Is this the apex of the ARPG genre? One that peaked so quickly and never recovered after that...

Is this the apex of the ARPG genre? One that peaked so quickly and never recovered after that. It seems like a lot of games that came after Diablo did the most logical thing, make it bigger with more things, then even flashier with each one trying to out do the other game. Over time I realized that Diablo struck the best balance of mechanics than other games in the genre even if it does lack any in depth class skills beyond the standard one you start with.

Before I thought more I had the better, blue magical items, rares, set items, and uniques. You get all these tiers of magical items that when you see that yellow item drop you bolt to it. There is a problem with this though, at a certain point why would the player even look at the inferior blue items that have a much higher chance to spawn over the other magical tier items when the player probably has rares and uniques. Those blue items tend to not have the modifiers to warrant even looking at them, none-the-less picking them up. It is common in games to just see blue items untouched while people blitz through the game. In Diablo you only had magical items and uniques. When you saw a blue item drop you bolted towards it because each blue item had the potential to change the file for your character with great attributes. Even if you have uniques equipped you wanted to know what that magical item did. Even then if it wasn't something you could utilize you could sell it and actually have a use for your gold to buy items from shops like spell books or other magical equipment that could trump the equipment you found.

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How loot affected the character and how it scaled in relation to foes you fought is much better as well. There was no need to continually start a new game with a character you leveled up to grind for loot. Diablo was much more balanced with clearing the game in a single go, with no monsters respawning and the player utilizing the items they found to the best of their abilities rather than needing to farm bosses or areas to hopefully find that gem they need or a much better weapon or armor to be proficient to either survive or kill at any reasonable rate. There is a lot of farming, to the point that it isn't surprising that people run their bots and would rather not play the game for hours on end because the loot grind isn't a good aspect in the genre, just the discovery of loot which loot farming only guaranteed over many hours of time, and even then it might not be an item that could be immediately useful for you.

Then the flow of combat was different than modern ARPGs. In a lot of titles you can run across the screen, get swamped by enemies, then smash your area of effect attack and decimate hordes of enemies. Your character is essentially a demi-god. Even melee characters get ground pounding attacks, or some attack that can teleport them across the room and allow them to attack, or some other fantastical physical strike like whirling around. It removed any bit of low or mid fantasy feel in favor in being flashy and tossing enemies at you to be grinded into mince meat. While in Diablo you often did want to pull enemies apart from one another to take on small groups. Your character was much more vulnerable. Not only that but the powerful spell caster wasn't proficient at combat at the early portions of the game, and he needed to be built up over time traversing the dungeons before he became more powerful with his spell slinging.

Then of course the cherry on top of it all is the atmosphere of the game. The haunting music, the art direction, seeing shadows shift in the darkness outside of your light radius. A lone hero delving deeper into the Earth as the monstrosities become even more sinister. I mean just listen to the caves music.
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What's good about it apart from genuinely great atmosphere, graphics, OST? It was novelty back then, but nowadays? The combat is slow-paced but tactical it is not. A warrior walks (because you can't run, of course) towards enemies, smacks them with a weapon and drinks potions. If you die, you just load a quicksave. It's a bad realtime roguelikelikelike with all good elements of the roguelikes gutted out. At least Diablo 2 and most of its clones has fun character building. Original Diablo is just a dungeon walker.

> The combat is slow-paced but tactical it is not.
You had to pull apart enemy mobs, you had to lure ranged characters around corners to try to attack you, or you had to circle firing squads while you closed in on them. You cannot go into Hell and just barge into five Doom Knights. You will get cut down in an instant, none-the-less what other succubi you might attract just from that.

You don't need to be that mindful in the clones of Diablo 2 since you can smash that AoE skill as the enemies rush break neck speed to your character to just get smacked by your skill.

Diablo is not an action RPG. It lacks the action element.

Would have said clicker but it is a divisive word.

>You had to pull apart enemy mobs
I don't really remember doing this much. Most of the game was just clicking and drinking potions. I had a fun game as a mage though, found the unique axe, got some Str boost items to use it, cast Energy Shield since it's stupid in D1 and was smacking people in the face with it. Including Diablo. But overall, I just don't see the replay value in it. I know people spent lots of time trying to get that Godly Plate of the Whale etc. but I just don't get it.
>You don't need to be that mindful in the clones of Diablo 2
Yeah no, they all have their ass-reaving enemies. Remember those whisps in D2? Or the iron maiden troll casters (RIP)? Multi-shot lightning enchanted?

I'll buy that Diablo 1 has the most tactical loot system of the genre. It's the only one where I did any gear swapping. You treat gear as good for specific situations rather than as a generic 'good for everything'

However there are a number of areas it is deficient in.

