Just an observation I made on Q23 on a thread discussing the recently released Titan’s Quest along with the unavoidable comparisons with Diablo 2. The thread is particularly interesting because one of the game designers is there discussing and explaining how they arrived at some of the solutions, also taking suggestions and critics (which is also a good demonstration of what I wrote here).

Anyway, beside the loot system and the mood/setting of Diablo 2 (graphic, animations, sounds effects and all), what really made it “fun” was the visceral gameplay. It was rather fast paced and action packed, and you got to fight droves of monsters all at once, often mixed types. To the point that most gameplay is about pure slaughter and “crowd control”.

And while other elements are kind of obvious and universally recognized, it’s the crowd control that is one strong element. I compare it to Qix, that classic game where you need to draw and close rectangular areas in a finite space till you reached a certain percent of completition.

In those massive battles in D2 you didn’t just had to click on every monster. In fact the important mechanic, the “fun” one, wasn’t clicking quickly, but it was the movement. In this game you had to constantly move on the screen, trying to “circumnavigate” the monsters to prevent them to surround you and trap you without a possibility to escape. D2 was ALL about movement. Territorial. The moment where you were trapped and couldn’t move anymore, you were dead.

Which is also (not a case) a basic gameplay pattern used in God of War, another game not short on “fun”.

I write this also because this draws a sharp line between those games and that kind of “visceral” gameplay patterns, and mmorpgs. In mmorpgs “movement” is often irrelevant. It can have a role in the group-play but it isn’t really used for what it is. In a mmorpg you cannot try to circumnavigate the monsters or use terrain and distance to your own advantage. It’s just not something part of the combat mechanics. It’s completely missing. If you are fighting against a group of monsters you cannot move around them so that you can manage to hit and get hit just by only one of them, because “distancing” is not an available mechanic (if not when you are fleeing) and with no collision detection all the mosters will stack one on top of the other.

Another proof of what I’m saying: I think in Diablo 2 most of the mosters moved *slower* than you. Again to let you exercize your movement superiority. If you didn’t have the possibility to move “faster”, then the circumnavigating patterns and “space managment” (or how the hell you want to call it) couldn’t have been possible.

In a mmorpg all that is missing. Everything is “intangible”. You swing your weapon at the air, you don’t see your enemy recoil, you cannot “reach and touch”, you cannot push. There is no contact. And, in the end, there is no space. And “space” is an extremely strong element of our reality and perception, so obligatory for a game to be “fun”.

Remember that it was not the clickfest to be fun in D2. And that mmorpgs are “not so fun” because they are “nerfed” on some founding values.

(then it would be interesting to discuss possible solutions to minimize that innate limit, since the connection latency will always prevent a direct fix)