Good or bad, for better or worse, everyone is talking about Diablo 4 these days, so I decided to throw my hat in the ring (cause I like to be original, you know). And from the noise rises a lot of emotions. The initial success triggered a wave of criticism, influential streamers leaving the game and a general sense of frustration towards the game. And I believe I know why: no one knows, and apparently neither do the designers, what this thing actually is.

In the first few hours of playing Diablo 4, it presents itself as a Diablo 2 successor. The gothic aesthetic, the dark and bloody story and good old Sanctuary, an awful place where you couldn’t be faulted for procrastinating on that trek through the woods to visit grandma. But then you gain a few levels, grow in power, get comfortable and the mask suddenly drops … it was Diablo 3 all along !! An ARPG, true and through (I know that’s not how the saying goes, but my version is better, deal with it) with hordes of monsters filling up your screen to be decimated in a few mouse clicks and enough loot to make you vomit gold. 

Within four hours of gameplay, you feel like Kratos in a nursery. And then you look at the map and think “wait a minute, this is an open world. There are random events on the map, I can go everywhere, I see other players running around. Is this supposed to be an MMORPG?” For some time, you could be forgiven for thinking it borrows the best part of the three. But comes a point, no matter how much you love the game, you have to realise the unicorn was but a donkey with a plunger on its head. It's just a very nice donkey, and a very nice plunger.

Many have speculated on the why. Was the open world a directive from an executive convinced open worlds are still the hot new shit in town? Was the design team afraid to lose the hardcore ARPG crowd if they didn’t fulfill the power fantasy grind fest they expect from the genre? Did the design team lack cohesion in their vision for the game, or misunderstand the core pillars of the genre they were working with? Your guess is as good as mine honestly (and most people who claim to know for a fact are lying, confusing “common sense” guesstimate for facts and reality). Personally, I would wager it’s a little bit of all of the above, as things often are. But I think why is the wrong question to ask. I think the right question (and the whole point of this article really) is: can we make something out of it? Not only do I think we can, but I think it’s an easier task than one would expect.

Steering the ship

The first step to fix a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be is to choose a direction. Is Diablo 4 an MMORPG or an ARPG, and there are about a dozen ways to define the distinction between the two. But for the purpose of Diablo 4, we are going to look at the End Game Meta, or in simpler words: what’s the point? ARPG are Loot driven games. Kill the monsters, get the loot, kill more monsters. (I know some people say it’s not and there’s more to it, but I disagree, and it’s my article). MMORPGs on the other hand, are Achievement driven games. It’s all about the feeling of accomplishment of beating that new Raid boss or bringing back a dragon’s head to mount it on the wall of your Guild’s house. Currently, Diablo 4 is sitting all the way at the Loot driven end of that spectrum and we need to slide that scale somewhere closer to the middle to fully harness its full potential.

Let’s get to work

Now that we have a direction and established our objective, it’s time for the real work to begin. We need to tackle and tweak four aspects of our end-game: crafting, challenges and objectives, open world content and social interactions. Let's take them one at a time.

Crafting

Any form of crafting in a Diablo game needs to maintain some sense of RNG (this is, after all, still a loot pinata game). So we’ll add just one feature. The ability to, through the occultist, swap one affix between two different items of the same type, using a new unique material. To maintain a sense of RNG, the affix’s numbers are rerolled during the swap. Just like affix rerolls, you can swap only one affix on an item, but can swap that slot indefinitely. Now remember that unique material used for the swap? 

This needs to be acquired by killing World Bosses, and for two reasons. First, you don’t want to gatekeep a new feature behind our new challenge bosses and force a poor soul to smash their head against a wall trying to beat an optional boss that was designed for the most hardcore and skill players (and eventually, we would run out of walls anyway). Second, because I have played two characters past level 75 and haven’t fought, nor seen, a single World Boss, primarily because I could not care less about them. So, let's kill two birds with one stone and make World Bosses relevant.

