Diablo 3's Ability System
Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 9:07PM Diablo 3 comes out in a couple weeks. I'm giving it the coveted award for "Biggest Comeback In System Design." Diablo 2's ability system was so bad that it's almost unbelievable, while the way Diablo 3 handles ability customization is one of the very best systems I've seen.
Diablo 2
Diablo 2 had talent trees where you spend points to unlock new abilities, very similar to how talent trees work in World of Warcraft. Also, you could allocate stat points into various different stats however you wanted as you leveled up. At first glance, these seem like ok things, but let's look at just how deeply problematic they really are.
Don't Use Points!
First, the best way to play Diablo 2 is have this big red "+" button on your screen almost the entire time, the one that says you have extra points to spend. The reason that will be on you screen for weeks is that you'd be a sucker to actually spend the points as you get them. You counter-intuitively (and unfunly) should stock up on those and spend them much later on. So the simple and fun thing to do (spend points as you get them) is just a trap for noobs.
Next, the whole system of allocating points in the first place didn't really customize anything. It was just a giant test of if you did your web research enough to know the only reasonable way to spend those stat points. You don't have to take my word for it either, let's see what Jay Wilson has to say. He was an avid Diablo 2 player, and the Game Director of Diablo 3 for the last 5 or 6 years.
Here's a written transcript of the relevant part, in case you don't want to watch the vid:
"You usually take as much strength as you need to get the armor that you're targeting, and that's usually around 120 or 220, depending on what type of armor. You take 75 dexterity because that's the amount you generally need for good block percentages. You take NO energy at all unless…there's like one type of build you can make on a sorceress that uses energy shield. And then you put everything else in vitality. That's a shitty customization system. That's just not a good system." --Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 Game Director on Diablo 2
Talent Trees
Next, there's the talent trees. There's two problems here, one medium sized and the other is one of the most mind-blowing fumbles in design out there. First the medium problem: it's pretty hard to make talent trees that give any real choice. They sure seem to allow choice, and in theory they really could, it's just very hard to balance it all so that there's a lot of good builds. Blizzard learned this in World of Warcraft, and I think we can see a clear progression in their thinking here. The first thought was that talent trees are great (and I was on board with this). Then there were too many talents that were "required" because they were so damn good, you couldn't pass them up. Stuff like +5% damage, you just have to take that compared to various utility skills. Blizzard reworked all the talents (well several times, but I mean one time specifically) to get rid of all those "required" talents. If something was just +damage, they mostly got rid of it as a talent. If a talent was an ability that was *necessary* for a class, they just gave you that ability outside the talent trees. So now what was left allowed for more flexibility in your choices.
I was on board with that, but it kind of didn't work that well in practice. Blizzard then gave it yet another try, trying to open up the reasonable choices even more. The next step in their progression in WoW talents was to get rid of the trees entirely, for the Pandaria expansion. In the new system, you will pick one of three possible talent powers every 15 levels. (Here's the Warlock one, for example.) Diablo 3 takes an even further step in this progression, but let's come back to that. There's one more thing about Diablo 2.
Start The Entire Game Over To Change Even One Damn Talent Point WTF
In Diablo 2, you can't respec your talents. Just think about that for a minute. If you spend a talent point wrong once, you have start over your entire character. What? Yes, really. If you want to try out a new ability and see what it even does...you have to start over your entire character. This is completely ludicrious. The best way to play the game is actually to download a hack that lets you set ability points to whatever you want instantly, just so you can see which build you might want to play, then go back to the real game. I've seen many players defend the lack of respec as "replayability" but that's not what replayability actually means. That's just an enormous time sink for no real reason and it severely damages the play experience. (Note that 9 years after Diablo 2's release, there was a respec thing you can do, if you jump through some hoops. Too little, too late.)
Years ago I saw several official Blizzard posts that defended a similar idea in World of Warcraft. Their claim was that the intentional difficulty (and originally, the complete inability) to respec talents was to create more diversity, and to make choices matter. This is really wrong-headed and actually the opposite of true. If you have a balanced system, you would not have any need to prevent everyone from switching their specs around. You're basically saying that you're happy that a lot of people are locked into bad specs they aren't happy with, because that means there are more different specs out there being played. What a terrible thing to inflict on your players. Again, you'll have varied specs out there if you actually have several viable ones and small or zero switching costs. Imagine if we made a fighting game and "balanced it" by saying you are stuck with whichever character you first pick! The big variety of characters played shows how great our balancing is right? (No.)
