Why is the Action RPG Genre so Stagnant?

Two decades after Diablo II, the genre is only just beginning to innovate.

“In a dank cave far below the town, I told my dog to stay, unpacked my fishing rod, stuck a worm on the hook, and dropped it into an inexplicable water-filled hole in the floor. The dog whined and lay down. I say still and waited, watching the ripples. Time ticked, somewhere nearby drops of moisture drummed a staccato rhythm on the uneven floor.

My fingers twitched in a pair of gloves I found in a box in a passageway somewhere a while ago. I had to muse on just why it was that someone would leave a pair of gloves in a locked box in a random tunnel in a mountain. They didn’t look particularly valuable. Was the owner going to come back for them? Where they even alive?

My musing was interrupted by a sharp tug on the line. I gripped my rod tight and tugged with a fury. Eventually, with a cry and a sudden splash I keeled over backwards and lay breathless on the wet rock floor. Beside me a fish flopped with futility on the end of the line.

I unhooked it and fed it to my dog. The dog turned into a cow-sized arachnid. This was highly unsettling. It raised a paid of thick hairy pedipalps at me and wiggled two huge fangs. Eight unblinking eyes watched me. The mood of a dog is easy to get a bead on, a tarantula the size of a bull, less so. I hoped it wouldn’t try to lick my face. I thought about riding it but looking at the shifting abdomen made my stomach churn and I thought better. I beckoned to the tarantula and we moved on.

As we trudged down another craggy passage, my torch guttered. I was glad I’d brought extra spares. A large fungal humanoid wandered around a bend in the rock. I stabbed it in the face. They always died without a sound. No mouths. They just keeled over and went still. Uncanny. I don’t what noise I’d have expected from a sentient mushroom, but I never could get used to the silence. I patted the corpse down for valuables and, not for the first time. wondered about the morality of running the pockets of dead mushroom person. It was carrying a pouch full of coins. Everything seemed to carry coins. Was there a functional economy down here? I hadn’t come across anything that looked like a merchant, hadn’t witnessed any exchanges of goods for currency. Why did they always have money?

We wandered down the left hand of a branching pathway and into a larger open cavern. We came face to face with a large pale ooze. Someone back up top had rambled on about something like this, promised a lot of gold to kill it. Didn’t think he actually had that much money – nobody up there was living large. I listed to the description, ignored the rest. He’d given the pulsating mound some manner of goofy name with too many words, but I couldn’t remember it, so I called it ‘Bill’. Bill didn’t look like the terrible harbinger of the end days that the idiot up top had described it as,, but I was concerned with whether Bill could be killed at all. If you stab a block of jelly it might wiggle some, but what has stabbing it achieved…?

Well, far lack of any other options, I gave it an experimental whack with my sword. It went about as well as expected. Which is to say, it wiggled. Then it sloughed forwards, sluggish like. I wasn’t entirely sure it was aware of me as it came on – for all I knew it was advancing arse first. I continued hacking at random, it was unbothered. I was unaware that it had surrounded me until it exploded upwards. Very suddenly I was engulfed.

Word to wise: You do not want to find yourself drowning in ball of cold viscous jellied oil. It was like falling into a river if the river was made out of porridge. My skin burned. How something that cold burns you, I don’t know, but you can take a look under all these bandages, and at the pot of stuff the alchemist gave me, and tell me I don’t look like I’ve lost a fight with a barn fire. Like a fool, when I felt the burning, I gasped. It was in my mouth in an instant, flooded in with a rapidity and a force that told me it was, very aware. If having icy burning slurry on the outside was bad, feeling it slide across my tongue was a whole lot worse. I clenched my teeth hard enough to crack them. Needn’t have gone to the effort. It pushed right in between them and started at the back of my throat. It pushed into my nose. I could feel my nostrils bulge and revolt, the cartilage straining and response something like wanted to sneeze and vomit at once. That sent me over the edge into panic.

