Let’s put why Diablo IV is failing into three buckets:
- Old, unoriginal, simplistic, basic combat. From abilities being lifted from preceding games to entire builds being focused on doing one thing for tens and even hundreds of hours there is little in this game that advances general gameplay or the genre. What was novel and satisfying decades ago at the dawn of gaming is niche and uninspiring now. There are still people who enjoy and swear by it, but tellingly even those people admit “Diablo” is for a chill, mindless power fantasy trip. See some monsters explode after a hard day’s work or when you want to relax. Bygone are the times when a game like this could be considered a masterpiece - now it’s at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of what gaming stands for. In other words, Blizzard have managed to turn The Devil into a punk-b1tch. “666”, “hell”, “terrifying”, and using some dark colors are the marketing lipstick they put on this decadent pig.
- Lack of exciting and worthwhile itemization and endgame. What most players find redeeming about the ARPG small-boned skeleton is that you can put a lot of meat on it with items. This grind and chase represents enough progression and reward to keep at least a nucleus of players happy. Without it the abomination is lifeless.
- Mostly lack of difficulty with pockets of unfun, uninteractive difficulty. Mindlessness has its limits. Do you guys not have phones?
A Compound Ability Tree, which is a term I just made up that may or may not be very suitable for what I’m about to outline, can be thought of as an ability that branches out. Let’s leave the Basic and Core abilities aside. The remaining four are the industry standard - usually you press the corresponding button once, the ability activates, and then it goes on cooldown. What I’m proposing is that pressing the button once is just the beginning or gateway. The single ability, whatever it is, activates, but as opposed to going on cooldown it goes to the second level of the particular ability tree. The four ability slots change to whatever the second level of that ability tree is, the buttons stay the same. In essence, the levels of the tree replace your abilities until you complete the tree, i.e. until you perform one ability on every level of the tree. The abilities don’t have to be related to each other or to the initial ability at all except for being placed on the same tree (e.g. 1-4-4-etc.). Finally you’re back to the four normal abilities and the initial ability can go on cooldown.
The Compound Ability Trees can be an entirely endgame mechanic delivered to players in the form of “loot” - an extension and intensification of the item chase and progression. The ability trees have to be built out through special items you find and earn, i.e. mostly drops. Let’s say that these ability trees date back to the time when the Nephalem were at their strongest and were capable of doing greater things. Somebody decided to catalogue the knowledge of this greater power and to suffuse the writing with whatever essence, magic, etc. is requisite to perform it. These are the rare items you encounter in Sanctuary. To have an ability tree of this sort you may first need a Tablet (like Moses and the Ten Commandments, except it boils down to Thou Shalt Kilt Myriad Monsters and Daemons). Then on this tablet you can slot items akin to Spell Scrolls that represent each ability in the tree. You can also have Passages of Conjunction that are slotted between levels representing some sort of modifier. Akin to Runewords you can even have some final level ultimate abilities conditional on what you did. There is a lot of flexibility in this framework beyond what is explicitly described.
The guiding principle is an emphasis on the active rather than the passive - putting power in the hands of players rather than baking it into the system. Letting players make choices and challenging their execution. Let’s consider the potential impacts this system could have on the fundamental problems of the game:
- You can seriously raise the ceiling and dynamism of dated combat while bypassing the technical and player mechanical issue of increasing the number of buttons. Not only would variety and possible combinations increase there should be competitive and conditionally better choices within ability branches. The expansion in choice can go hand-in-hand with increased difficulty in monster/boss/enemy design to induce players to have various options within branches to respond to dynamics on the battlefield (additionally, deeper levels should perhaps be unavailable until populating shallower levels with abilities being easily redistributable, or there could be variance in this too, many things can vary should be repeated). When you stop just baking things into the game and hand power to the player directly then you can take challenge outside of the realm of background math and onto the actual screen for players to react to.
- Loot takes an exciting and long term dimension. Drops can meaningfully change or enhance characters over many hours of playtime specifically in the problematic endgame. Players will also have to mix, match, and play with what they come across rather than just having builds and itemization progressing blandly.
- Presently the game faces bipolar issues of difficulty. The biggest one is lack of it, however, where it exists (e.g. in higher level Nightmare Dungeons) it often takes the uninteractive and unfun form of being one-shot or CCed to death. You can also just get pummeled/overpowered. A damned if you, damned if you don’t sort of dilemma. Boring one way and boring the other. By improving combat you create room for funner difficulty reliant on action/reaction, choice, and execution. When the player character is less limited in what it can do monster design can become more active and dynamic too, present more of a threat with a greater capacity to counter or outplay it.
This could be very difficult to implement and the implications are far-reaching, but it’s exactly the sort of ambitious and innovative thinking that this game needs. It could also be partially implementable and of course testable as seasonal content. Betting on nostalgia has been going on for too long and has failed too many times. The irl treasure goblins who took the Diablo name for granted to the bank have decisively tarnished it and thinking small from here on out is waving the white flag, imo. I also want to point out that as an endgame system/mechanic this is intended to raise the ceiling rather than exclude the people who by their own admission just want to derp around in the world of Sanctuary. Evidently those people are insufficient, and the true spirit of Diablo should be greater.