The no-respec mindset is actually counter-productive to the goal, too. When switching costs are really high (like creating your entire character over from scratch...) then no one really wants to experiment. It's too risky to do so, and it's better to go look up the cookie cutter build and go with that. So you get less variety, not more. The variety you do get is often from players who you pissed off by punishing them for mistakes or for exploring the system.
The good news is that Blizzard's thoughts on this have clearly changed over the years. WoW respecs got more permissive over time, and the next step in that progression is Diablo 3.
Diablo 3
Allocating stat points as you level up: gone. Great, this was busywork that contributed basically nothing, so the subtractive design makes the game more elegant overall.
Talent trees: gone. You have exactly 6 slots for abilities, and you can put whatever you want in those slots. There are approximately 24 abilities per class, so your build involves making meaningful choices about what to keep and what to leave out.
Runes: interesting new feature. I read that this system took far longer to design than any other system in Diablo 3, and I totally believe it. When I first saw the interface in the recent open beta test, I couldn't believe what I saw. I was so blown away, that I had to go read about it before clicking on anything because it appeared too good to be true. I think this actually happens a lot in design, where when you finally create / see / experience the "right answer," it seems so obvious, like it couldn't have been any other way, but it might have taken years for the designers to figure out that answer. Elegance is hard.
Here's how runes work. A rune is a modifier to an ability. Every ability (each of your class's 24 abilities) has 5 runes associated with it. And I don't mean the same 5 choices, these are custom for every single ability. You can only have rune selected for any given ability. So that means you have to choose if you want your Magic Missile to have 1) increased damage, 2) split into three shots instead of just one, 3) pierce through enemies and keep going, 4) generate mana ("arcane power"), or 5) track the nearest enemy and do slightly more damage. Here are the abilities for the Wizard, along with all their possible runes.
So the combination of possible builds here is ridiculously large, given that you fill each of 6 slots with one of 24 abilities AND for each of those 6 abilities you chose, you also choose one of 5 runes. Oh and you also choose any 3 out of 15 possible passive abilities for you class, so even more combinations.
Infinite Instant Free Respecs
Now here's the part that was too good to be true to me. You don't spend points on these runes. You don't muck around with them in your inventory. You don't commit to them and have to pay some annoying respec fee or something. At *any time* you bring up the ability menu, set which abilities you want, and for each one click on the rune you want. It's all in a nice menu with no hassles. Again: any time. With no cost. As much as you want. The only drawback is a three second cooldown so you don't do this in the middle of a fight. Wow!
As you level up, you automatically gain new abilities and runes. Gaining them requires no action on your part. And at any time, you can switch amongst any abilities and runes you have so far, eventually all of them. You can fully explore the system all you want. You can see what every ability does. You can try out any combination of abilities. The freedom is amazing and it shows newfound confidence from Blizzard. There is no need to slow the progress of people figuring out good builds: Blizzard is telling us that exploring builds basically *is* the game, so go for it.
Elective Mode
I do have one minor complaint here. Internally, Blizzard said they divided the abilities into different categories that helped them think about what's what, then they realized that players should be able to see these categories too. So they exposed them, and tied them to the 6 different slots you have. I think this worked really, really well. It makes the whole system easy to understand, elegant, and imposes an interesting restriction: that you can only have one ability from category one, one from category two, and so on. It would be absurd to think you don't have enough choices, because you actually have over 29 BILLION possible builds per class with that system.
But really, I think Blizzard had already done a lot of development that assumed you could choose multiple abilities from a category if you wanted. They were maybe already too far down that road. So while their new system is easy to understand, elegant, and has an interesting limitation, you can turn on "elective mode" in the menus to get a less elegant UI that lets you put any ability in any slot. And of course you have to because it's strictly better for you to remove that limitation. So yeah, too bad they couldn't have made the simpler concept with better UI and the category limitation work. But whatever, it's fine.
