Diablo franchise boss Rod Fergusson is taking a fair bit of heat online for suggesting ARPGs that are similar to Diablo should be labeled Diablo-likes.
In a tweet that’s since been properly ratio’d, Fergusson asks whether ARPGs should adopt the Diablo-like moniker in the same way that a certain breed of action-RPG is called a Souls-like and a particular type of dungeon crawler is called a Roguelike.
“Feels like the genre of ‘ARPG’ is starting to mean a lot of different things,” Fergusson said. “Much like ‘Souls-like’ and ‘Rogue-like’, I wonder if we could normalize ‘Diablo-like’ for ARPGs that follow the Diablo formula…”
Feels like the genre of “ARPG” is starting to mean a lot of different things. Much like “Souls-like” and “Rogue-like”, I wonder if we could normalize “Diablo-like” for ARPGs that follow the Diablo formula…November 22, 2024
Just to contextualize how voluminous the backlash to this suggestion has been: the top reply is from streamer Empyrian and it reads simply: “I don’t think so.” That reply has 1.4k likes compared to the 728 likes on Fergusson’s original tweet. Worse yet, Fergusson’s tweet has a whopping 2.2k comments, the overwhelming majority of which are disapproving.
“I wish d4 was a diablo like,” reads another highly liked reply.
I’ll leave you to make your own judgment call on the situation, but I will also point out that Fergusson sent out the above tweet just hours after Path of Exile 2 had its big Early Access reveal stream; Path of Exile of course being Diablo’s most direct and formidable competitor. From the outside looking in, it sure looks like there might’ve been a little frustration over how much attention Path of Exile 2 was getting that inspired Fergusson’s tweet, but that’s purely my own assumption that isn’t based on any inside knowledge.
It’s also worth acknowledging the influence Diablo has had on the action-RPG genre. I mean, we don’t have a whole list dedicated to games like Diablo for no reason. Path of Exile itself is often considered a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 and its lead designer, Chris Wilson, has said explicitly that Diablo was the team’s main inspiration. The blowback to the above tweet seems mostly directed at Fergusson himself, who didn’t join Blizzard until 2020 and thus didn’t play a role in actually creating the Diablo formula.