Diablo 4 makes me miss the Division 2
How in the goddamn did Ubisoft & Massive Entertainment drop the ball on giving us a The Division But Star Wars???
Finally stopped waffling on D4 a few days after the expansion launch; some of my gaming friendos were going to do a run of the expansion and new season and, while I wasn’t really feeling it, I figured what the hell, I’d just got done getting a ton of entertainment out of the WoW RWF so Blizzard deserved the tip. Despite my hesitancy I’ve very much enjoyed it, would recommend, it’s a very pleasant-if-benignly-pointless treadmill. It’s an incredibly optimized only-have-a-few-hours-after-work game in that it’s trivial to fill short periods of time and feel like you’re making progress, and you kind of don’t get extra returns from spending a ton of time on it. Definitely a game that’s designed to waste your time, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
I have minor personal problem with games now where I often feel like I need to be long term invested in a game to want to play it, in a very irrational OCD-y kind of way, even if my long-term goals aren’t realized. This is one of my biggest hurdles to carving out some of my Steam backlog in between other games I’ll play for longer periods of time. My impulse now when looking at my library is to go to the guides, find one of the all-achievements guides, and try to gauge how easy it would be to hit them all without having to invest in multiple playthroughs or challenge runs. Like, I generally don’t want to spend time on most games outside a playthrough of the main experience but I also want to feel like I’ve gotten a complete go of it, which tends to be conflicting goals in a lot of cases. This is very obviously a stupid way to approach most games.
Else I tend to want my games to have long term progression goals. The shortcut to this is for games to have anything resembling an “endgame” with either compelling logistical components or easily accessible social elements. Bonus points for both.1 Something like Borderlands 3 or Nioh 2 fits here, and I could maybe have saved a lot of time by saying “just about anything that could be said to have been descended from Diablo 22”.
But Diablo 4 is heir to a particular style of endgame design that scratches that itch hard, a style that both never quite caught on and seems to have died out before its time. There was an era of live service/MMO games where the endgame was highly task-directed where very often you didn’t have grand goals in the form of, say, a traditional MMO raid but instead had a constellation of types of relatively bite-sized things you were intended to be doing as distractions3.
Here’s a cross section of the repeatable things you can do that have explicit rewards in Diablo 4 before reaching the maximum level 60 and have completed the campaigns:
Open world events
Timed open world legion events
Dungeons (from the perspective of other ARPGs, these are functionally side areas with contained objectives versus full MMO-style dungeon instances)
Cellars (basically single room Dungeons)
And here’s more stuff that you can do once you’ve hit max level and finished the campaigns, ie the “endgame”4:
Several new flavors of Dungeons (the rewards and incentives to do each are all slightly different)
Nightmare Dungeons
Undercity
Dark Citadel
The Pit (ie Rifts from Diablo 3)
Infernal Hordes (the closest it gets to a straight horde mode)
Even more open world events
Helltides
Timed world bosses
Seasonal events
Uber bosses
Whispers, which aren’t their own events per se but are additional rewards for doing designated tasks that will randomly be any of the above plus additional open world mini-quests
For many games that do this kind of thing, things tend to fit poorly together in terms of incentives. For the two examples I’m covering here (Diablo 4 and the Division 2), what works about them is that they tend to be rewarding either gear or items/currency/materials needed to incrementally improve that gear—everything funnels in more or less the same direction. Very importantly, for these two examples, these activities aren’t tied into the usual sorts of systems that are typically associated with free-to-play and/or gacha-style mechanics.
An example of a game that does do that (and suffers quite a bit for it despite otherwise being a great game) is Lost Ark. The sharpest difference is in the degree of determinism that isn’t tied to external monetization. Lost Ark’s gear systems are designed to funnel players towards an unambiguously pay-to-win purchase structure: upgrading gear eventually gives way to ever decreasing chances to upgrade gear and so you’re increasingly at risk that the materials you’ve spent time gathering disappear completely and make the time you spent collecting them actually, unavoidably worthless (and the ways to mitigate this consistently require real dollars). Diablo 4 and Division 2 have extremes in loot variability mitigated only by playing the game; you may not get the outcomes you want but you’re never at risk of getting no outcomes.
Anyways, the reason why Diablo 4 makes me miss the Division 2 is because the Division 2 had things you could actually do with well-optimized gear. Division 2 had proper raids.
Well, okay, so, a case could be made at this point that I’m now just straight describing traditional MMOs like World of Warcraft. I think what separates the “specific style of endgame” I’m drawing a category around Diablo 4 & Division 2 for, from traditional, WoW-style MMOs is the relationship between gameplay and loot. D4&D2 flood you with gear, but the intention is that even the gear you don’t want is building resources towards getting or improving the gear you do want—in many ways juggling the loot is a substantial part of the gameplay. In MMOs when you get an upgrade you generally ditch what it’s replacing wholesale, and much of what you get that you don’t need often doesn’t convert cleanly to currency for upgrading5.
Now, when I say I miss the Division 2 there’s a couple mitigating factors here. Actually, I don’t know why I feel obliged to be embarrassed that I like the Division 2 because it was actually a pretty solid game from the start (they’d worked a lot of the formula’s bugs out in the course of the first one). But I did go back to it at a time and place in my life that holds some strong nostalgia.