Nephalem Valor
There is one more surprisingly great thing about the Diablo 3 ability system. That you can respec at any moment as much as you want does create one problem. If you are super hardcore, you will have a different spec for like every encounter in the game once you have memorized it all and are farming for items. That means the best way to play is tedious once you reach that level of mastery. It would really suck to "fix" that by limiting the respec in any way though. Normal humans want to explore the system freely and I'm so blown away by this infinite, instant, free respec thing that we should NOT ruin that to address this hardcore problem.
Of the top of my head I thought, "Hmm, maybe have a separate mode where respecing sucks or something, let hardcore people play that." But Blizzard's answer is much better. The Nephalem Valor system kicks in at the max level (60). So before that, meaning your first run through the game, you really can respec all you want for free with no drawback at all. Go for it! Once you reach 60, you can get a buff called Nephalem Valor that can stack a few times, maybe up to 5. Each buff increases your gold find / magic find stats. Also, if you kill a boss with that buff on, the boss will drop extra loot. You get the buff by killing rare or champion monsters.
The genius part is actually how you lose the buff though. I think it lasts about 15 minutes, so you have to keep progressing to stay buffed. But you also lose it if you *leave the game* or if you *change your abilities or runes at all*. Ok think about that. If you plan to farm the same 3 minute segment of the game over and over and over, you can do that. But you'll be doing it without the buff so it won't be optimal to get rare items that way. Also, if you want to respec before every single encounter, you can. It's just that you won't have the buff so it won't be the optimal way to get items either. The optimal way to get items happens to line up with the fun way to play: to go an entire big run where you stick to one spec. This is a very clever way to solve the problem for the new player and the expert without really sacrificing anything.
Conclusion
Thanks to Jay Wilson and the rest of Blizzard. I think this ability system with 6 slots, the lack of tech trees, the 5 runes per ability, the infinite instant free respecs, and the valor buff system overall is a very solid design. I'd go so far to say that it advances the craft of game design, even. Blizzard has come a long way in designing these kind of systems, and I think they've finally nailed it.
Reader Comments (126)
balasa, no it doesn't at all. I don't even see why anyone would think that, as skill trees are far more restrictive. That's not even a subjective opioin, I think it's actually an objective truth there. The combinatorics are billions more without trees. You seem to be talking about the design of specific skills and how they happen to go together, and about the tuning of inferno difficulty. Both of those things are totally irrelevant to the design of the SYSTEM of having 6 ability slots, which this article was about.
I don't know if you're familiar with a 'Diablo-clone' game from 2006 called Titan Quest. It never seemed to get a huge amount of hype, but I thought the skill system in that game (ignoring the attribute side) was pretty well done. You had skilltrees, but they were loose not strict with a web of dependencies, and you picked two of those trees (from a possible nine) to define your eventual choice of abilities. Skill respecs weren't free, but they start off incredibly cheap and then become more expensive each time you use one.. but to try a new mastery combination you'd need a new character.
Anyway the point is, they're making a new ARPG called grim dawn, and I'm definitely interested to see if they go with something D3-like, the more traditional skill-tree setup, or some evolution of what they had in TQ.
Dominare: thanks for alerting us to another ability system. Hopefully their new game will allow instant switching at no cost. I don't think I could even a play a game that put any cost on that again, it feels like the developers "don't get it" if they do that after seeing Diablo 3.
David, I am wondering if that is true. Before I played Diablo 3 I intellectually agreed with all these points and more (indeed I evangelised the skill system to several people on precisely the grounds you mention - lots more "real choice" versus false choice of trees). However, the ability to respec at any time curiously had a lot more of an impact than I expected: it made the customisation feel temporary, characters amorphous, and removed any incentive at all to make a new character of that class. Effectively, it shunted the entire burden of the games development onto its endgame - because nobody would ever be doing the low level content ever again! I suspect this is to a large degree why so many people have burned out and left D3 pretty quickly - the old respec system made people vary their play a lot more. Now, it's an interesting question if one could have a completely free respec system that still encouraged that kind of play... I'm not sure I can think of such a system off the top of my head.
