Diablo

Foreword

The Diablo games have some really nice game mechanics which I often refer to elsewhere, but perhaps the bestiary was a bit generic so I never really drew anything from the games, until now.

Diablo 1 & 2 monster redesign

The idea with the monster lineups below is to develop some kind of interesting light/med/heavy/special/boss variants which are reasonably consistent in terms of race/monster type morphology, and take some opportunities to have some global consistency across the entire bestiary. For example, maybe all demons have certain anatomical parts which are simply pronounced differently. Maybe the Scavengers and Quill-rats are related. I don't know much about the Diablo fluff though. There are a whole buncha books that I haven't read.

These concept are haphazard first or second iterations, and there are a lot of gaps. I was going to say missing gaps but then I caught myself.

The original fallen ones looked more like generic goblins. I think they're creatures, and not demons, despite looking a bit like imps ingame. The D3 fallen ones are interesting, facially, so I borrowed features from those. Actually those might be based on what seems to be an older acrylics painting.

This sheet is a better example of how monsters could be varied. It might be possible to just make a single 3D model of a typical specimen, then distort it into the needed variations.

Diablo 1 had a tendency of throwing incredibly annoying enemies at you, like those warping mages if you were a melee guy, or the knights if you were a sorc... I think I defeated Diablo after having thrown Berserk on those bodyguards of his from safe outside of his quarters.

Playing around with the idea of the Ghoul also being a mage of some sort. The other drawings are mostly random thumbnails with little consistency. I'm a sucker for 'nude' skeletons, but I haven't drawn any here. I'm not really a fan of the colored skeletons in Diablo though. They should all be bone colored as far as I'm concerned, perhaps with varying equipment levels instead.

Assorted Diablo 2 monsters. The Tainted gorilla-like monster felt a bit too cool and bulky looking, so I decided to play up the creepy with nasty teeth and a starved lion look. Then there's the similar baboon demon, which might be the same species so to speak. I decided to try out some of those long nasty teeth which you see on deep sea fish.

Some failed rhino/horned demon exploration. I think it should be more of a sturdy, chunky thing, with a nice charge look to it.

Necromancer, Amazon-Rogue, Corruped Rogue. Indeed, it's a black lace thong (perhaps with a thematic bat pattern). However, the females in Diablo mostly wear some kind of flimsy loincloth rather than a bikini bottom.

As for skimpy clothing on females in games... remember the words of wisdom by Jean Rasczak: Never pass up a good thing.

For me, the problem doesn't really lie in how the characters look graphically, because games like Diablo and nearly all RPGs are abstract to begin with. If you have war axe, it doesn't matter if you hit with the pointy spike (stab), the blade (forehand), or the hammer (backhand). It also doesn't matter where you hit, so you can't really stab the girls in the bare midriff. Monsters often have arbitrary resistances and stats, and info like that is rarely ever communicated to the player in an intuitive way. No monster ever drops what it's actually wearing. Instead you have stuff like bee swarms dropping breastplates and town portals.

Most computer RPG games are about popping the bubble wrap and climb that nonlinear level curve. See those damage numbers float over the heads of the enemies. With systems like that, the issue of practical armour design hasn't really bothered me. One might even say that sexy armour quite affordable because of it. all I need to be told as a player is whether my outfit looks cooler than before... so it's a relativistic deal.

That said, I think it would be fun to have a swing (forehand, backhand, stab) * effort (jab, normal, fury) combat system where you can have fun combining blows against enemies, not stabbing the skeletons, not clubbing the fluffy yetis, not cutting the armoured knights.

I actually programmed one such system for a Golden Axe project, but ended up doing no animations, because a lot of them would be needed. I also had features like push back, edge sharpness, weapon reach, with strength being modified by equipment agility and weight, bunch of character and equipment OOP. It was one of those projects where the design doc became so detailed it kind of turned into working code...

Anyways, with warhammers/picks and crossbows around, it might almost be safer to run through dungeons in just your shorts. ;P

Comments on similar (looking) games

I actually haven't played that many. Titan Quest looks like it has a more active town with guards defending the perimeters, but I don't know much more about the game. I never got to play NOX, but I liked how the line of sight was pronounced. Baldur's Gate had that nice space-bar pause feature and I really liked going berserk in the town. I'm ashamed to say that I never played Planescape Torment or Arcanum. Or Jagged Alliance. I think I stopped playing Fallout when I found out that my character wore grannypanties or something. While some of these games might only be graphically similar, I should probably investigate them further, because I'm open to experimenting with the action RPG formula.

Torchlight is maybe a bit too cartoony for me. Actually... I don't mind cartoony. It's just that it's Malt Cross cartoony. I liked those kind of proportions when I was younger, but now I prefer... well, the opposite.

