Diablo IV, Part 2

Last time, I talked about how much I enjoy the writing in the video game Diablo IV. This time, I’ll get more into general gameplay. The designers of this game paid a lot of attention to the player experience, and they put in a lot of fun touches.

For instance, the world map is very large. There are new places to visit, but we also get to revisit settings from some of the other games. Old characters show up, or are mentioned as part of history. Players who have been through the previous games will find those mentions entertaining.

Character customization is another big update. Players in video games always want to customize their characters. Previous Diablo games didn’t allow this. Each character class had a single character image. In Diablo III you could decide to be male or female, and that was it. For Diablo IV we get full customization of hair, skin tone, body type, scars/tattoos, and more. That is an important expectation for video games.

Clothing has been another issue for players. You find a ton of weapons and armor in these games, and when you put them on, it changes the character’s appearance. However, there was no way to customize those items. You could end up with ugly color combinations or ridiculous weapons that, while having the best stats, didn’t fit how you imagined your character. In Diablo III you could buy dyes to change your equipment’s color, but that was it.

Here, you can salvage excess gear at a blacksmith and it will save the “look” of arms and armor. You then can go to an armoire and select from the looks to make your character appear the way you want it to. It’s a bit like paper dolls, which isn’t something I thought I would ever enjoy in a video game. But I use the armoire quite a lot. When my character is in snowy mountains, I give her fur-lined armor. When she’s in the desert, I put her in lighter fabrics. To me, it makes the game more immersive.

One of the most notorious aspects of costuming in games has been the “magical armor” the women are shown in, while men are fully clothed. In this game you can have both men and women in “magical armor.” All’s fair in love and war and Diablo IV.

Another improvement for players in this game is the ease of fast travel. Diablo games always had teleportation scrolls to get back to town quickly, although you had to buy them. There were also town portals for moving from place to place. In this game, the scrolls are free and unlimited. You can also ride horses across country. Horses are a big thing in video games these days. Previously you had to run everywhere, and be attacked by every creature along the way. With horses, you can ride by most of them. You can also pin locations on the game’s map to find new places more easily. These changes make it much more convenient to move around the map, and that’s a welcome improvement.

What these details have in common is a mindfulness of the player’s experience in the game. That is something we can bring to our writing. Not exactly in the customizing; readers aren’t going to change a written character’s appearance on the fly. But as writers we can keep genre expectations in mind. We can consider the competition for a reader’s attention, and make our stories more fun to read. That might mean injecting a bit of humor, or it might mean creating more interesting settings with attention to the world building.

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