I also have a suspicion that a skill system of the type that Diablo 3 has requires VASTLY more testing than a conventional skill system because the test applied to each skill variant is so harsh - it has to be interesting and balanced against its alternatives.
Of course it removed the incentive to make a new character of that class. That's the whole point. That's why it's great. Playing the entire game over to change something about your character is an F- terrible idea that was fixed. I think the ability *system* (emphasis on the word system) worked out exactly well as imagined. The complaints people have are with the specific tuning of individual abilities, with the general uninterestingness of items, with inferno having too many "stupid" challenges rather than things player-skill can avoid, and things like that. Those problems wouldn't be a reason to go back to the old terrible system of limiting respecs though.
You're making a very old point here. It's the same point that Blizzard made during World of Warcraft development early on where they said if people could change specs easily then there would be lower variety. Yeah that is true if your idea of good is basically tricking lots of people in sucky trap specs. And even then people are going to go with only the cookie cutter they read on the net instead of try anything because the cost of trying things is way too high. So the only way to have real variety is to allow full respec, so trying things is easy for everyone.
Your last statement seems kind of vacuously true to me. A system where you can switch easily needs to have balanced skills. A system where you can't switch easily can get away with less balanced skills because it's using it's sucky nature to hide it's problems and make it harder to really try all aspects of the game to see what you want to do, so it's kind of a total failure of an idea fundamentally. So yeah allowing switching means you need balance, but choosing some annoying bad system just to not have to balance things as well kind of a non-option to me.
Inferno is garbage for many different reasons, notably the idea of "challenge" as simply increasing monster stats and piling on monster affixes that tend to offer two choices: stay two screens away and kite, or die.
However, your argument that the system is not at fault is also wrong: you can literally swap out skills in mid-battle, removing the incentive to compile a skill set that is viable against all monsters and replacing it with mindlessly picking the AoE spells against normal monsters and the single target spells against bosses. At least make it so you can only swap out spells between maps.
Also, in a game like this it is literally impossible to balance skills, because they need to be good at various things and if one is even just 0.1% better than the others at one thing it will be all anyone uses.
What's the difference?
Skills and items are both "unlocked" by killing monsters. You are certain to unlock the skills you want (in some games you have to plan for it), but you are not certain to "unlock" the items you want.
We readily accept the notion that items are of varying power.
Switching costs for items are extremely high.
To try out the best items, you have to play the game A LOT (or pay cash). Of course, once you paid that switching cost you can always go back to the item you had before, but is that really all it takes? Would a simple option to go back to any previous skill build (for free) solve the issue? I think it would go a long way.
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In the end I have come to realize that Diablo 3 is more of an experience (like a movie) than an actual game. It's a strange experience in that it has built-in mechanisms for making it more rewarding (in a certain way at least) the more time I spend on it, but it's not much like a game since I can't do much to actually become a better player.
Sirlin: You say that forcing the player to play the whole game again is a bad thing. But in the case of this genre I disagree. Having an excuse to start over with godly equipment and having an easy time is a reward for many players. And why is it that playing the same game on the same difficulty over and over to unlock/find an item is OK (that's how I read you anyway), but replaying on a lower difficulty setting to unlock a skill is not?
Okay I'm going to update my previous post. In my last post I agreed completely with Sirlin, with the one caveat that if the game ever got intensely difficult, everyone would just be using cookie cutter builds anyways. I WAS RIGHT. Let's talk about why this is because Blizzard messed up the skills and not because free respecs are bad:
So, 99% of this problem is that Blizz sucks hard at balancing and designing skills. What is the strategic difference between these skills?:
(all the numbers were about 150% so I just made them the same to illustrate the point)
•"Shoot a fire arrow that deals 150% weapon damage as Fire to all targets it passes through."
•"Fire a massive volley of arrows dealing 150% weapon damage to all enemies in the area."
•"Shoot at random nearby enemies for 150% weapon damage."
