There are those few games that come out once a generation and completely shift the landscape for better or for worse. They change the conversation regarding what one could expect from games and what we should expect from the future. Sometimes it's an RPG pushing the limits of immersion, sometimes it's a online shooter starting a worldwide trend of Battle royales. In 1991, that game was Blizzard's Diablo and it helped spawn a franchise and a genre, both of which are still loved to this day. (Mostly. Diablo 3 still has it's critics.)
This genre has come to be known as 'Diablo-like', even if many modern iterations tend to be displeased with the forced association. They are characterized as isometric role playing games in which the focus of the gameplay is not in making decisions and exploring a lovingly rendered world space, but rather in slaying horrific beasties and trudging ever further down an unending dungeon of torment. these games were the original 'loot-grind' extravaganza, built from the ground-up to support replayablity and constant improvement. The Borderlands series may fashion itself as "The original looter shooter" (Quite rightly so, incidentally.) but the Diablo-like archetype was the specifications to which that franchise was built.
But what was it about Diablo that made it so special? Well, for that there is much debate. For my part I think that a key part of the franchises success comes from the way in which the game left much of it's content unexplained and left the consumer to discover what was going on. You must remember, as this game was the first of it's kind and this left a great many number of players incredibly confused as to how to reach their fullest potential in the game. Luckily, this came out in the beginning years of the Internet when people were just beginning to uncover the secrets of connectivity. And if you played Diablo you knew how to work the Internet, particularly because one needed an account on Blizzard's Battle.net in order to play online and chat. This meant that the player base became one of the first video game fandoms on the Internet and thus created a strong knit community that persisted for years. Plunge the depths of the Internet and you may still find an old, poorly formatted site for such a community. (Although most of the OG's are only archived on the Deep Web now.)
Whatever the causing factor might have been, Diablo turned out to be a huge success for Blizzard and the gaming industry in general. A press release from 1997 boasted that Blizzard's Battle.net servers had identified 13 million games, and Blizzard employees had their chests puffed out during interviews for the next year. Nowadays, Battle.net still exists and runs most all of Blizzard and Activision's online endeavours, all because of the smash hit that was the original Diablo.
All of the 'Diablo-like' games tend to follow a similar premise 'in homage' to the original that started it all. That means things usually start with a small town that gets attacked by an unlikely presence, causing the hero to go in search for the cause of it all. In Diablo, that means trekking through hoards of undead through miles of catacombs and into hell itself to kick the Devil where the sun don't shine. Other genre examples do tend to share in Diablo's penchant for hellish, grotesque and gruesome imagery as you plumb the depths of hell. Things never get too bad, (Like, say, they did in the weird hack-n-slash game; Dante's Inferno) but you'll see enough gross stuff to make a sensitive soul lose their lunch.
One way in which this genre appeals to such a vast array of gamers is through the class system, something that Diablo bought to life in a way that no other RPG had quite managed before. In Diablo, when you choose you class you are essentially deciding the way that you will be playing the game for the long-haul. If you choose the Necromancer class that means you'll be spending all of your effort in summoning familiars to your aid. Those that prefer ranged combat might prefer the Demon Hunter class, melee folk might flock to the Monk, so on and so forth. Not only did this allow for players to cater towards their gameplaying strengths and preferences, but it incentivised repeat playthroughs as different classes to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each. Remember, different classes in these games fundamentally change the way the game is played, picking a new one can feel like a whole distinct experience.
Personally, I don't have as much of a storied history with this genre of games as some other gamers out there might, but I have dabbled in a few over the years. Specifically, I have tried my hand at Torchlight and Path of Exile. The former of which is a bright and colourful take on the genre that portrays cartoony characters and colourful attack trails whilst the later is a gritty upheaval of the formula of these kinds of games, fashioning itself as free-to-play and basking itself in all the seasonal gameplay events and online play features that one can shake a stick at. (Also cosmetics, PoE has a lot of those.)
Of those games, Torchlight was the only one that I played to completion (Or at least, as much as you can complete games like these) so I'll focus there. The times that I would play Torchlight almost felt akin to playing a clicker game, only with heaps more depth thrown in. By that, I mean that the key to these games is finding a strategy that works for you and spamming it to death. Therefore it is entirely feasible to breeze through several floors whilst watching a video on your phone and hardly paying attention to anything that you're doing. However, things are always shifting in games like these and so a winning tactic is only going to work on one type of enemy, you'll have to mix things up once you reach the next area. In this way, Diablo-games reach that interesting sweet spot between games that you can sail through in a power-fantasy haze, and those that have you glued to your every resource stat and buff, watching which tick down and up. It's a peculiar experience and one that I certainly recommend that you try for yourself at least once. (Remember, Path of Exile is free to play.)
There is no shortage of variety when it comes to these games, either. Whilst Diablo explores the depths of hellish mythology, (Although nothing on the Mexican land of dead despite the namesake) torchlight takes a bright and appealing approach to it's game design and Path of Exile envisions a bevy of surrealist monsters with slight mythological inspirations. There are even some more games like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing which delves into several European mythologies that one would expect from a property like that, including Sirens, Werewolves and ghosts. The only meta-genre that these games haven't touched is Sci-fi for some reason, and even then that's only as far as I know. There may be an amazing space Diablo out there that is yet to drift into my sphere of gaming knowledge.
Diablo games are the progenitors of worthwhile replayablitiy and have wormed their way into many a player's hearts consequently. Sure, when taking account the entire catalogue of games that make up this genre, the bar for quality might undulate a bit, but things have kept consistently good enough that people never lose faith in these games. Everytime there is a Diablo 3 to sour people's tastes, a Path of Exile comes out to bring equilibrium to the universe. Heck, by the time this blog comes out it is highly likely that we'll be looking at a Diablo 4 in the near future, so we'll get a chance to see how the series' formula has evolved in a world that has birthed the looter shooter craze. (I'm expecting a sword that walks at the very least.)
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