I love speedruns. There’s something incredibly satisfying about watching people push the boundaries of a game’s physics engine, manipulate RNG and take unintended routes in a rush to finish their chosen game in the fastest time possible.
Half-life in Half an Hour is one of my favourites. When I first played the game, I was terrified in its opening sections. The worm/incinerator puzzle confused me for hours, and I got lost on Xen multiple times. At the time, it was a significant challenge for me to beat. Spider-Waffle, on the other hand, effortlessly sails through the game, nearly unscathed and with clear headed purpose. It’s almost like he’s playing a completely different game.
And in a way, he is. A speedrunner approaches their game with optimisation in mind. They want the most efficient routes. They want to exploit glitches and skip cutscenes. They want to peel back all the layers that make up the game, reducing it to its bare essentials, a pile of code waiting to be broken.
I, on the other hand, stumbled and fumbled my way through. Playing Half Life, for me, was more about the immediate experience. I crept along its murky corridors, flinching whenever a headcrab launched itself in my direction. I battled against the soldiers, marvelling as their AI wrecked me with their grenade throwing and flanking manoeuvres. I got caught up in the mystery of the elusive G-Man, and got great joy when I discovered the teleporters that he was using to travel around Black Mesa.
Both of these are valid ways of experiencing Half-Life. And in fact, experiencing it the way I did enhanced my appreciation of the speedrun. But what happens when a sequel, or an entire genre morphs from one kind of experience to the other? What happens when something artistic and atmospheric gets turned into an elaborate number generator?
Let me tell you a little bit about a game series called Diablo.
Action RPG’s have existed in one form or another since the 1980s, but one game solidified the genre’s definition under the point and click style: Diablo. I played through the game recently for my podcast, and I was surprised at just how primitive it is. Diablo 1 has no skill or talent trees. It has no activated or alternate takes on abilities. There is no crafting of any kind. There are zero champion mobs.
And that's just what’s obviously missing. The ‘unique’ monsters are just regular enemies with inflated hp pools. A lot of said regular enemies just walk at you in a straight line and try to attack you. There are exactly 3 shops, and 1 lucky dip vendor. And, most surprisingly of all, the entire game takes place in 1 location - Tristram. There’s exactly one dungeon with 15 levels (without the dlc) and that’s it. The loot system is simplified to just normal/magic/unique. The game’s complexity is a hollow shell of what would come after it.
But. Diablo 1 has something else going for it, something that makes it worth playing, even today. It has atmosphere dripping from every wall.
The camera is zoomed in on your player character, your perspective shrunk to half the size of a modern arpg. Your screen is permanently shrouded in darkness, with light emanating primarily from the small lantern on your hip, or enemy’s fireballs flung at you from the darkness. The monsters appear as dark and indistinct silhouettes on the edge of your screen, only coming into definition as they shuffle closer, mouthing guttural moans.
And the music, it sucks you right into your monitor and makes it your entire world. As you first step into the church, and your character utters “The sanctity of this place has been fouled”, you get hit with Dungeon. It starts of with a choir before descending into heavy drums and more unnerving sound effects as the track progresses. Much later in the game, you hear Hell, reprising those choir effects but laced with far heavier distortion. And the bit where the military-like snare drums and piping kicks in always make me feel deeply uncomfortable.
So theoretically, if we can improve on the gameplay, we’ll have the best game ever made, right?
4 years after the Diablo series debuted, it was time for the sequel. Diablo 2 expanded on every possible facet of the Action-RPG. Finally, we had something that resembled modern titles - skill trees, gems, champions and multiple locations. You started to get builds appearing on shitty, badly designed websites - the ‘whirlwind barbarian’ and the ‘corpse explosion’ necro. The loot system was massively expanded, with set items and another tier of rarity being thrown into the mix. Diablo 2 was an evolution of everything that Diablo 1 had to offer.
Nearly everything, anyway.
Because while Diablo 2 as a game was by far the more sophisticated project, with more complex systems cleverly overlaid atop one another, it did have worse atmosphere. Not terrible atmosphere, mind you, but it never quite reaches the heady heights that Diablo 1 had to offer. The music is quite good, but overall not as consistent (shoutout to Mephisto though). And while I’m a fan of its washed out look, its improved visual clarity and cleanliness didn’t grip me in quite the same way (with the exception of the Arcane Sanctuary).
It's still a brilliant game, just one that I’ll remember more for its RPG systems and playing with friends than its general ambience. Diablo 2 also came out at around the same time the internet was exploding, so playing co-op with friends was a realistic thing instead of being the luxury good it was back in 1996.
Now, you probably think I’m going to talk about Diablo 3 next. And I will. But first we’re going to take a quick detour to a rest stop on the side of the road And while we’re there, we’re going to say hello to MMOS.
I read a lot of reviews for World of Warcraft when it came out in 2004. Those reviews didn’t talk about ‘dailies’. There was no mention of the balance of the PVP, or anything about the scarcity of end-game content. It was a simpler time.
The reviews talked about a Tauren quest that had them transform into a spirit wolf and follow another across the plains. One told the tale of how they ran into an enormous abomination stomping across the road, and how they ran and hid. It was only after watching another player run up to it that they realised that it was an NPC that just wanted flowers. Reviewers talked about the marvel of the world and being in it with other players, even as they bemoaned the subscription cost.
But the thing about subscription costs is that you need to continually compel players to keep playing. So you require systems, upon systems, upon systems. You need a level of elaborate complexity that made the loot of Diablo 2 look child-like in comparison. And so Blizzard got to work. Skill Trees, Crafting, Dungeons, Raids, Dailies, Trinkets, PVP, Loot tables - WOW became a way of life, and still is, to this day. Players weren’t running and hiding from abominations - they were perfecting their questing routes and using plugins to determine their exact threat level. The ‘magic’ became lost, in an avalanche of endless numbers and continuous optimisation.