To simplify things a lot, I tend to recognize three main proportion styles:

Tree trunk proportions can be cool for certain kinds of blocky mecha (Asimo-like) (using blockyness as a consistent theme), but when it come to armor and demon designs, I want to see some more variation in silhouette flow. I've been avoiding doing demons with Rhino/Brontosaurus (yes I will continue to call it that) legs. Maybe the Shambler is somewhat excused though, because it's all stompy and I just want to hug it. It's arms/hands are pretty OK anyways. I like how the lowpolyness of Quake forced the pointy simplifications of silhouette.

Thoughts on game mechanics

Cherry picking

Here are a few of Diablo's features that I liked, but would change a bit:

• Doing boss/dungeon "runs", collecting items dropped by special monsters. Actually I can think of three good features here.
  • Runs. It's fun to revisit Andariel, the first boss in Diablo, and defeat her several times just to see what she drops and how much more powerful your character is. However, maybe there's a way to include a 'runs' feature without breaking fourth wall. For example, the player could get random quests, perhaps with certain level ratings.
  • Unique and special items. In some games you just collect fruit, gems, or regular items. Getting items with random-ish stats makes Diablo feel like it's personal to me. It makes the collectibility aspect much richer.
  • Special monsters, or perhaps mini-bosses. Diablo just re-colors regular monsters and ups their stats. Although some would say that game pieces need to be predictable in order for a game to be readable, I wouldn't mind seeing some variation to regular monsters as well. With 3D models, it's possible to piece unique figures together. As long as the overall look and performance for a certain kind of monster is coherent, I think a little variation will make the setting seem more plausible and less like clone-wars.
• Diablo 1 has some shrines with both good and/or bad effects, which can present interesting choices. However, for a beginner it's hard to tell what effect the shrines will have. I think obscurity of information isn't fun nowadays because it's so easy and tempting to get a guide, and after you have that, it's just a chore to look stuff up. I would consider the solution of having shrines which gives a clear clue what effect they have, and give them effects which are both good and bad. One example: cursing one item and blessing five items selected by a certain criteria (e.g. placed in front of the shrine).
• Speaking of the good and the bad, it would be interesting with items that has negative traits, burdening the player character in some way. This might be very similar to having an absence of bonuses though, as stats are relative. Perhaps there could also be items which set stats to an exact value (which might be lower or higher than the current stat.)
• Shortcuts, such as portals in D2, or the emerging gates in D1 (e.g. up in town a crack in the ground would allow passage to hell later in the game). Torchlight introduced the pet, which could run to town and sell stuff. Perhaps a spell of some sort could be used to return items to the stash in town.

Stuff that I didn't like

• Item and enemy rubber banding. Rubber banding in general. This mechanic makes my effort feel meaningless, a bit like the AI drivers always catching up to you in Mario Kart.
• Level caps on items. This always seemed like such a sloppy, knee jerk solution to prevent players from 'twinking' their character. Yet, I'm not really sure what the alternative is, but I can think of a few candidates.
  • A 'Soul' stat could be used instead of level caps. The player would level up Soul, and this is required to equip certain magically enhanced items. Conan would stay away from this stat and focus on Str, Dex, Vit though ;). What I'm thinking here is that, at least, the use of the word Soul suggests that there's some in-game-universe magic at work. Using the word level breaks fourth wall a bit I think. Who is counting levels? The game is, and not a plausible in-game-universe law.
  • Other stats are used to prevent weaklings from equipping say, heavy armour. It's more difficult to use such a mechanic for light magical boots or rings though...
  • The game could simply allow twinking, perhaps even include it as a core mechanic. One example could be having permanent death of characters, but with a permanent treasure room.
  • Shops could be used to transfer items between characters. The shops would assume that the characters don't know each other, so all items would have to be bought at retail price (with the funds going to the seller). This way items which you would normally just discard/sell would feel more useful as your other characters could eventually pick them up. This feature requires that gold can't be sent to other characters of course.
• Inventory Tetris and stash claustrophobia. The game rains items over you and it feels wasteful to throw most of it away. See shop solution above. A shop (or perhaps donations) could also help townspeople, improving the town defenses.
• Palette swapped enemies, NES style. I suppose it was an affordable, maybe worthwhile way make the game seem a bit richer in content... but the visual effect always bothered me.
• Content dilution. D2 in particular feels like each Act has two zones too many per Act. By the time I get to Act III (Jungle), I'm pretty tired of wading through hue shifted enemies. Act I had a few grassy plains too many too. Act II had pretty good environment variation.
• D2 classes felt a bit too restrained to me. I think I prefer D1's character development system where you can mix things up a little, having a warrior who can cast a little firewall and stuff when he needs too. I liked D1's book system. In general, we learn stuff from other people, books, by repeated doing, and by magic (That's how I learned to draw. The witch just laughed and said something about paying later... as she flew off on her broom).
• I've heard people say that D2 was less scary than D1, and I think I agree. I think this had to do with the early areas setting the mood. D2 had the safer looking grassy plains, funny imps, sexy rogues, porcupines and yetis. The early D1 levels were set in a gloomy dungeon with undead lurking about. Both games were pretty gruesome though. Blizzard is going to run into problems with D3 if they want to continue to go in that direction, as they would have to make HD models of nude impaled women. I'm guessing that they're going for a wider demographic (as the more cartoony graphics and colors seem to indicate), so we're gonna see more cool+gothic+skullpile and less guro.
• Little sense of community, history, or loss. So many games and movies feel a bit claustrophobic here. It would be interesting to see a city or town full of people and colors, before it was devastated. Perhaps the game could open with our hero leaving a town more like that in Baldur's Gate, full of people and colors (or something sympathetic). Then we see the bad guys attack, preferably not through a directed video sequence, because I always feel that those are disjointed from the actual capabilities of the character performances ingame. So, there's a battle and we see just how powerful/numerous the bad guys are when taking out the medium level town guards. The game cuts to "some time later" with the hero character coming back from a trip to the corrupted hometown. This setup would directly explain the low population, as well as giving the player a bit of extra motivation.
• Lack of depth in melee combat. Click click click. Get better weapon, do more damage. I suggested an alternative higher up on this page.
• Disappearing corpses. This reduces immersion and my sense of achievement, and removes navigationally important landmarks. It also makes things really hard for my Necromancer.

