David Brevik, lead designer on the original Diablo game and the person most often credited for the ARPG series' creation, isn't a big fan of modern ARPGs.
Talking to VideoGamer, Brevik railed against the blistering pace of much newer ARPGs. Naturally, he didn't name any specific examples, but I mean, it's pretty obvious that he's referencing Diablo 4 and, perhaps, Path of Exile 2.
"I think that ARPGs in general have started to lean into this: kill swaths of enemies all over the place extremely quickly,” Brevik said. "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 2 creator says players treated the action RPG like a "lifestyle game" because it was fun, and MMOs like World of Warcraft had more to do with starting the live service trend
- Diablo 4 boss would push for patches to have more fun stuff to balance out unpopular but necessary nerfs: "Lots of medicine, don't see much sugar"
Of course, Diablo has always been about clicking things to death and not a whole lot more, and I say that with extreme fondness for the series as someone whose first online obsession was the original Diablo. That said, Brevik seemed to be arguing that it's the pace of the death clicks that was slower and more deliberate back when he was at Blizzard.
"I don’t find that as kind of personal and realistic as like Diablo 2. The pacing on Diablo 2, I think is great," he said. "That's one of the reasons it's endured. I just don't find killing screen-fulls of things instantly and mowing stuff down and walking around the level and killing everything, very enticing. I just don't feel like that is a cool experience. I find it kind of silly."
As someone who plays and mostly enjoys Diablo 4, I get where Brevik is coming from. There's definitely something to be said for the older Diablos' restraint in terms of enemy density and player builds that helps foster a thicker, more mellow, more immersive atmosphere.
Brevik left Blizzard in 2003 and would eventually take on a role as advisor for the Chinese version of Path of Exile, Diablo's most direct competitor. He later started up Graybeard games and released a new action-RPG called It Lurks Below to positive reviews.
