Embrace tradition and stagnate
Chance-based gameplay
We have established that the traditional model of the action RPG utilises gameplay that is almost complete devoid of active elements requiring player input beyond lacklustre screen clicking that effectively triggers various equations to run in the background. As a result, despite the genre’s reliance on randomised elements throughout the mechanics and content, there is limited uncertainty or chance specifically due to the demarcated lower and upper boundaries of the damage-per-second/health pool calculations. As previously indicated – once you know that you can simply out-maths the content, you’ve effectively solved it. As a result there is limited engagement past the short-term novelty effect.
In my most recent delve into Path of Exile, I noticed that, around Act 4, I wasn’t really all that engaged anymore. I was able to breeze through everything with no great problem. I can’t tell if my build was just better this time – I’m sure I had more trouble previously – but I’m assuming that, between the seeming increase in gem drops and thus options, general power creep, and possibly my own better understanding of the game, it has become easier and faster to progress. On the other hand, Act 5 presents you with a severe damage spike, at which point you get these pronounced walls of difficulty that a player will just run into.
This is ok, except that because of the blitz of effects hitting the screen, often the players is left without really knowing why the wall is there, or how to get over it. They might, therefore just presume that they simply need to hit more things harder per attack, resulting in mass area-of-effect spam.
The thing that stands out is that the problems I’ve had with Path of Exile have been present across the genre for over a decade now. The same issue that were there in Torchlight 2 in 2012 are there in Path of Exile in 2024, which is indicative of how little the format has evolved.
Damage spikes
One common wall comes in the form of sudden damage spikes – usually elemental. So fire, ice, your parents disappointment in you, etc. This isn’t bad on its own – in fact, I’m absolutely in favour of it as a base element. The problem with the way that this functions is that you end up with optional-non-optional choices. This is common across all ARPGs but to my mind, Path of Exile stands out as the posterchild for this.
In PoE it’s generally considered essential to have capped resistances at around half way through the story, so you need to do a whole bunch of crafting a passive allocation in order for your character to survive. Broadly the ‘trash mobs’ are a series of vague shrugs. In fact, in the boss battles, they are there entirely to kill so you can refill flasks. I’m not really a fan of ‘trash mobs’ in general – if you’re just putting models on the screen to put models on the screen… what’s the point? Do something interesting with your assets. From Act V onwards, there are very notable damage spikes tied to elemental damage. Which is fine – some of them come with interesting side effects, ice for instance freezes you and doubles as crowd control that you need avoid.
The problem is that you’ve effectively got all these slots and nodes so you can make a choice with how you assign them – possibly not into resistances and hit points. But if your baseline is 75% resistances and X amount of health or die… then that necessitates a base level point spend. Past a certain point, it seems like literally every character would end up looking relatively similar, because the game is effectively making the choices for them. You can pick a different choice, but it is effectively a trap. If you need to hit a base level of a certain stat at a certain point, then why even have the choice in the first place? I’m not sure that I know what the answer to this problem is, and obviously many developers have been wrestling with it themselves. Remember the Diablo III automatic stat allocation controversy?
For all the proselytising about Diablo II, much the end game resistance game amounted to everyone waddling through dungeons, weighted down by an inventory full of charms. While you can excuse the game given its time, I don’t care how thick your nostalgia goggles are, lets stop pretending it was perfect.
Didn’t you just say the game has no evasion? Why are you now telling me you’re having to avoid the crowd control?
True enough, but you – theoretical ‘well ackshully’ guy – are missing the broader point. PoE does have ‘movement’ skills, but it’s more a descriptor attached to skills that weren’t designed with the intent of evasion and damage negation, they were designed with movement being a part of an offensive ability. Leap slam, whirling blades, etc. The game clearly wasn’t built with skill and position-oriented gameplay in mind – as is the case for second-generation ARPGs. So Grinding Gear Games have had to make a series of slightly awkward shifts in their design choices over the years to accommodate an emergent feature that the base game isn’t designed for. If it were, there’d be a dedicated evasion mechanic, such as those present in Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2.
On the other hand, Diablo III‘s Sorceress gains the ‘teleport’ ability relatively early on, a clearly defensive movement ability that is relatively out of step with the majority of other attack-focussed abilities. Other classes each have defensive abilities, too. The barbarian gains speed buffs and damage reductions, the monk has healing abilities, the demon hunter has caltrops and smokescreens; but it all seems more like a nod to the idea, than a full integration. The teleport skill becomes the primary example of this in any ARPG, usually used more as a means of advancing through the content faster, than it is a means of escaping danger. The gameplay, overly focussed on aggression in any and all circumstances, eschews anything beyond damage amplification – and this tends to be a consistent note running through the majority of titles in the space. Amusingly, the Diablo III barbarian has the skill category ‘tactics’, which is arguably one of the major elements that the dungeon crawler subgenre is missing.