First the level design. The lay out of Diablo 1 dungeons is very bad generating lots of floors that require signficant backtracking. This combined with the slow movement speed makes for some serious drudgery. Map navigation has significantly improved with more recent games such as Path of Exile which has less backtracking or Grim Dawn/Titan Quest which has handcrafted maps.

Second the combat in diablo 1 sucks. Unless you play a caster you have only one type of attack. It encourages doing tedious slow shit like pulling enemies into corridors or abusing their dumb ai (which gets even more tedious because you move so slow). Every game that came after improved in some way or another. Newer games even FEEL better with more *umpf*

As for atmosphere. It's good but it can only go so far with such a repetative tile set. Path of Exile is a billion times better because there's so much more to it. It has every environment Diablo 1 has plus a billion others. It's also way more detailed with little critters running around the forest, waves of water moving. It feels much more like a real world. Piety's floor 3 also is hands down the best tile set in the history of the genre (the one with the rivers of blood and piles of dead bodies being brought in through carts).

Overall I don't think it makes sense to hand the trophy over to Diablo 1 just because it does 1 thing the best, while it's successors did everything else better.

>Putting Diablo in the same tier as Cookie Clicker
You're asking for angry replies. Also nice to see Cthulhu Saves the World, the aesthetics and writing are awful but the gameplay is solid.

>It's a bad realtime roguelikelikelike

Please stop using that word in stupid ways. A game that is not turn based is not a roguelike. The presence of RNG is not one of the qualifiers for word. I know indie-fags like to stick the word on every game they make to confuse people but you don't need to drink cool-aid.

It's a real-time dungeon crawler. Ultima underworld but overhead instead of 1st person, less dialogue and puzzles than Ultima but more RNG.

The wisps aren't that big of a deal until Hell which is a pure gear check which I mentioned one of the positives of Diablo 1 over any other ARPG after it with the player needing to stop progress to grind for loot.

Iron Maiden was a time out spell if you were a melee character, but otherwise you would go into the Oblivion Knights minions which were those Doom Knights and either AoE'ed them if you had one or just smacked them up while in the mob.

>Unless you play a caster you have only one type of attack.
To play devil's advocate, there are bows.
>Piety's floor 3 also is hands down the best tile set in the history of the genre
It's basically a little less sophisticated Duriance of Hate. Also, how did those carts get there??? And what did they eat (before dying)??? I'd be tempted to say I liked Solaris temple more if only it looks pretty unique.

you know D1 literally started as an attempt to make an Angband-y game with graphics, it even was turnbased (and should've stayed that way)

>one of the positives of Diablo 1 over any other ARPG after it with the player needing to stop progress to grind for loot
you don't need to grind for loot on Normal and Nightmare in D1 either, Hell was specifically added for people who like to hyper-optimize characters but still want at least some challenge

You must be an underage , if you first played Diablo in 1997 and not 2017 , Diablo was fucking crazy action. People didn't watch a youtube play through before they played in those times. You got to experience a new game everytime running into randomly generated quests. The first time you hear FRESH MEAT , fuck you you don't know what action is

That most certainly doesn't make it better than all others. Grim dawn in my opinion is better than diablo 1.

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A little bit for nightmare due to the resistance negatives and if you're a melee character there is a good chance your weapon from normal you've been using for a while won't scale well, though it fares better than the nightmare to hell jump.

m8 I played the Diablo demo before the full game was even out. It was not action based then nor is it now. Click to move control is the exact opposite of action based gameplay. If you don't directly control the character it's not action based.

Diablo 1 does have its flaws, but I find the attributes that the other games take like how loot is and how throngs of enemies are often thrown at you and most if not all classes have an AoE attack to deal with them thus making the player much more powerful rather than vulnerable as boring to play. I rarely need to creep around because a swarm could kill me, even if alone the enemy wouldn't be very threatening.

I do agree with the walking pace and the game can improve with skills for the classes BUT it would only be good if it kept in line with the low fantasy theme rather than dashing across the screen, leaping chasms, or punching enemies and having them explode.

>To play devil's advocate, there are bows.
And the fighter really isn't going to use past early level. So the rogue has one attack, the bow. The fighter has one attack. The melee.

And even if you play a wizard are a weird hybrid you still have way less attacks than the other diablo-clones. Less cool attacks.

>you know D1 literally started as an attempt to make an Angband-y game with graphics, it even was turnbased (and should've stayed that way)

The requirements of being a rogue-like are being turnbased and not being able to restore dungeon progress by saving. So even if it was turnbased if you could still quick-load it would not be a rogue-like. It would be a dungeon crawler.

I think what conclusions people is that dungeon crawlers are SIMILIAR to rogue-likes and they get them confused.

>Hell was specifically added for people who like to hyper-optimize characters but still want at least some challenge

Yep and the genre development started focusing heavily on that aspect. We know have stuff like Diablo 3 where the staff isn't even sure why they made the main quest; it's zero challenge and ends in like 2 hours after the newer patches.

