Even though I play a lot of action RPGs, I hadn’t heard anyone describe their combat in terms of stats, like dexterity and intelligence, before watching former Path of Exile game director Chris Wilson’s recent video about Diablo 5.
By this metric, Diablo 4 is more a dexterity-based game where quick reflexes and lots of dodge-rolling out of attacks can be the key to victory regardless of your build. Diablo 2, however, is an action RPG that favors the intelligence and strength-based approach where your success is mostly based on how well you’ve prepared your character for a fight rather than your actions in the moment.
As Wilson says in the video, most action RPGs blend the two, but many modern action RPGs tend to skew toward fast-paced action (think: soulslikes). Diablo 3 and 4 pushed the series away from the heavier RPG elements of Diablo 2, which is partly why Wilson put a team together to make a game that returned to that style with Path of Exile.
Joe Shely doesn’t acknowledge Wilson’s video directly, but it seems to me like he’s directly responding to the part where Wilson theorizes that Diablo 5 will continue where Diablo 4 left off. His response suggests a bigger shift than I expected, especially given how Blizzard abandoned its goal to recreate Diablo 2 shortly after Diablo 4 was released by speeding everything up to Diablo 3’s pace.
I really liked the direction Diablo 4 went, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the slower-paced combat it used to have. The few things Blizzard said about Diablo 5 at BlizzCon show that it’s very aware that a lot of people want more of that old DNA in there. Something as simple as items taking up multiple inventory slots again is a great example of a small, but flavorful thing that the series lost when loot became more homogenized and fictionless.
As Diablo 2: Resurrected and now World of Warcraft: Forever have proven: People are willing to put up with inconveniences when they add weight to their experience. I forgot how fun it was to get a quest in WoW that mostly involved running for 10 minutes to a new area. Most modern quests fly you to where you need to be very quickly, and you never get a sense for how the world really pieces together.
The same can be said for modern Diablo games when it comes to how little you have to think about your character’s strengths and weaknesses compared to the older games. Diablo 4 is mostly about making your damage numbers go up until you’re an unstoppable force. The journey from zero to hero lasts a few hours and then the rest of it involves completing everything in front of you until it’s time to do it all over again in a few months when a new season starts.
All of this is to say that I hope Diablo 5 takes this opportunity to lean harder in the other direction. Blizzard keeps saying it has no intentions of leaving Diablo 4 completely behind as long as people still play it. There’s no better opportunity for Diablo 5 to take a different path that incorporates some of the old with the new to see what sticks.
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