Diablo IV seems to have tried to advance on this concept, with dungeon bosses often throwing out crowd control effects. However, seemingly in a bid to appease all audiences again, this is executed in a profoundly lumpen manner. The Broodguard Spider in the Defiled Catacombs, for example, throws out a truly comical amount of web traps and poison pools. The intention is to keep the player moving and off balance, split their focus between the boss and the ground – and this is a good intention, I am fully in support of ARPG enemies utilising crowd control against players. It really does force an increase in engagement. However, the crowd control needs to at least appear to have a semblence of forethought or intelligence behind it.
The way in which the Broodguard Spider functioned, was to effectively mirror the player in spamming one or two abilities for all that they were worth, covering the arena in myriad tiny circles of crap, and hoping it was enough. The effect way that translates is to turn the boss fight into a hybrid floor-is-lava / inverse whack-a-mole mess where the player is less concerned with choosing an angle of attack or watching for an exploitable opening, and more concerned with running around like a decapitated chicken until there’s a gap in the crap covering the floor from which to attack. Spare some pity for melee characters doing that fight – it’s not so much an epic climax as it is a slapstick scenario played out against the Benny Hill theme chortling along in the background.
Gear checks
Diablo III had probably the most notorious version of this problem. Originally, the Inferno difficulty was touted as this nightmarishly punishing content that would take players years to get through. In the end it took only 4 days for the first person to clear it. Did they sleep? Did they stop for meals? Did they get up to go to the bathroom? Don’t answer that last one… there are some things best left unknown. The reality was that Inferno wasn’t hard, it was just an artificial wall that you had to grind through to get to the point that your numbers were big enough to do the content.
This was was exacerbated by the real money auction house, which made the majority of the game a weird buy-to-buy-to-play trading experience. In fact, I came across one post that claimed that one of the most efficient farming methods wasn’t killing monsters at all, it was breaking pots and barrels. The Blizzard developers literally had to nerf the gold output of pots, because the players would just spend their time breaking the scenery to get the money to buy things off the auction house to sell for a profit. Killing monsters inadvertently became a mini game. Diablo III began life as a commerce simulator.
Gear checks are bad because they are entirely arbitrary. In Diablo III inferno terms, you’d spent however many hours getting through the other difficulties and getting enough gear to comfortably beat the last boss. Then you’d arrive back in Act 1 and immediately have to sell all your gear on the real money auction house, and then swap everything out for the basic grey items that dropped from the first skeletons or whatever. This was because the most basic gear in the next difficulty upwards was substantially numerically better than the best gear from the end of the last act in the previous difficulty. There was no way to outplay the game. You just had to out-maths it. I put the game down at that point.
They fixed the Inferno difficulty, along with the itemisation rework, a couple of years post-release, of course, but it’s telling anytime a game will let you go from the final boss of the game in one instance to the most basic enemy in the next, and find that the basic enemy is harder.
I remember a similar thing happening in Torchlight 2. I had been doing absolutely fine up until one specific point where I just ran head first into a difficulty wall, and it didn’t really matter what I did play wise, whether I used healing items efficiently, whether I moved well enough, and attacked at effective times – I’d die. I twigged that what the game actually wanted me to do was go back and grind a bunch of better gear in previous areas for however many hours, before it would allow me to progress. And I put the game down.
Gear checks are not a difficulty curve, they’re a Boolean. Do you meet this arbitrary condition? If 0, you’re allowed and if 1, you’re not, based on an abstract calculation. You don’t have to get better, you just have to get ‘more’.
It’s the gameplay equivalent of the wealth divide. I suppose at least with Diablo you can accumulate enough money numbers to eventually play with the monstrous “elite”…
One-shot mechanics
Finally, there are one-shot mechanics. These are, as the name might imply, ‘one-hit and you’re dead’ attacks. I am actually reasonably fine with one-shot mechanics in games that are specifically designed with them in mind – ie: games designed with defensive mechanics in mind. As long as they aren’t abused, and the player is given the adequate capacity to negate them, then it usually boils down to an issue of timing – which is a fairly fundamental aspect of game design since its inception. Hit the button to late, or go in the wrong direction, you fail. Hit the button at the right time or go in the right direction, you win. So, with that in mind, this is mostly a problem for first- and second-generation ARPGs, which do not, at a fundamental level, account for active defensive mechanics. By that logic, in theory it should be a completely reasonable tool for developers to incorporate into third-generation ARPGs.
The reason that this does not work for traditional ARPGs is because there is no real counter to it. At some point you can’t even maths your way through it – it’s just a ‘fuck you’ button. Doubly so, because it’s usually applied in such a ham-fisted manner that it simply feels cheap – with monsters killing the player long before the player can ever see them. It’s the digital equivalent of ‘rocks fall, you die’. The player, therefore, is forced to accept a minimum number of deaths while they slowly work away at a big wave of enemies or wall of health and bullshit. It’s not satisfying.
On the other hand, what else do the developers have? If you know that your players have pre-calculated your increased difficulty numbers, then the only tool that you are left with becomes the ‘fuck you’ button. Realistically, they will be aware that one-shot mechanics are not a well-considered approach to difficulty, in purely numbers-based games so neither the players, nor the developers will be satisfied, because at a fundamental level the mechanics aren’t built with that in mind.