I stopped bothering with the sword and just flail. My limbs moved like a drunk in a dream. I tried to call out. I tried to scream. I made no sound. I might have choked. It was muffled. I couldn’t even hear my own muffled hysteria, just the blood pounding in my head and the sensation of this thing forcing itself into my ear canals.

And then there was a shift. A shudder. The pressure of the thing lessened. I redoubled my efforts to escape. It did little, but a second shudder, more violent, distorted the jelly. These ripples flowed around me, I could feel them pass through me. I suppressed the urge to vomit. At the third shudder it withdrew. It shrank back. My head broke the surface. I drunk air the way a drunkard drinks out of a keg tap. That musty cave air was like water straight from the source. I clawed my way forwards and free of that abomination. On hands and knees I retched and threw up, still trying to keep moving. Everything hurt. Outside, inside, it was all pain. I got to my feet, turned and fell backwards. I landed hard on my side, my arm went numb, but I was focussed on keeping that bastard thing in my sights, I scrambled back and away until my back hit the wet cave walls and I kept trying to back away, become part of the rock.

I watched the spider that used to be my dog bite into that amorphous stain against nature. It bit down again and again, the fangs twitching sickeningly each time, but as it did so the ooze puckered and pulsated and it tried to retract away. Pustules formed across the impossible slickness of its glutinous mass and they burst like boils, the craters they left looked corroded. It sloughed away from my spider. It sought escape. A minute of flailing and flopping later, the ooze had corroded fully. It deformed, spread out across the floor like a puddle of decaying fat. Fumes rose into the air out of it. The stench made me retch again.

I retrieved my sword from the puddle, wiped it off on my coat and noticed with unease how even the trace oil seemed to eat at the material. I will need to have the blacksmith give it a look before I go back down there again. I took a glass bottle from my pack and, slowly, approach the stilled ooze. I squatted over it, and watched for movement. A bubble formed and sluggishly rose to the surface and burst. I skittered back like a startled kitten. I do not want to meet another one of those things so long as I live. Collected myself, scooped some of the puddle into the bottle and replaced the cork. With that done, I was more than happy to return to the surface.

Back in town the guy accepted the vial of ichor and paid me very well for the pleasure. On reflection, I should have just scraped something off any old wall and claimed the thing was dead. Would have saved me some bad memories. I doubt he’d have known the difference.

I fenced a bunch of assorted junk scavenged from the hole to the local merchant. He grimaced as he handed over enough money to see me comfortable for a long while, but he eyed the junk with an avarice bordering on lechery, so I figured he was happy.

Then I went to see the gambling girl. She was happy to see me. She’s always happy to see me. She went through the flourishes, I threw a pile of coins on the table and said “black.” Her eyes went wide, but only for a moment. What’s she doing in this dump? If she can keep a straight face like that, she’d make a killing in a city. Then we rolled dice. We put the dice under shells and shuffled them. We flipped coins and added those to another set of shells and shuffled those around. The ball came up red, and I’ve never been too sure on how she accounts for the meaning of the coins or the dice. In the end she shrugged and handed me a large flanged mace she dug out a battered brown trunk behind her. It gives me plus two to leg hair.

I shrugged. It was time to drink. Drink until I forgot the ooze. Drink until I forgot my own name.

My dog was still a spider. Didn’t seem to rely on me for food no more, which was for the best, really. What does one feed a bovine-sized arachnid? Didn’t know whether I should turn it back into a dog or not – could spiders even eat seafood? What’s that old saying, ‘teach a man to fish’…?”

Riiight… ?

Don’t mind me, I’m interrupting the usual bollocks to make a mini-series where I ramble about some other broadly irrelevant gaming-related bollocks.

Far back in the mists of time, a young me bought FATE. FATE is a 2005 action RPG designed by Travis Baldree, who would go on to found Runic Games, who brought the Torchlight series to the world.

In FATE you are a gormless tit with a dog. You start in a small mountain village and some berk standing outside a big door gives you a ‘main’ quest in which you have to go into the mountain and descend a series of randomly generated dungeons, at the end of which you must kill a major guy at the bottom with a longwinded name. Once you’ve done that, you can retire your gormless tit and their dog. In between that, you’re taking randomly generated quests from various people in the town – usually to kill another named monster or a number of a certain type of monster. Very basic stuff.

