Summary
- Diablo creator David Brevik criticizes modern ARPG pacing, feeling it detracts from the genre’s best qualities.
- Diablo 4’s record success contrasts player backlash, highlighting potential pitfalls of instant gratification.
Diablo creator David Brevik has reportedly spoken out against the instant gratification approach to pacing that has grown prevalent in the action RPG genre. While Diablo remains one of the most celebrated ARPG series of all time, Brevik’s comments indicate that he feels the rapid-fire pacing is making modern ARPGs lose something that made the genre popular in the first place.
With four mainline games and even more spin-offs, the Diablo game franchise has captivated players with its dark fantasy action since the first game’s release in January 1997. Brevik served as lead programmer and senior designer of that game and as project and design lead on 2000’s Diablo 2 before leaving Blizzard in 2003. Since then, he’s continued to be active in game development, including as creator of Marvel Heroes, and he is the current head and executive producer of Skystone Games, which he co-founded in 2020.
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While he still seems to be a fan of fast-paced ARPGs, Brevik also has some apparent criticisms about the current state of the genre, indicating that sometimes the pacing is a little too fast. VideoGamer reports that it has interviewed him for an upcoming episode of its VideoGamer Podcast—to be released at an undisclosed date—and shared his feelings that the rapid pacing of progression in modern ARPGs detracts from some of the genre’s best qualities. While speaking about the comparatively slower pace of Diablo 2, the website quotes him as saying, “I think that a RPGs [sic] in general have started to lean into this: kill swaths of enemies all over the place extremely quickly. Your build is killing all sorts of stuff so you could get more drops, you can level up […] and the screen is littered with stuff you don’t care about.”
Diablo Creator Criticizes Modern ARPGs’ Instant Gratification
While not all of Brevik’s comments have been made public ahead of the podcast episode’s premiere, what’s been shared from the interview indicates that the celebrated game developer has even more to say on the topic. It hints that he feels the frequent level-ups and loot drops in Diablo‘s newer entries and other recent games in the genre take away the sense of progress from reaching major milestones. Older ARPGs didn’t shower players with as much loot, and it can be argued that this made coveted items all the more meaningful to acquire.
Modern ARPG developers may want to heed Brevik’s advice. Diablo 4 smashed Blizzard records when it was released in June 2023, becoming the fastest-selling game ever for the company and logging more than 93 million hours played in its four-day early access period. Despite its commercial success, it’s also been widely panned by its own players, sitting at a user score of just 2.5/10 on Metacritic, compared to the 8.8/10 score that Diablo 2 enjoys on the same review platform.
- Released
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June 28, 2000
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Animated Blood and Gore, Animated Violence