“Maybe the genre just isn’t for you anymore?”
I promise this isn’t become a blog about ARPGs, but apparently I just had more to say on this subject than I anticipated. I swear I’ll shut up and get back to saying something less tedious soon.
I’ve been bitching about the stagnation of the genre for a few thousand words now, and you might, justifiably, be thinking, “maybe the genre just isn’t for you anymore?”
Very possibly. But I don’t think it’s that simple, and I don’t think it’s just me. Which is why I’m writing all of this stuff — because I have this idea that if Path of Exile 2 doesn’t grab me, it’ll put the final nail in the coffin for my interest in this genre, and I wonder if it’s just me. I’m just not enthusiastic about it anymore because I already know the experience and mindlessly clicking on things and allocating stats to a series of pseudo-optional pre-ordained systems isn’t all that interesting — no matter how many particle effects you throw at the screen.
Years ago, before Path of Exile had Acts 5 through 10, and the rain effect during the Dominus fight in Act 3 was still nuking people’s PCs, I was messing around with a character. I hadn’t really planned much, I was just following a general idea based on the gems I found along the way.
There’s a passive tree keystone called ‘Vaal pact’ — it basically turns you into a kind of instant-meal vampire, but also suppresses life regen. Or at least it did at the time, I don’t know if they’ve changed it since. I paired that with a skill gem named ‘blood rage’, which drains health over time, while buffing attack speed and life leech, and refreshes on killing an enemy. In effect, I had ad-hoc turned my character into a mad frenzy vampire that could only sustain its own life at the expense of other lives. In theory this meant I had to tear through maps, into packs of mobs, create as much death as fast as possible, and move on. In practice, I hadn’t built my character around this idea from the start, so my leech wasn’t stacked enough and I couldn’t regenerate any damage I took outside of taking it from enemies. It was an incredibly fun premise, but very quickly I had to take Vaal pact off, because the lack of regen to offset blood rage became my main road block. I would dive into a mob pack, blood rage would trigger, I’d kill everything in a hilarious carnival of death, go screaming off looking for more bodies… and then collapse in a hallway and die due to the health drain. It was actually quite funny.
Nevertheless, the ability to create this zany synergy was incredibly compelling — practical or not. It’s remained a good memory, despite my weariness of the ongoing ‘zoom-zoom’ pit into which Path of Exile has fallen. And that zoom-zoom pit, to me, epitomises the problem with number-crunch ARPGs as a whole. Because the zoom-zoom style instantly transferred from Path of Exile to Diablo III & IV, to Last Epoch, and so on.
None of this is new. This was happening to a far lesser extent in Diablo II — as soon as people knew which node combinationss trivialised the game at a mathematical level, they could search and copy someone else’s build and blah-click-blah their way through what should otherwise have been an interesting, mildly creative, experience. Hence every other character was a teleporting ice sorceress or a hammerdin. Path of Exile just let you do it on steroids by having an ever-expanding number of options.
Despite Path of Exile‘s elaborate skill system, the same phenomenon occurs — someone figures out the nuke-zoom build and blah-click-blah’s their way through an incredible amount of content and then nobody else has to experiment. If they do experiment, there’s not much deviation from the known outcome: area of effect spam, zoomies, and life nodes.
No matter which way the meta shifts, the genre is trapped in a stagnant mire. Do it with fire, do it with ice, both the action and the result remain the same: Click button, clear screen, zoom, repeat.
I don’t hate modern ARPGs, but I do vaguely resent the fact that until very recently, the genre has been forced into a basement to churn out carbon-copies of one fucking game from the late 90s for 20 years by people who are apparently most enthusiastic about the genre — far far more than myself.. Which is odd to me? If you’ve done it in one game, and you know you’ll do exactly the same thing in the next game, then why do it? This is why Path of Exile 2, with its dodging, directional blocking, and WASD controls marks almost a defining moment in the genre as a whole, because it represents progress and a break in the endless sad cycle of rehashing Diablo II until the sun burns out.
I said back in the second post in this mini series that I wondered if the third generation of ARPGs would be a short lived one. Path of Exile marks the merging of ARPG mechanics with twin-stick top-down shooters like The Ascent or Ruiner. And if the broader market accepts and integrates that, as I suspect they will, then I think that could open the gates to a new era of much needed experimentation for the genre.
No Rest for the Wicked also has an extremely compelling premise in its merging of action RPG mechanics with Souls-esque mechanics. From what we have seen, the developers behind it, Moon Studios, who produced Ori and the Blind Forest, seem to have done it very well and have no intentions to stick to the tedious dogma demanded by the ARPG orthodoxy. For that reason alone it is one of the few games in the genre I’m awaiting the 1.0 release of.
To some extent, the ARPG community reminds me a lot of someone who loses a loved one and cannot let them go. They keep cooking an extra meal, they keep the urn on the fireplace, they talk to the old photos, they completely shut out all acknowledgement that that person, as much as they were loved, could be a complete prick at times, or maybe they just had a couple of deeply irritating personality traits. Nobody’s perfect. But this person develops a whole host of unhealthy behaviours because they refuse to break the attachment and accept the reality that their loved one is gone. So it is with Diablo II‘s mortuary cult. The parallels between Diablo IIs fanbase and a person experiencing unhealthy bereavement is actually quite ironic, given the number of walking corpses across the franchise. The fans really should accept that Diablo II is gone, and that era of ARPGs was not perfect and it is also gone. Expecting everything else to match this pedestalled idealisation is delusional and destructive. It’s basically an orthodoxy at this point, which is worrying.
The unhealthy psychology of the Diablo II community risks projecting the same delusional perfectionism onto every new game coming out in the genre and then inevitably rejecting them because they do not fit the traditions well enough, that they don’t rehash the ragged memory of Diablo II with enough fervour and impiously innovate beyond the sanctioned limits. The genre will stagnate if that happens, which will be a great shame. As with all forms of stagnation and tradition, that enforced adherence to a dead past by a very influential crowd of the entrenched will ultimately kill the future.
Words and Chaos 
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