“You gotta let some of the chaos in”: Diablo 2's art lead explains what he doesn’t like about Diablo 4

Last week, Moon Beast Productions officially revealed Darkhaven, a new action-RPG in the spirit of Diablo II, but with a changing, destructible, procedurally generated world that both echoes Minecraft and takes inspiration from the Diablo modding scene. Moon Beast are made up of ARPG royalty – their senior staff include original Diablo senior designer, art director and writer Erich Schaefer, Diablo 2 art lead Philip Shenk and Diablo 2 programmer Peter Hu.

As you’d expect, the Darkhaven devs have many Thoughts about Diablo today, at once leveraging their credits for marketing (they’re about to launch a Kickstarter) and resisting the idea that they are making an unofficial Diablo sequel. I don’t get the sense that any of them outright despise Diablo IV – summarised by Alice Bell as “2023’s prettiest RSI machine” – but Shenk in particular argues that the game has squandered “the magic” of previous games by focussing on smooth progression and balancing and in general, “overly engineering the experience” in order to keep people glued to the game’s live service.

All that’s from a chat I had with Shenk and Schaefer this week. At one point, I made the armchair designer observation that creating an ARPG with such a disorderly, malleable world is surely a nightmare for balancing and overall consistency. You need to ensure that players get their level-ups and gear of increasing rarity at a steady pace, and it’s hard to do that when, as in Darkhaven, people can dig through the majority of the terrain, or trigger a lich-summoning world event that slowly transforms the entire map into a necropolis.

Shenk pushed back on me a bit. “You mentioned about this, you know, perceived precision that needs to go into the design,” he said. “I feel like – not being the one who implements this, but I feel like that’s where the magic gets lost. Like, when you’re hammering down all the high points and levelling up all the low points, and trying to make smooth progressions. You know, like when Diablo 4 has their auto-scaling – nobody likes that, we’d like to have the spiky progression and we like to have the fun, cool moments.”

“I think it’s less precise than people think it should be,” he continued, “and I think that’s almost part of the problem with today’s games. They try to design it too perfectly and precisely, and the magic and the experimentation and the unexpected things, they never happen, you know – you gotta let some of the chaos in.”

Darkhaven’s chief instigator of chaos may be Erich Schaefer, partly because his process is to play the work-in-progress game everyday, and he doesn’t want to get bored. “I play the game constantly and make notes and badger people to get things done,” he told me. “Which requires, since I have to play it all the time, that it can’t be that straightforward. It has to be different all the time.

“So that’s why I concentrate on things being kind of radically different. The maps really matter and how they unfold and how you explore the world and open things up. It’s different every time and it opens new challenges, you can take on different things at different times. That makes it exciting enough for me to play it every day.

“The world can be destroyed,” Schaeffer added. “You can lose this game. I haven’t really seen it happen, other than faking it on purpose, but you could let the Necropolis take over. Basically, the game will end if it takes over the entire world, and wipes out all the waypoints, so there’s nowhere to resurrect.” If that happens to you in Darkhaven, you can start over in a new world with the same character. Myself, I like the idea of trying to survive inside a Necropolis. Moderate 2b2t vibes.

I returned to Shenk’s Diablo 4 comparison later in the interview, asking how Darkhaven’s own post-release updates will differ from Blizzard’s live service. Schaeffer began by noting that Moon Beast do not have Blizzard’s billions, so enormous story bolt-ons like Vessel Of Hatred are unfeasible. “I think the big difference is their campaigns that they do, their expansions are extraordinarily expensive,” he said. “We can’t really even compete with this kind of thing.

“They put so much work into the cinematics and the new maps and the new classes – I guess we’re going to do that to some degree, but our procedural style and these event-driven things, we could just make little modules that fit into the world and, and hopefully give you at least as much entertainment as a new campaign, that’s good for one playthrough in Diablo 4.”

Shenk, meanwhile, linked Darkhaven’s approach to post-release updates back to his opening arguments about ‘designing too perfectly’, commenting that Moon Beast want to get away from the stifling philosophies of free-to-play games that are predictably designed for the sake of retention.

“I think Path Of Exile sort of started set this precedent, because it’s free to play,” he said. “Their business model is, they need to keep people coming back on a regular cadence, otherwise the business is in debt, right? You know, if you don’t have people coming in for new content and new reasons to spend, then you don’t have a business.

“And then you have these games that are like [pay upfront] retail games like Last Epoch or Diablo 3 or Diablo 4, that somehow took it upon themselves to compete with that. But now it’s like, well where are you making your money? If you’re not a free-to-play game, you’re spending a lot of money to make these seasons, but you’re not really getting the benefit for it, you know, and then you need to do a battle pass, or you need to do expansion packs, all manner and stuff.” (I assume here that by “not really getting the benefit”, Shenk means the larger share of eyeballs resulting from ‘giving your game away’.)

“So I mean, we have a lot of ideas, but mostly it’s like, let’s just try to make this game replayable forever,” he continued. “Diablo 2 feels that way to us, you know – you have to keep injecting new content, but not in the same way. It’s just magically held up for 20 plus years, because it’s always fun to do another run.

“That’s not true of a lot of games. It’s certainly not true of Diablo 4, or a lot of these linear campaign games. They need to inject expensive new content. And a lot of this is back to what we were talking about in the beginning. If you’re overly engineering the experience, and everything is prescribed – here’s what we want you to experience, this big event, and we want everybody competing with this big event, and we’re going to tightly design the boss, and there’s one or two ways to solve it… Where’s the magic in that?

“You’re just going through a quick-time event essentially,” Shenk argued. “Whereas Diablo 2 and Hellgate: London – Diablo 2 was a sandboxy game, right? You don’t know what your game is going to be like, and that’s half the fun.

“You kind of know the order of things that you’re going to get, [but] the loot you’re gonna find, you know, that was huge – you’d find some new item and it could be a white item and that’s like, I want to build my build around this, you know. So that’s where the chaos comes in.”

Look out for the rest of my chat with the Moon Beast developers soon. You can already find streamer footage of early Darkhaven test builds on Youtube, if you’re too frothy at the thought of self-propagating undead kingdoms to wait for my words.