The early game stopped being part of the game. Questing was just an obstacle to reach the ‘real’ game, the end game, the post-game. I have been told by countless people over the years that MMOS get good once you get to max level, and I’ve never been able to understand why I would waste my time boring myself with grind to get to the good part. The design goals were all about keeping players in the game after they had finished the story content - not to make that story content compelling.
These games were not action-rpgs as we understood them, but make no mistake - this was their next, unfortunate evolution.
We cut back now to 2012, on the eve of the release of the widely anticipated Diablo 3. I stupidly stayed up to a late hour with my friends so that we could play the moment the title dropped. Of course we couldn’t play (even solo) when it was released, because it was an always online game, and the servers crashed and were unbearably laggy. And then I didn’t get any unique or set items dropped in the 30 hours or so it took me to finish my first runthrough of the game because Blizzard wanted me to use their real money auction house. But, as mad as these things make me, this is just the surface of the issue with Diablo 3.
I remember having a few different weapons - a bow, a short sword, a hammer - I wanted to see how they compared. I knew they’d have different swing speeds and other different attributes, so I wanted to have a quick glance at their stats before trying them out. And then I saw it - the ‘DPS’ of each weapon was already kindly calculated for me. No need to compare and contrast, just look for the higher number!
The game does everything in its power to play the game for you. It locks skill customisation options behind a menu (that I didn’t even discover until many hours) in case you somehow accidentally choose a ‘bad’ set of skills. There’s always a big glowing icon telling you where to go next, there’s no getting lost in this linear adventure. And naturally, there was no way to raise the difficulty level to something actually challenging when this game was first released.
There were times in that playthrough where I stood in the midst of monsters, watching them attack me while nigh invulnerable with health regeneration. Good luck doing that in Diablo 1 or 2. At some point, as I mowed my way through wave after wave of monsters, I paused and wondered why I was playing this game. I wasn’t really having fun. It wasn’t challenging or interesting or immersive. Something fundamental had been lost somewhere along the way between the 1996 title and Diablo 3.
It clicked, finally - this was secretly an MMO. The point wasn’t to play Diablo 3 once, it was to finish it and get to the good stuff. It was to sustain the real money auction house, it was to keep people playing indefinitely. It was a money making machine, with you shooting in circles through the lifeless, uninspired world and story, again and again, with Blizzard taking a cut of every sale that wound up on that damn auction house.
Other games have risen to take the ARPG crown (and, to be fair, Diablo 3 is a very different game now from what it once was). Path of Exile is probably at the vanguard, and is the true evolution of what Diablo 2 is trying to achieve. Its skill tree is intimidating to look at, it's got a million mini games and modes, its crafting and customisation options are basically limitless. My co-host, James, literally puts together excel spreadsheets to calculate how best to optimise certain builds.
And that idea makes me sick. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that some people thoroughly enjoy this sort of gameplay, one based around optimisation and perfecting builds. But it feels so far flung from the experience I had playing Diablo 1. It's so cold and lifeless, so divorced from any emotional connection you might have with a game. As a friend of mine poetically put it, “Path of Exile is about building the most mastubatory engine possible, then running a victory lap to prove how smart you are.''
The revelation that I’ve had about Diablo 1 is that its barebones gameplay is precisely what allows it to be such an immersive experience. When you play Diablo 1, you don’t focus on skillbuilds and talent trees - you just play the game. Oh, on occasion you might notice that a sweet weapon has a STR requirement, and remember to sink some points in it later - but thats as complicated as it gets. You’re hunched over, dodging fireballs and other projectiles, desperately managing your distance and quaffing health potions. There might be one piece of loot dropped out of 50 mobs, not the rainbow vomit that splurges over your screen every battle you take in PoE.
That’s the cost of having optimisation: atmosphere. When you peel the layers back, you stop believing in the world, you stop caring about its characters and fearing the dark. It becomes an elaborate succession of different numbers, to be neatly squared away in an excel spreadsheet. Diablo 1’s biggest virtue is that its essential gameplay is clicking on dudes to kill them - and while its slightly more complicated than that, that core idea never goes away.
I don’t watch speedruns of games I’ve never played. Horror games, RPGS, ancient 2D platformers - doesn’t matter. Once you’ve played and enjoyed a game from start to finish, you can begin to appreciate how to break it. You can play it on NG+, you can use glitches and go for weird easter eggs. Or you can do what many people are essentially professionals at - you can speedrun it.
If your only exposure to a game is in its most optimised fashion though, I feel you’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re not giving yourself a chance to fail, to learn from your mistakes and overcome challenges. You’re not letting yourself get sucked into the world of the game, its writing and its foibles. It becomes a sad and sterile imitation of what the game was trying to achieve.
It's in our nature to drive towards total efficiency. And in the case of ARPGS, it's been a non-stop arms race, with the developers building their engines up and the players following with increasingly rapid understanding. ARPGS have changed beyond my ability to appreciate them because that aspect of the game is one I’ve never truly loved. The systems have become the bulk of the game, not the steadfast descent wrapped in layers of darkness.
And that's ok. Not every game needs to be designed for me. But I can no longer turn to point and click ARPGS to give me a Diablo 1-esque experience, which is a funny thing to think about. I have no hope for Diablo 4 either - these games are just fundamentally different now. I think I might just boot up another game, a different game. I’ll descend downwards - into the undead burg, the sewers and then blighttown, with just my trusty sword and shield to protect me. Maybe, just maybe, that will trigger the feelings I got from playing Diablo 1 again.
