the tools that allow artists, photo editors to create the art/ works they envisioned.

Complexity is fairly clear, but what then is depth in context to D4. Depth is subjective, but this is how I define it in the context of D4/arpg

In the same way that Photoshop is deep because it provides the tools (which are mostly easy to understand & use) for user to create their vision/art, depth of game is having the tools (skill tree, talent trees, gears, etc) that allow gamers to create the playstyle, direction they wanted, tools that allow meaningful choices & tradeoff. Nope needed to be complex (it can be for sure). If I want to play a tanky char & just use a big S hammer to hit mobs, does the game allows me. If I wanted to be a wizard that zip around like a lightning bolt while killing stuff, does the game allows that? I want to be a healer, stay at back & buff health regen & provide shielding, can I do that? If I want to command an army of wolves, that rips mobs apart which I watch & apply curses, can it be done? The more “Yes” to these questions, the more meaning depth the game has. What we do not need is Ph.D. in Cosmo Physics to min/max the formula how the damage is statistically most optimized with the 25 different types of damage, each with a different formula.

A simple example:
If I wanted to moved faster, like super faster, what choices do I have? What tradeoff do I need to make.

Lets say I have a boots that give 100% movement speed, but you do 50% less damage. Then I need to decide with a choice of speed, & if I am willing to take a damage nerf. To mix things up, imagine another boots with 1% movement bonus for 5 sec every time you kill a mob, stack up to 50x, buff reset after 5 sec if you lose the buff. It provide ½ the movement speed, & no damage penalty, but to get the buff, you need to be able to kill consistently. Now you have 2 meaningful choices, with a 3rd being just worn boots with a standard 20% increased movement speed.

I have more examples if you want to hear, but I think my point is clear enough.

Let me know what you guys think, & see you in hell.

2 Likes
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hmm…
If I take this correctly, you would agree that Diablo 1 has the most depth out of all games, since, although it is limited in what the players can do, within those limitations, you can actually design any character. For instance, the warrior can learn any spell as long as they equip magic stat boosting equipment and the mage can wear any armour as long as they wear strength stat increasing equipment.

D2 then loses some depth by creating class skill trees, which almost dictate how you play based on the skills available to you. Although items exist to grant limited skill use, it is a clear difference than D1 where an ability could be a staple of your build… let us take a sorc with lower resistance necro curse, unless I found an item with the curse (I’m not sure such an item can exist) I would not be able to play a sorc who hexes her enemies to reduce cold resist and the casts max level FO with max cold mastery. Whereas, within the mechanics of D1, the sorc could find a tome of lower res curse and max the ability, enabling such a powerful design and play style. Depth is also distorted in D2 by reducing the effectiveness of initial skills and prioritising more end skill tree skills. A prime example would be fireball v firebolt, the max damage of fireball easily exceeds firebolt, and with the limited skill points, renders any use or thought of firebolt pointless. In D1 both could be maxed and as such firebolt can become a utilized skill, especially when considering resource drain.

D3 on the other hand has even less depth, as you cannot use other class skills and even the skills you do have require finding a supporting item to boost the damage. Since not all skills are equally reflected with regards to items (compare wiz hydras v meteors and items that use them) this further reduces depth as optimal character builds require certain skills. D3 does not suffer from D2’s redundant skills however, as, if a skill has a use at one level, it will be useful at any level. This allows for a form of depth slightly different than D2, but is clearly not enough to offset the item affix requirement.

As such, in order for D4 to achieve maximum depth, it should remove the skill tree notion and merely create “preferred class skills” to encourage the use of traditional class skills, but not limit the player from using other class skills should they so desire it?

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I wanted to expanded what I said, but I did not want to make the original post too long. Its already too long.

The main purpose of the post, as titled, is to address the confusion of comeplexity vs depth. In a way also simplicity vs shallowness. I did so also by providing some exmaple to hopefully made my pointz across.

I wanted to point out also that which depth is important, it not the sole design goal, other things like class identity, fantacy, time limitation etc. Compromise and pioritising need to be made of different factors.

For instance, if a sorc can wield a 2 handed axe and do physical damage better than a barb, then the fantasy of the sorc & barb will be lost.

As far as the 3 diablo games, I think each has its depth & limitation. E.g, in D1, every class can use every gears and spells, but there is no way to modified the spell in any meaningful way other than spell levels.

D2 go for class focus, & each class has unique skills, though you can have gears that give skill from other classes like Enimga giving teleport . It open up lots of interesting builds & interaction. There are more diversity of builds. It has one limitation similar to D1, skills can usually only be enhance via skill level. There is very limited ways to modified a skill from gear or the tree.

In D3, runes & legs can make signifcant impacts on skills, in theory give most choices. The problem is due to power creep, any skills not supported by sets or legs lags so far behind, & many builds are pigeon holed to certtain runes and gaers due to how OP they are. Every Saders used Akarrat champion Prophet, every Multishot builds used Yang bow, & UE sets.