NONE. There is no strategic difference, they all just kill a bunch of enemies, you just have to aim them a little differently. So if you have to kill a bunch of enemies, you just choose whichever one is slightly better at it. Or maybe you choose one because it looks cool, then you switch to the better one when you get to Inferno Act 2 b/c it's hard and you need every edge you can get. After the best one gets nerfed, go on justin.tv and watch someone trying out the 15 versions of skills that all basically do the same thing to see which one is a little better.
So basically Blizzard needs to modify the skills to have a wider variety of strategic effects and more synergies (and not stupid "This other spell gets 10% damage" stuff). Think of it like a TCG- you don't design an entire Magic: The Gathering set where 1/3rd of the cards are Lightning Bolt with different names, 1/3rd of the cards are Incinerate with different names, and the rest are actually different cards. Even then the game is going to require HELLA GOOD BALANCING to have a huge variety of builds. Look at Sirlin's games- balance is possible, most people just suck at it. I think it's completely possible to have 8+ "cookie cutter" builds per character with some spells switched out every now and then, leading to an actual large amount of different builds used at high level play.
The hilarious thing is that even if all the skills have different strategic definitions, there's the meta-strategy of what your character's build *does*. If you have 8 builds that are all just good combinations of spells to kill monsters, then whichever build kills monsters the best is the one everyone will use, so you really only have one build there. I can think of several different ways builds could be different on the meta-level, but it would require a pretty big design philosophy change and for me to be working at Blizzard so whatever! I think with Blizz's current designers after they do the 1.04 buff to skills or whatever there will be like max 2 or 3 different builds per character.
So did the skill system achieve what it set out to do?
It sounds like the skill system promised three things:
1) Less frustration and "noob traps" with more ability to re-spec.
2) A greater variety of good builds. (Instead of "variety" by making it impossible to switch out of a bad build.)
I think #1 has obviously been achieved, just by design.
But what about #2? Are there more than a handful of good builds for each class? Or have players just found the optimal build more quickly?
And what about side effects? Is the side effect that the optimal build is hardcore micromanagement: optimizing your build one way for one battle, and then optimizing your build another way for another battle?
Interested to see the final verdict on this.
Actually I think #2 is the wrong question to ask there. Let's say you found that the system produces a really small number of viable builds (bad). There are two reasons why this kind of doesn't matter regarding this article:
1) It would mean that individual skills are poorly tuned, a concept unrelated to the overall system.
2) If only a very few builds were viable, you couldn't HELP that situation by making people start the game over to change builds, or any other time sink delay. You'd still have exactly as few viable builds, just with more annoyance and obfuscation of the problem.
Thanks for the response! But if you're saying that question #2 is irrelevant, then is the new system really all that ingenious?
Couldn't you have achieved the same thing by having the Diablo 2 system, and letting people re-spec at will? Wouldn't this be a much shorter article, that says "re-specs good, no re-specs bad"?
(I do appreciate what you're saying. Okay, let's just say that in theory, the new Diablo 3 system is balanceable, even if it's not currently balanced. But I'm just not seeing how the new system is any more or less balanceable than Diablo 2. Especially if it's led to the exact same balance problems in practice, minus the annoyance of having to replay the whole game to re-spec.)
I was interested enough in this question that I did some research.
(I haven't even played D3!)
I read a ton of forums and commentary, trying to really isolate the intelligent criticism of the new skill system.
If I could sum up the most salient criticism of grabbing 6 skills, it's that it's too much "breadth" and not enough "depth". There isn't any reward for specializing. You pick your favourite skills. And if you realize one isn't working, you replace it with another. Even if you picked two skills that are different from your friend, they don't really feel like different characters anymore.
The way that fans describe it, it's that there are no more "builds". It's more like Halo 2, where you just wield different weapons at will. I can't really say that I become a different character when I go from wielding 2 pistols, to wielding a pistol and a plasma rifle, to wielding 2 plasma rifles. Even if they're balanced choices, it feels superficial. Your character doesn't really master anything.
But then I go back to Diablo 2... and I think "okay, so what's so brilliant about putting one point into every skill to unlock the powerful abilities, then putting 20 points into 2 or 3 top level skills?" Why not just have a system with the two or three skills?
It's a hard question for me to wrap my head around as a designer.