This would have been the summer of 2020 just before the second raid was released (fandom wiki says June 30th). I’d just left my job at Walgreens6, COVID-19 was starting to ramp up, and I was happy to take a break from both and reconnect with some old gaming buddies. They and I had independently played the Division 2 sometime after the original release and they were thinking of picking it up again for the new expansion and raid.
Now again, the game was pretty good from launch, but they’d done a good job of expanding lightly on their loot systems and by now there was a good amount of viable build diversity7. Because nobody had done it comprehensively for the newer updates, I was able to have some fun putting together a spreadsheet parsing all the different weapons, which gave us a little bit of an edge beyond the stock reddit build recommendations in some situations8.
I can’t remember exactly how many weeks we prog’d Operation Iron Horse or how many weeks it took us after we cleared it to ensure everyone got one of the legendary rifles from the end, but the whole process was pretty fun.
One of Diablo 4’s major changes compared to both Diablo 3 and Division 2 is less of a reliance on gear sets to define builds. Both of those games had sets of gear with set bonuses9 for using multiple of the same type that boosted abilities to such an incredible degree that it mostly invalidated non-set-based builds, and the meta was a game of which set bonus was the most positively imbalanced. In a lot ways this was nice if you’re the type of player who wants to spend less time thinking about build optimizing; the actual choices are clearly defined and you merely have to pick the gear set that appeals to you and your preferred playstyle either by design or by power.
Diablo 4’s trick is instead tying build-defining ability modifications to legendary affixes, which are very easy to swap around. This allows for a more flexible degree of build diversity while still being simple and understandable enough to not be intimidating for players who don’t want to have to invest much into figuring it out for themselves (or in other words, legendary affixes slot very easily into a simple build guide).
I think this is a pretty strong improvement over the previous formula. It’s a subtle difference and honestly things still will probably shake out the same in terms of what’s powerful but it frees up itemization a little bit. Though counterpoint: this makes it a little harder to get optimized gear since random affix rolls are important again where set pieces may have had less variability in affixes (though actually I don’t remember precisely how true this was in Diablo 3 or Division 2). Counter-counterpoint: some uniques being mandatory per build at the extremes in Diablo 4 dampens that by decreasing the number of slots with variable affixes. I guess that’s kind of a delicate balance but I very much feel like Diablo 4 got it right.
The conclusion here is that I hope there’s a wave of games that follow in Diablo 4’s footsteps in the same way that there were generations of games that followed Diablo 2’s example, but I also hope we get that with some lindy endgame components the way the Division 2 executed on. Basically I really kind of need a the Division 3.
This is an incomplete explanation because a lot of games I’ll spend a lot of time on don’t fit in to either. For example I recently spent a lot of time with shapez 2 and Satisfactory, the former of which doesn’t have achievements beyond accomplishing diagetic milestones and the latter…actually I guess it does literally (and virtually only) have “compelling logistical components” but what I’m getting at here is that the games that tend to hold my attention the longest and the most thoroughly are vaguely live-servicey, often in the style of an MMO.
Also I guess this leaves out a lot of other types of conventional games, but on balance those are also becoming sort of poisoned by the siren-song of achievement-goal-direction. I was going to say a start-to-finish playthrough of a JRPG doesn’t fit but the most recent example, Persona 4 Golden, was partly achievement-motivated. But I still play these kinds of games for the long term—I didn’t 100% complete the final ending of P4G but I approached everything up until I stopped playing from the mindset that I would.
Although, I never really got much into Diablo 2.
I know that WoW went through a phase of this too where bits of progression were tied to a mix of open-world events and niche side activities. The more recent expansions still have some of this but there was definitely a point circa Legion when it was more intense. I’m not enough of a historian in this arena to know for sure whether WoW was responsible for the wave of these or if it merely rode that wave for a couple expansions.
Many of these are actually locked by the campaign and are available before you hit max level, but this is mostly illustrative.
This is admittedly less literally true for WoW but I encourage you to think of WoW as a very well-refined outlier when we’re talking about MMOs.
I don’t recall if I’ve put this story on the Substack yet but the shortest version is that I got fired on the day I was going to give my two weeks notice.
Truth be told there were maybe only one or two builds that were worth pursuing for most people but, since it’s my fetish, I was able to construct several additional nonstandard builds that ended up being useful for the raid. I got to be that guy who could whip out something niche when it actually needed to be whipped out.
Though IIRC Bullet King ended up on top for a lot of situations, turns out not having to reload on an LMG is pretty powerful.
To further explain, there would be multiple items in different slots you could combine to achieve bonuses for equipping some total amount (like, say, 2 or 4 from the set). For example, the Hard Wired set in Division 2—a set that makes a more frequent use of skills much more viable and powerful—has six possible items to use in the set (in Division 2 set bonuses are for using 2, 3, and 4 items). Set items in Division 2 are set up to incentivize using the backpack and chest slots, which provide additional bonuses that synergize with the set, but for the remaining 2 items you have 4 slots to use as you want or as fits with the build to get the remaining 2 for the 4-set bonus (or if you wanted to be maximally lazy you could simply use all 6 items since their base stats are also more likely to synergize with the set regardless).
Often the largest possible set bonuses were of the highest power for a given build, but occasionally there might be a reason to combine multiple 2-set bonuses from different sets.
This is also how tier set bonuses work in World of Warcraft, and a lot of games still use these types of gear bonuses.