When you’re in the dungeon you’ve got a fishing minigame that will get you items and fish that you can feed your pet in order to transform them into monsters, making them more effective in combat. This is where Torchlight got that gimmick from. Once you’ve completed a quest you’ll return to the surface with a bunch of loot and sell it to various vendors. With your newly amassed gold, there’s not much else to do in town but gamble for other loot that might be better than your equipped gear. Once you’re out of money you go back into the dungeon. Rinse repeat ad infinitum.

The first game in Torchlight, a far more successful series that you may be more familiar with, is effectively a graphically upgraded version of FATE. Mechanically, it’s almost a one-to-one copy. FATE was my introduction to the action RPG genre. From there I found Diablo II, Din’s Curse and on through a slew of other ARPGs in a similar vein.

Grinding Gear Games, developers of Path of Exile, released their ‘Settlers of Kalguur’ update on July 26th, and I was compelled to dip back into it after many years of absence. While playing, I couldn’t help being reminded why I put Diablo IV down almost immediately after the campaign, with a strangely flat feeling. I was reminded why, despite the town building gimmick, Path of Exile was having as hard a time as ever sinking its hooks into me.

What is an action RPG?

Action RPGs, technically, covers everything from Diablo to Devil May Cry – there are a lot of games that involve playing the role of another character and are focussed on action. But we’re talking about a specific type – the ‘Diablo clone’. This type, as the pet name suggests, stems from Diablo, which started out as a roguelike, but someone at Blizzard took the pause away and figured out they had something good going on. The genre is characterised by an isometric viewpoint, a focus on random dungeons, random loot, with an emphasis on character building. They’re usually played with the mouse where clicking is both to move and to attack. The loop is designed to be a constant ape-brained dopamine drip, but the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this is extremely dependent on the player more than it is the game.

If stockbrokers designed games that weren’t EVE Online, they’d probably make ARPGs. These games follow roughly the same format: advance through randomly generated level, kill an absurd amount of things, rifle through piles of loot and level up. The gear swapping and levelling should be pretty consistent and not take too long, so you get to see various different numbers go up. Repeat for more micro-doses of dopamine.

The problem comes when you realise that for all the animations going on, noises playing, and particles flying around on screen, there’s actually very little actively required of the player. You click on the ground, you click on the monster, you click on the items and that’s basically it with some maths. These games do not expect you to do anything except manipulate percentages. As the genre has become more complex, instead of the games becoming more involved, they have in one sense done the complete opposite: They reward increased number crunching and less playing. To the point where a modern ARPG like Path of Exile will give EVE Online a run for its money in the ratio of ‘spreadsheet to gameplay’ your average player will be expected to do before they can play effectively.

Two decades under the influence

FATE was a long time ago. Diablo II is even older. Before we set off on this mini series, you should know that I am, by no means, a hardcore ARPG player. There are other lunatics who know the intricacies of the mechanics buried under a pile of percentage modifiers, but this is not necessarily about which cog interacts with which gear. I have played my fair share of ARPGs over the years between then and now. What bothers me is that they haven’t changed much over the course of nearly two decades. Sure, Path of Exile took the character building aspect to a level so far past lunacy you’d need the Wayne June to narrate the idea, but at its core, it’s still the same 90s videogame. Diablo I was released on the 3rd January 1997 in North America, with Diablo II releasing on the 28th June 2000. Diablo IV released on the 5th June 2023. Diablo IV, like more or less every ARPG to this day, shares so much DNA with Diablo II, that the genre has effectively become the Hapsburgs of gaming.

That is incredibly unhealthy for the long-term future of the subgenre, as indicated by the increasingly dubious receptions by the fans and beyond them the wider public, despite developers trying to deliver fresh experiences and having more means to do so than they ever have. So what’s going on? Over a series of short articles, I’ll be delving into the action RPG genre, looking at its state of ongoing stagnation, and attempting to see where it might be headed next.