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[TeeGee]

Perhaps Diablo 2 on the hardest possible settings becomes a bit more like a game, however it's still the case that when you die, nothing happens.  You just try again from pretty close with slightly less gold - it's merely a small setback, not a loss.

I'm NOT advocating for Diablo to have permadeath or something like that.  Diablo has to be completely re-designed from the ground up to include something like the ability to actually LOSE.

You do realize that Diablo 2 has a perma-death mode, right? A lot of people play it that way, and it's tons of fun.

Also, when you set the amount of players to 8, Diablo 2 is a highly challenging and strategic game. More so than many classic roguelikes. It takes some serious build tweaking and cooperation between players to finish it through all difficulties. Even if death itself has a minor effect, dying all the time holds your progress anyway.

Sure, you could criticize Diablo for being an addicting click-fest, but its design is actually quite tight. Many roguelike developers could learn a lot from it. Take enemies for example. Most roguelikes just go for quantity here - myriads of enemies, differentiated mostly by their stat values. In Diablo games, every enemy type has something special going for it - some guys charge at you, some can resurrect buddies, some explode when they die, some teleport, some have pack mentality. And the game randomization system is designed so that on each level you get a nicely balanced set of enemies, that creates interesting strategic situations and allows every character in the team to shine.
I've read Bill Roper's article about this a while ago. It's crazy how much thought went into something that most players won't even register on the conscious level. It's probably one of the reasons why none of the later Diablo clones enjoyed similar level of success.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

What?

Isn't every game like that? Don't you simply play until you win? Isn't being killed just a setback until you hit start again?

What the hell are you on about? You seem to have just argued that all games are not games by virtue of the fact that you can try to play them again.

yeah this seems to go beyond even icycalm extremes (he believes that games should not have check points or save points and you should go back to the beginning of the game when you lose all your lives). if going back and having to redo your work isn't a good enough punishment for dying, i don't know what is; making the game permanently impossible to play ever again? add electric shocks to game controllers?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

for instance, if you play "cops and robbers" or "pretend" or "catch" (kids' games) they don't have winners or losers but are still called games

They are games, and they do have winners and losers.  It may not be explicitly stated all the time, but if it is then it becomes a game.  If I say "You can't catch me", I have challenged the other person to do so.  If they can, then they have "won" this round.  If they can't, then I have won.  I don't see why that's not a game (although I do think it's a somewhat crappy game, as it depends on one party simply tiring out... there should be a time limit, or something).

i think you're thinking of a different game of "catch" than i am, but perhaps children's games' names vary in different parts of the world. in the game of catch i'm familiar with, you throw a ball at each other, and each person catches it and throws it back at the other player. i suppose 'losing' would be if you miss and don't catch the ball, but the point of throwing the ball at someone is *not* to have them miss it, if you throw it with the intent that the person catching it should miss it you aren't playing catch correctly

the term game doesn't mean "something that you can win or lose", it means something interactive that you play for fun

[eclectocrat]

If I say to my friend "do you want to play shinny?", shinny being a very relaxed for fun ice hockey game, then he understands that I'm not going to bodycheck him into the hospital.

Can you watch TV actively? Can you play games passively? I'm not sure, but I can certainly see that there is some blending between passive media consumption and active media participation. At what point does a game become a 'choose your own adventure' or something, I do not know, but surely such a line must exist somewhere.

As far as Diablo is concerned, I have no opinion one way or the other. I played Diablo 1 last year again. It's still a very good game.

[bateleur]

A further point about the way Diablo is played in practice: For a long time I had a once-a-week Diablo group that would meet to play co-op online. (And we're now playing Titan Quest, which isn't all that different in style.) We played exclusively on Normal difficulty and there was already plenty of disincentive to dying, because when you die in that environment the other players all see it happen. If you get killed by anything less than an Extra Fast Spectral Hit boss it's going to be embarrassing!

For this kind of play we wouldn't want skill-based barriers to content. We're all experienced gamers and could play that way if we wanted to, but on a weekday evening after work it's more fun to play around with suboptimal builds, charge recklessly into huge combats and allow people to keep equipment they like rather than engaging in constant intra-party optimisation. It's nice to be able to use gems instead of always saving them for the Cube.

As a game designer, what change would you make to Diablo II's death mechanic to better serve our style of play? Presumably you don't want to make it less fun?

[starsrift]

Dinofarm, I agree with your surface assertions but not your underlying reasons. That is to say, I think there are methods beyond player punishment to make character death meaningful. I don't think using death as a player punishment mechanic is always necessarily a good thing. Furthermore, I don't think that "guaranteed to win" is an inherently bad thing in a game, either -- sometimes the journey is more important than getting there.

On the other hand, I very much agree that Diablo 3 looks like it will be tuned for compulsion, your 'slot-machine' comments. Blizzard does this very well(see: WoW), and if there's a way for them to make money off of it, they will.

Comparing D3 to your current project is a bad move, for two reasons - 1, you work on roughly the same familiarity of a reader with D3 when you talk about it, but you know far more about your own project than your audience does, and 2, you open yourself up for personal attacks on you or your project, which will make you defensive instead of willing to engage in dialogue. You'd be best off stripping those comparisons from your analysis.