Challenges and Objectives

First, we need challenges. To slide the scales towards an achievement oriented end-game, we need, well… things to achieve. Diablo 4 already has end-game bosses: Uber Lilith and Tormented Echo of Vashran (season 1), so let's just throw three more in there. Three new golden doors on the map, with a big ugly demon trying to cave our skull in. And when I say “trying to cave our skull in”, I mean really trying. Big mean bosses with phases, mechanics and skill checks. Something we can test our builds, but more importantly, our skills against. We can even use the mechanics of the bosses to incentivise new seasonal builds, like an immunity to Vulnerable, a resistance to damage over time or weakness to Overpower damage (we will make Overpower a thing or die trying!).

But now we have a problem: we need a reason to fight these bosses. I mean, most of us would go in there just for the sake of it, but a little candy at the end to rationalise our insanity is always nice. Problem is just another word for opportunity, so let's start introducing a little bit of targeted farming in our ARPG, give a little agency to our players. Something like a guaranteed item type drop for each boss (weapon, armor, jewelry) or guaranteed specific affixes type, like skill ranks, defensive stats and offensive stats. Our objective here is to allow players to convert skills into time and offer a choice: grind nightmare dungeons hoping to find the perfect piece of loot or attempt a skill check and increase your chances of optimal loot.

Open World Content

Diablo 4 has already a surprising amount of open world content. It just sadly… doesn’t really matter. So let's make it matter. We already introduced a new crafting material to World Bosses. Let's do something similar for Helltides. An item set which can only be found in helltide? A new set of legendary aspects which can only drop on Helltide gear? One Unique item per class which can only be found in Tormented Chest? The world’s your oyster really. As long as it’s unique to Helltides and relevant to player’s builds. Finally lets increase the frequency of Legion Events and World Bosses a little to make them farmable, and voila. We now have an open world worth spending time on, rather than teleporting from town to dungeons and dungeons to towns.

Social Interactions

As far as social interactions go, I really have nothing clever to offer. Smarter people with more experience (and more interest in social interactions fullstop) have spent the last two decades coming up with various social features to engage players and they all more or less follow the same basics: talking, teamwork, trading and fighting other groups of people for artificial glory. There’s a chat box, trading (ish), the PvP people can go play in their designated sandbox. Get a damn marketboard (seriously though Blizzard… folks want a marketboard real bad) and hope that the challenges proposed earlier inspire the power of friendship or something. 

The one thing we could do to forward our objective driven agenda is to introduce a guild house (I’m sure there’s an empty house somewhere in a stronghold whose landlord was recently repurposed as a demon’s afternoon snack), so that we can mount the Butcher’s head on a chimney mantle once and for all, and maybe introduce a Clan chest. This would certainly fix some storage issues in the process.

The outcome

Now let's look at what we’ve made. We have a game with the core gameplay loop of an ARPG, running around murdering demons as if they were made of cardboard and feeling like a god among mortals. But you have the End Game Meta structure of an MMO, with skill challenges, targeted farming, best in slots items found through varied content and a little crafting to stop the RNJesus from making your life too miserable. And while I used far too many words to describe it (yeah, I like to be thorough, sue me), all we really did is add:

  • Three bosses
  • One crafting material
  • One occultist tab
  • One new Helltide specific drop
  • A somewhat basic MMORPG social feature.

Kinda looks like a basic patch note when you put it like that, doesn’t it?

But then, Is it still an ARPG?

I already hear what the most hardcore ARPG fans will say. “This is no longer a loot pinata anymore. You just don’t understand the genre”, and to this I respond, “Yeah, you’re probably right. But truth be told, I don’t think I care.” Does a game need to correspond to exactly what you expect from a genre, or isn’t the goal to make the best game possible for as many people as can be? 

I am no oracle, I’m just a guy with unsupervised access to a keyboard. But I have played more than my fair share of games as a service, and abandoned even more. And listening to many of the complaints about Diablo 4, what I hear is: we are longing for a sense of purpose. ARPGs are a lot of fun, but no one retains audiences like a well designed MMORPG, and I think Diablo 4 is in a unique position right now to take a page from their book and become the game it wants to be. And if all fails, well at least I’ll have a reason to push my characters past the damn level 75.