Dan that's an easy one. The answer is that argument is nonsense and we can reject it out-of-hand. There are builds so "there aren't builds!" is flatly wrong. And saying you have nothing invested in your character's build is another bit of rhetoric that's a fancy way of saying I wish some huge time sink kept other people from choosing my build. What you're quoting is frankly stupid stuff by people who don't really know what they are talking about. I think the underlying issue that we see across almost all games is that people don't like things that are different, even when the different thing is clearly better. So they complain and make up bogus arguments that make no sense, like the ones you listed.
Someone could certainly have criticisms about the game, but the ones you listed are not reasonable ones. As if being able to replace a skill that isn't working out is a *problem*. I mean seriously, what.
Thanks again!
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. There's a lot of gateway and filler skills that are pretty meaningless. They only add the illusion of choice, and create unnecessary roadblocks to "grind through". We may as well let players pick from the juicy skills. No filler.
HOWEVER...
I do think there's something missing when we try to take human psychology out of our approach to game design.
Okay, fine, we can do the math and prove that your psychological feeling of choice is actually 100% bullshit, and you have less quantifiable choice than you think you do.
But what about the psychology of investment? The psychology of specialization?
That's a lot harder to quantify. In some ways, it's easier to focus on choice, since it's measurable. But we can't measure how much a player feels like they're creating an extension of themselves when they gradually build up a character. We can't measure that emotional investment.
Just because we can't measure it, it doesn't mean it's not important.
The unreasonable part is saying they don't have that investment. You can choose to play a certain build a lot. Now you are "invested" in that you played it a lot. The end. There's also the matter of needing gear to support or enhance a build, which is quite significant. I'm sticking to my story here that somewhere between 0 and 1% of the problem is lack of investment and 99 to 100% of the problem is irrational hate of change. I think if you listened to those players, you'd steer way, way off course in making games. For example, you might make a system that required people to start over the entire game if they wanted to change a talent point so that they're "more invested" in a build.
Yeah, a lot of it was hatred of change.
Most of the comments were much more focused on whether to re-spec or not. And then there's the "the game is ruined", "Diablo is no longer an RPG", "the developers are lazy", "this game is for babies"... which was sadly more than half the comments.
I had to dig hard for the substantive criticism, to find a handful of comments about the lack of tree.
I'll still be interested to keep an eye out for a mass-market game with a good skill system.
(Hey, surprised to see this is still an active discussion.) I've found the reaction to Diablo 3 pretty maddening, because it generally seems to be a better game than D2, yet people seem to like it less. It's bizarre because while there are real problems with D3's endgame, there are also real problems with D2's endgame (and especially vanilla D2 before the Lord of Destruction expansion and subsequent patches). But the lesson I see repeated over and over in the gaming press and among gamers on forums is: "See, D2 is just better and all these interesting, risky decisions that Blizzard made in D3 are wrong and we should go back to the bad old days."
This sucks because it's basically saying "If you try to fix design problems we will crucify you if you don't do everything 100% correct." Even worse, a lot of people seem to be saying that what they like in action RPGs aren't making interesting strategic decisions, but instead just blindly following a guide, grinding a few spots over and over, getting uber loot, and then steamrolling monsters. Virtually all of the controversial design decisions in D3 (abilities, randomly generated items, Neph Valor, no guaranteed loot from bosses, really hard random mobs) seem to have been made to break that old gameplay and replace it with actual strategic decision making at every turn.
Now I think it's pretty clear that Inferno wasn't tuned well and that player skill didn't matter enough, and there was still probably too much repetitive grinding. But as Sirlin keeps saying, most of the problems with the endgame come from tuning issues, not the overall system design. I think Blizzard was trying to simulate WoW's raid progression in Inferno, where you have to step your toes into places that are a little too hard for you and slowly work them over and over until you have the gear to move on to the next section/act. This is kind of an interesting idea, but I basically got bored of it in Inferno A3 and haven't gone back to finish it because:
1. As everyone has mentioned, too much of the combat vs random affixed mobs boils down to really dull kiting strategies. The fights tend to take a long time and are dull.
