Diablo 2 left an indelible mark on videogame design, formalizing mechanics and systems like skill tree progression, randomized loot affixes, and colored rarity tiers that are now standard in RPGs and beyond. But despite its impact, Diablo creator and Diablo 2 director David Brevik still has gripes with its design 25 years after release.
Specifically, as he told Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson in a video interview celebrating Diablo 2’s 25th anniversary, Brevik thinks its stamina bar is awful.
In addition to health and mana, Diablo 2 characters have a stamina resource that drains as they run. Once it’s depleted, the character’s speed is slowed to a walk, and it’ll only start refilling once they come to a complete stop—or they drink a stamina potion. And if you ask Brevik, he’ll say it sucks.
“I hate the stamina bar in Diablo 2. It makes me cringe every time,” Brevik said. “It’s an irrelevant thing later in the game and it’s a punishing thing for the new player. It’s like a newbie tax almost.”
The stamina bar’s intent, Brevik said, was to keep players from fleeing or sprinting past combat. “It was supposed to be, ‘Hey, we just don’t want you running away from the enemies all the time. We got to limit your ability to constantly run away,'” Brevik said.
But in practice, it ended up feeling like an arbitrary obstacle to prevent a type of gameplay that most players weren’t interested in anyway.
“People don’t want to pass up the enemies,” Brevik said. “They want to fight them and they want to get the items. It’s not a passive kind of game. So the idea that somehow you could run away all the time and never die, I thought that was kind of silly.”
Wilson, whose entire game development career has been defined by being a Diablo 2 diehard, said he “charitably” views its stamina bar as “a mastery mechanic.” It might initially be a hurdle for players, but it lets them eventually feel the satisfaction of making it irrelevant through progression and proficiency. He compared it to Path of Exile’s item quality mechanic, where each piece of equipment has a quality rating that improves its stats as players increment its quality with currency drops.
“After a while that’s easy, and you do it to all your items and you never think about it,” Wilson said. “But it was still useful because it’s a thing that matters for early players. It teaches them about complex systems and then they feel good about just being capable of maxing it out later on.”
Speaking as someone who, despite hundreds of collective hours of PoE playtime, has never been more than a casual player because of systems like item quality, I suspect mileage on “mastery mechanics” might vary.
Brevik—perhaps under duress—allowed that Diablo 2’s stamina bar wasn’t entirely without merit.
“Right off the bat, it encourages combat. So in some ways it was good. But I don’t know,” Brevik said. “I still think that there probably could have been a better system to design there.”
Designers elsewhere seemed to agree: By the time Diablo 3 rolled around, ARPGs had broadly ditched stamina as a mechanic. Still, even if it clearly didn’t prevent Diablo 2’s success, there’s something reassuring in Brevik’s insistence that it was an imperfect mechanic. It’s nice to know that even the creators of some of the world’s most influential games are their own worst critics.
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