The inevitability of area-of-effect spam
When games become almost entirely dependent on numbers, they inherently devolve into area of effect spam. It’s a game of who can roll the most dice – the player or the computer? Ultimately, despite the endless claims of increasingly ludicrous build numbers, for instance the tens of millions touted by Blizzard before the launch of Diablo III, there is only really a set type of playstyle which the basic mechanics favour. That style is wipe the screen. You build the character that will turn the game into a sort of inverted etch-a-sketch. The screen is filled with stuff, you shake the etch-a-sketch, the screen is cleared. That’s before you even start talking about ‘viable’ builds, at which point the millions of potential options usually decreases to a handful. of variations on ‘reset the etch-a-sketch’. Your only option is how to shake it – with fire? Or ice? Or poison? In the end it’s irrelevant. The result is a game genre that touts itself as endlessly creative, but due to the limitations it is built around, ultimately revolves around a mono playstyle.
Purely numbers-based gameplay is increasingly shown to be limited in contrast to other games with a broadly action-focused style. One-button screen spam is passive, and in the end, despite all the options, still tedious. These are games which the developers are trying to construct around being played for hundreds of hours – if not thousands. Path of Exile starts to become notably tedious somewhere around Act 5, even as the number of item sockets and gem mechanics begin to notably open up and you can start experimenting with skill combinations and synergies. By that point you’ll have clicked on more things than a Mechanical Turk employee trying to teach an algorithm what a mouse is. There’s still five acts to go, and after that the end game content. All this in a 3-4-month timeframe. This sounds exhausting at the best of times. If you’ve got a job or other responsibilities, forget it.
The pack density also becomes comical. It’s to the extent that players are walking from one monster closet to another, literally fighting multiple new groups of enemies in every single room. Except it’s obvious that, at this point, PoE‘s gameplay had pivoted to being designed with the one-button-map-clear meta in mind, because if you slow down then it becomes incredibly laborious to be wave-assaulted by goons that you can kill a dozen of in one attack.
I get that there’s some element of power fantasy here, and maybe some people do get a thrill of power watching twenty guys evaporate at once, but personally after I’ve seen the ‘vanish the bad man’ trick three times I just roll my eyes and want them to get out of my way.
Maybe that’s the Londoner in me – I have places to go and I move fast, so step with a purpose or piss off. Maybe that’s the next action RPG – a rush hour-themed dungeon crawler where you navigate through procedurally-generated train stations and bus stops, obliterating hordes of slow walkers and phone zombies. I’d play it.
Stagnation
That’s one of the reasons so many dungeon crawlers are adopting dodge mechanics. Because the genre itself is stagnating due to this refusal by the loudest section of the player base to move on from the gameplay loops of the 90s and early 2000s.
And at this point, people come out of the wood work and complain that everyone is just imitating the Souls-like subgenre. No, really it’s like clockwork – look at the absolute idiocy in this Reddit thread. I don’t know if you guys had noticed, but the reason people like dodge mechanics is because there’s some engagement involved. It’s not just that ‘all the cool kids are doing it’. it’s a genuinely good mechanic. Moreover, it allows developers more freedom and creativity in designing their games. It is an order of magnitude superior to ‘put 5 points into evasion per level and hope the percentages work in your favour’.
Obfuscated clicker games
At this point, people say, “oh, you haven’t even got to endgame yet!” As if that addresses the point. What does the fact that people don’t get to end game tell you? If a game stops feeling meaningful long before end game, because the majority of it is just plowing though heaps of trash in a mindless daze and then running into a numeric cliff face, then what does that tell you? It tells you that there is a massive problem at the core of the design. Moreover, what’s end game? The same thing. The same thing, probably with some more modifiers. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but the fact of the matter is that the end game is just the main game with more modifiers, and if the main game can’t retain players then your end game isn’t very good, is it?
If getting to endgame is a process of plowing through a thousand mobs and dpsing down a boss as fast as possible with a screen full of disco lights, and that gets tedious long before the end game, then why in the world would you want to do it even more? If the bosses are the only meaningful part of the game, why even include the rest of it? Again, Path of Exile – having arguably usurped Diablo as the posterchild of the ARPG genre for damn good reason, and despite all of its mechanics stacked on mechanics – is the best example of this issue. But this was the case all the way back in Diablo II with Mephisto and Baal runs. The Diablo-clone subgenre effectively turned itself into the boss-rush genre with unintentionally forced downtime because the majority of the content was designed to be something that is just there to get in the way.
And people will say “just git gud.” Git gud at what? There’s nothing to get good at. It’s just percentages running in the background. Eleven years ago, Yahtzee Croshaw, in his satirical review of Diablo III noted, “Ultimately, I confess I still don’t get the appeal of dungeon crawlers. Seems like I could recreate the essential experience by opening Microsoft Excel, scrolling down ten thousand pages with the down cursor key, and then typing, ‘The Most Splendid Trousers of Them All!’“ That is an uncomfortably accurate skewering of the state of the genre – arguably through no fault of the people trying to create these games.
As various other people have noted across the years – there’s a surprisingly small gap between an ARPG and a clicker game.
Why open Diablo when I could just play Banana…?
Words and Chaos 
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