Diablo 3 & Game Motivation

With the release of Diablo 3 earlier this year Blizzard/Activision answered the dreams of gamers for the past 12 years. Unfortunately it seems that dream is slowly spiraling down into a nightmare. When Diablo 3 was released gamers surged through the content at a pace that was at best unexpected. Through the increasing difficulties and gear drops the world first Inferno mode Diablo kill came just over a month after the game's release, despite complaints among players about hitting a wall and having to farm for hours to find gear needed to progress.

While recently there have been patches and additions to the game there has been a lot of public backlash against Blizzard with the way that not only the game has been handled but from public statements made by some of Blizzard's employees and a mess with overzealous forum suspensions. While these things don't directly affect game play they reflect badly upon the way that Blizzard has handled the fallout of poor game motivations and bad game balance.

When designing a game there are specific motivators that keep gamers playing. Content, challenge, rewards and story, each of these come together to create and experience for players that should be engaging and rewarding, Diablo 3 is an example of how when one or any of these aspects is missing the game feels incomplete or at best broken.

Let's start by taking a look at how Diablo 3 addressed content within the game. I played through Diablo 3 on the beginning normal mode, through all four acts and finished it at sometime under 19 hours. Including the time it took to farm the items needed to unlock the hidden area "Whimsyshire", and I thoroughly enjoyed the time it took me to run through the game the first time through. However Diablo 3 is setup so that once the game has been completed on normal mode the next tier difficulty unlocks and the player is asked to play the game again, their only rewards for doing so being better gear and harder creatures to fight. This harder tier adds absolutely no new content for the player to experience and for those people, like myself, who play games to see the content that was created have no motivation to continue playing.

Diablo 3's challenge aspect is something that worked early on in the game, normal and nightmare modes were fair, the challenge ramp up through the acts felt even and smooth and there were times that when I died it felt frustrating at points but never did it feel like it was an unfair death. I always felt that if I approached a situation or particular fight differently that I was able to overcome it and move on and 90% of the time that was absolutely correct. Never was there a point where I felt like I had hit a brick wall and could not progress. As the later difficulty ranks of Diablo 3 were unlocked, hell and inferno, that no longer became the case. Players now need to spend hours and hours collecting drops in hopes that something that would increase their stats enough for them to move forward would drop so that they could progress.

Loot drops have become the reason to continue playing Diablo 3 for many gamers. The reward of finally being able to move to act two or three of Inferno mode so that they can continue to grind for different items and collect new rewards is the biggest motivator of continued play from people that I know still playing the game. While there are several reward systems in Diablo 3 including gear, gold, and with the addition of the Real Money Auction House, income it seems that this was the focus of the development team over many of the other aspects of the game. The primary and main motivator of Diablo 3 has become the reward system which when looking for that "perfect" item in and of itself is a poor motivator. The chances of a item dropping that has perfect stats for a player is an abysmal 0.0000343%, and while there are hundreds if not thousands of pieces of gear that drop through a play through of all four acts you still end up with an extremely low probability that the piece the player is looking for will drop. I'm certain that this is an intentional move on Blizzard's to push players to spend money at the Real Auction House, which Blizzard takes a cut of.

Lastly people play games for the story; this is something unfortunately where I believe Blizzard has failed completely at. The story behind Diablo 3 is, to use and overused phrase, cookie-cutter at best. The location types used in Diablo 3 are almost exactly the same location types used in Diablo 2 in almost exactly the same order. The characters are flat; lacking any real traits they are almost impossible for the player to be empathetic to. Even the big "twist" towards the end of the game seemed predictable and the final confrontation feels anti-climatic.

Personally I think that Diablo 3 had the capability of being an excellent game if it had taken a more traditional approach to content progression by making the player grind throughout the game content for gear that they needed and an overall progression of difficulty through the story instead of asking the player to run through the same content four times with increased difficulty while playing through the same content.