>The requirements of being a rogue-like are being turnbased
That's why I said "roguelikelikelike".

>Yep and the genre development started focusing heavily on that aspect.
Yeah. Honestly I'm not even sure I like the genre. I feel like it's not for me. But I played D1, 2, PoE. Never got too far in the grinding zone, though.

You can have a vunerable player even with the modern aoe-spamming style. The way you do is just make the enemies really aggressive and give them some strong special moves you need to avoid.

Path of Exile used to be like that. If you didn't avoid the leap attacks or shield charges it could kill you. You had aoes but the enemies had enough health and defenses to surive them. You also had to have a single target skill to take on the stronger mobs.

Than they made aoe skills scale so well with support gems they dealt as much damage as the single targets. You were killing enemies before they had a chance to swing your attack. In addiiton enemy damage got nerfed so it never doesn't matter if you eat 3 leap slams in a row unless it's from a boss or an enemy that has the stars align during it's random generation.

>That's why I said "roguelikelikelike".
Yeah that just creates more confusion. You're spreading the idea that RNG=something to do with rogue. That's false. If the original rogue had all it's RNG removed and just one handcrafted dungeon it would still be the same genre.

The mind set that rng=rogue is leading to stupid ideas. No one used the word 'rogue' to describe Diablo except when talking about a certain class. Soon people will start calling loot-crates "roguelike elements) if this nonsense spreads anymore.

>Yeah. Honestly I'm not even sure I like the genre. I feel like it's not for me. But I played D1, 2, PoE. Never got too far in the grinding zone, though.

As long as the ability to respawn exists the games will be grindy. Diablo 1 let you reset the dungeon anytime you wanted. You could grind, it just that most people didn't unless they were stuck, because there was no such thing as 'end-game'.

It's possible to do all of diablo 2, PoE's main quest (but not the end game) without grinding. You just need to be very smart about how you build yourself. It might be possible for Titan Quest and Grim Dawn too I havn't touched their 3rd difficulty setting.

I really want these games to come with an ironman hardcore mode. Not only do you only live once but nothing respawns so you can't grind. Than make the enemies as tough as Poe was during it's nemesis league. That would be a true challenge.

>If the original rogue had all it's RNG removed and just one handcrafted dungeon it would still be the same genre.
Randomness is a high factor in Berlin Interpretation. Rogue sans randomness would also be an extremely boring game and a lot of systems in it would simply not work, like identification.

>"roguelikelikelike".
This is why the term Roguelite was created, to describe Diablo. So you don't have to come up with daft stuff like 'roguelikelikelike'.

The point isn't whether RNG is good. It's whether it defines a genre. It doesn't. The amount of RNG has no relationship to the word 'rogue'.

>This is why the term Roguelite was created, to describe Diablo.

This is historical revionism. NO ONE called it a rogue-like. The term was popularized by indie-fags who were either confused or intionally deceptive.

>So you don't have to come up with daft stuff like 'roguelikelikelike'.
How about "random generation"? That's what people used before the indiefags started to butcher language.

>rogue-like
I never said they did, m80. Turn your dyslexia off for second and reread my post.

No one called it a rogue-lite either. If you're saying people did that's historical revisionism.

It's a word created by confused people trying to describe games and concepts they were not familiar with. I don't remember it existing before the indie-fags started using it.

>historical revisionism.
Why are you bringing history into it? It's what the game is NOW.

How can you say that when randomness is such an important part of the genre definition?

>Top down camera
>Arpg

Nope

Dude. My point is that it is NOT part of the genre definition in any what so ever. I've explained this several times over

*Roguelike=turn based. Cannot recover progress by loading game. Those are the traits of the genre

*Randomness: A trait that is in a many variety of games but does not define them.

*Roguelite: A word made by confused or deceptive people. The earliest time I saw it being used was by confused indie developers.

It's a decay of language. When definitions become muddled you end up with confusion. There was already a word to describe games with RNG "randomness". Diablo has it, so does Rogue, and the random track generator in F-zero X.

There's a reason they call it "The Labyrinth"

The key difference between D1 and nearly everything after it is that D1 is a dungeon crawler.

What are you even saying? You can have a labyrinth with detail in the visuals and more than 1 wall tile.

So are it's successors dummy.

Not really.

Grim Dawn fuckin rules.

How so? They have dungeons and you go through with them killing monsters and collecting loot.

If you're going to mention that they had outdoor areas I'll remind you that so did Wizardry.

Not until VI they didn't and post-V Wizardry is a fundamentally different series.

I liked Dungeon Siege 1/2

Well if Wizardry 6-8 and Dialbo 2 are not dungeon crawlers what genre are they?