Diablo's moreish tap-and-loot loop definitely has a lot in common with some live servicey features, which are mainly aimed at keeping people on the seasonal hamster wheel forever, but the series' co-creator doesn't think Diablo was designed with the same intent.
Blizzard North co-founder and Diablo co-creator David Brevik recently chatted with the VideoGamer podcast and explained that Diablo 2 was so widely popular at the turn of the century because it was a damn good time, not because of what we now consider live service-style bits, like battle passes, never-ending updates, and shop rotations.
"The audience that played for the ladders and things like that, they were a hardcore audience," Brevik says, before explaining that the "great majority" of Diablo 2 players simply treated it like a "lifestyle game because they enjoyed the game." They weren't racing to reach level 99 in record time, say.
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Ladders in Diablo 2 were a closed multiplayer realm where players would create a new character from scratch and grind for XP to top a leaderboard, which would then reset at a certain point, but Brevik doesn't think it has much to do with the live service fluff we see now "where you’re competing in this particular thing or you've got some kind of special mechanic for this season and you've got a season pass - that stuff didn't really come out of Diablo 2."
He instead reckons that ever-evolving MMOs, like EverQuest or World of WarCraft, had more to do with laying the groundwork for the live service boom to come. They had your big events, constant expansions, social systems, and cosmetics you'd chase to brag to your friends. Sounds like every other online shooter nowadays, no?