2. I actually think the gearing system is generally interesting (there are some good, hard choices to make about stat prioritization especially after the first few patches, can't say for sure about the current state of the game), but is held back by the fact that well-prioritized gear is just too hard to acquire short of the AH. There's too much randomness and they really should have mitigated it; it sucks a lot to get useless legendaries or do a full clear of an act and not find anything really good to sell.
3. Given points 1 and 2, the amount of boring kiting you have to do in order to get good gear and progress is too high. It feels like nothing more than a big gating system to prevent people from beating the game too quickly.
What I don't see at all is how lots of choice with abilities enters into Inferno's problems at all. Somebody above in the thread suggested it means you just use AOE abilities against mob packs and then switch your build to single-target abilities for bosses, which I guess is fine if you hate loot and don't care about losing your NV stacks. Is anyone actually playing Inferno like this?
There's another aspect here that I find troubling, which is a lot of the arguments in favor of D2's broken designs boil down to: "I like being psychologically manipulated by a game." When people talk about how they like feeling "invested" by lock-in systems, or they just play because they liked the feeling of getting really cool loot, I'm a little worried. If anything, we need to reduce the Skinner box nature of games (especially RPGs) because it's not really good design to just exploit weird portions of player psychology. What if we applied these kinds of arguments to slot machines? When you hit that jackpot, boy, do you feel great! A+ game design would play again! Hey, I've sunk $1,000 into this progressive slot -- love that I'm so invested in it! I can't stop playing!
Quick addendum to my overly-long post: I feel like when we think about game design, we often overvalue addictiveness and even "fun" (as Sirlin has pointed out, "fun" is a really weird thing because it's obviously true that people can have fun with things we would consider bad). That people compulsively played a lot of D2 doesn't mean it was well designed, it means it was compulsively playable.
An analogy: potato chips are really addictive. As the marketing slogan goes, once you eat one you can't stop. We've all experienced this, and it's because as humans we're wired to respond to salt and fat, and potato chips are an effective salt/fat delivery system.
Imagine that we were discussing the best foods, chefs, restaurants, etc. Into this conversation I interject that potato chips are clearly one of the greatest culinary inventions, because it's so hard to not eat them. Would this be a compelling argument? I hope we could agree that, while potato chips have their merit in small quantities, they don't exactly represent the pinnacle of achievement in terms of "food design." They don't really taste that good, we just like them because of a quirk of our evolution.
"The psychology of investment," to use Dan's phrase, seems to me to very similar (also the "psychology of loot" that many other writers have talked about re: D3). Feeling invested in something isn't really a function of good game design; it's a function of our brains needing to justify our actions. And frighteningly anyone who knows much about psychology knows that our brains are really, really good at justifying things after we've done them (and in fact we often seem to act and then create the reasons for the acting later which is always kind of scary to me). There were/are probably valid evolutionary benefits to this behavior, but it's not exactly humanity at its finest. Taking advantage of this quirk isn't good game design.
Stephen, yes A+ post. As you say, there are lots of problems with the tuning of Inferno that we could point to (that you did point to), but that's neither here nor there about how the ability system works, or Neph Valor, etc.
I laughed at this line though: "If anything, we need to reduce the Skinner box nature of games (especially RPGs) because it's not really good design to just exploit weird portions of player psychology." That's the whole point of Diablo3 though, to be a Skinner box, lol.
I guess I don't have much to add, but if anyone out there is reading the comments, read Stephen's.
If we re-read Sirlin's original post, we see that he assumed the N. Valor buff would be a good incentive to "stick with one build." However, the N. Valor buff just makes item drops better, and item drops in D3 are SO BAD that getting better item drops isn't a good incentive to stick with a single build for an extended period of time.
This is in addition to the Inferno problem of having an environment with only one dimension of interaction (be good at dealing damage), so there is only one "optimal" build. If the environment supported multiple play styles, there would be a separate optimal build for each playstyle, and possibly hybrid builds.
In effect, there isn't anything wrong with the basic skill system, but the rest of D3 doesn't support it. As a result, the skill system makes an already dull game worse, because it emphasizes, rather than hides, the other flaws.
Of course, even that is a good thing, because it means people will stop playing it sooner, and go back to Puzzle Strike :-)