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I finally understand why I clicked with Diablo so profoundly as a child struggling with ADHD: the action-RPG was literally designed to remove as many barriers as possible between the player and "clubbing a skeleton."
In an interview originally conducted by Edge magazine, now republished in Playmakers: The Inside Stories of 30 Iconic Video Games, Condor (later renamed Blizzard North) co-founder Max Schaefer shared some of the earliest design philosophies that informed the conception of Diablo. According to Schaefer, the creators felt RPGs at the time were too complicated, took to long to get to the good stuff, and focused on penalizing players more than rewarding them, resulting in dwindling audiences.
"Back then, RPGs were so overwrought with statistics that the genre had shrunk to a tiny audience," said Schaefer. "We wanted to do an RPG how we'd played Dungeons & Dragons as kids: hit monsters and gain loot. Our mission was that we wanted the minimum amount of time between when you started a game up to when you were clubbing a skeleton."
This genuinely explains so much about my childhood gaming habits. Diablo and Ultima Online were the games that introduced me to the RPG genre, and now I'm realizing that a big reason for that was probably their simplicity. I simply didn't have the patience to tinker with complex RPG systems that defined games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, but I loved exploring dark fantasy worlds at a quicker pace. It turns out I was precisely Condor's target audience.
"Making a game simple for the player is actually harder for the developer," explains Schaefer. "One of our philosophies was to make it a reward-based rather than penalty-based game. A lot of RPGs fell into the trap of penalties: you don't eat and you die; everything you find is a penalty. With us, it even feels good to pick up a potion in the inventory and put it back down."
I don't know how often I pick up and put down potions just for the fun of it in Diablo, but Schaefer is right to point out how immediately and consistently gratifying it is to engage in the series' core gameplay loop. There isn't much more to the original game than clicking skellies to death and scooping up gold and loot – and you could argue not a whole lot's changed these days – but damn does it feel good to do that over and over and as your stats go up and up. I can't put a finger on exactly why, but I can only imagine there was some dark wizardry involved.
Of course, these days, now that my frontal lobe is fully developed, I can sit still long enough to appreciate the more spaced-out feedback loop of RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, but there's a reason I still go back to Diablo 2 some 25 years later.
