Why do you play ARPGs? Is it to face swaths of monsters to mow them down and get showered in digital gore and shiny loot? Well, if that’s your preferred experience, you are apparently doing it wrong according to former Diablo designer and Blizzard co-founder David Brevik, who shared some feelings about the way the sub-genre has changed in a podcast hosted by VideoGamer.
“I think that a RPGs in general have started to lean into this: kill swaths of enemies all over the place extremely quickly. Your build is killing all sorts of stuff so you could get more drops, you can level up, so you can like, and the screen is littered with stuff you don’t care about. […] When you’re shortening that journey and making it kind of ridiculous, you’ve cheapened the entire experience, in my opinion.”
Brevik also expressed his opinion that Diablo II has endured because its pace of leveling and loot was more slower-paced and “realistic,” that RPG progression should be about the journey, and that racing to max level and loot is a problem that’s affecting modern MMOs as well. “How fast can you level? How fast can you kill everything? It’s all about speed and things like that,” he’s quoted as saying. “I just think that makes a kind of a worse experience. And I tend to shy away from that direction.”
This is nowhere near the first time that Brevik has had some spicy takes on the genre and the industry overall, as the list below illustrates. We’ll just go ahead and add this one to the pile and see what discussion springs up in the comments.