Random ideas

Scribble: GUI. I can't use the HP/Mana globes from Diablo, so I came up with a new innovative shape called cylinder (plus clingy stone babe).

Idea: The player can roll/design and manage their coop/mercenary NPCs as if they are player characters. Actually, Diablo 2 : LoD kind of did this. It's an interesting concept to play around with, but it might be frustrating to have a character that you've invested into die because the AI is crap at controlling it.

Idea: Items can be "worn in", increasing their efficiency when used by owner. When "wear in" has been maximized, the item can be named. Rationale: This feature will increase the character-item bond and make the relationship feel more solid. Being able to just swap out items left and right with no effect makes that relationship feel more flimsy. In real life, we both have close relationships to inanimate objects, and we grow used to handling them or wearing them (cars, pencils, shoes, etc).

On top of this, the player could grow proficient in using, say certain types of weapons, like swords, maces, bows. I can see many approaches to how the level-upping would work here:

• The player has points which can be spent on weapon proficiencies.
• The player can only spend points on the usual stats like str, dex, etc. The weapon proficiencies and such would be automatically adjusted to reflect what the player has been doing the most.
• The points are spent automatically based on the player's activities.

Idea: Forcing the player to grind on new enemy types by reducing the XP earned from commonly defeated monsters. Weaker enemy types could have their XP yield depleted faster, because the complexity of the interaction with them is lower. Perhaps the XP yield could regenerate, encouraging the player to move to new areas, or old areas.

Creating an identity for my Diabloesque

If I were to make a Diabloesque game, I think it's important to give it an unique identity, both in terms of setting and game mechanics. The game would need some kind of punch which gives it instant character.

Setting

It's perhaps more common in sci-fi settings to use a clean, orderly society as the evil antagonist. There have been a few games where the player fights for evil (e.g. Overlord, Dungeon Keeper), but what if evil angels were to invade a peaceful underworld? Instead of having chaos, gothic ruins and skull totems spreading across the land, dull, clean, pompous architecture and orderly columns of mindless angels come marching in.

There are a few problems with this setup. It's a lot easier to think of interesting evil-monster enemies than it is to come up with a varied good-guy bestiary. Equipping things on the morphologically diverse bodies of hero monsters is another problem. Perhaps the player is a very humanoid demon, with monsters being mercenaries or summons.

As for the angel monsters, it might be possible to take classic monster designs and style them with clean clothes, pleasing symmetry, and strict stature. Monsters could be absorbed into the angel ranks in the opposite way that angels are often corrupted in typical RPGs (i.e. they would be tidied up).

Mechanics

My preferences always have a leaning towards less gamey games. With gamey I mean mechanics or visuals which break fourth wall and tells you that you're playing a game. Examples are:

• NPC which are invulnerable to postal players - IIRC, you could actually slaughter most of the civilian population in Baldur's Gate.
• Damage figures shown over the head - Here I'd prefer a scaled splash+sound+kinetic indication as it would actually make me feel more powerful than seeing 67362 damage in red text.
• Items or enemies which have level-scaled values that you wouldn't expect by looking at them. I prefer games to be readable, meaning, you can just study an enemy and come up with a working strategy.
• Slot and tree systems - I liked D2's sockets though.
• No-penalty rebirth, without any explanation - This makes the game feel like meaningless grind, especially if there's no sense of player-skill achievement like in certain superhard platform games. Also, in Mario you wouldn't make Bowser runs because all coins and score points are the same, but in Diablo you can get unique items, so grind is more tolerable.

So, if I could have my way, I would design a game which could stand a little player abuse, or demand self-responsible players.

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- by Arne Niklas Jansson, 2011