Chasing Green Drops: The Intangible Appeal of Loot Games and Why Diablo 3 Works When The Division Doesn’t

As I wind down on the latest season of Diablo 3 and as The Division’s Underground DLC release date approaches for PS4 players, I wanted to take the time to reflect on my time with both games.

Diablo 3’s troubled history is one of gaming’s most interesting comeback stories. As a player who was there when the game launched, I experienced a lot of the problems that would plague the game during the era before Reaper of Souls and “Loot 2.0” were ultimately introduced into the game. It’s not worth rehashing the design issues that negatively impacted the way that most casual or “casual-core” players would enjoy the game, particularly since Josh Mosqueira gave an excellent talk at GDC that served as a mea culpa for the design decisions that informed the launch version of Diablo 3. Needless to the say, the itemization of the game was completely broken and the only reasonable way to progress in the game, that is well into the end-game grind, was to buy loot drops in the auction house.

The Diablo 3 team would eventually rollback the auction house and rework how the game worked — tuning the itemization of the drops so that players would drop class-appropriate gear, and also greatly increasing the rate of legendary and set item drops. By the time I returned to Diablo 3, many more changes occurred, including a new end game in the form of Greater Rifts (which had the effect of at least lessening the need to grind bounties for more casual players). I’ll admit that I’m not deep enough into the game to be able to consider the specific intricacies of the changes made to the game since I played it — for example, 2.4.2 brings massive nerfs to a specific play-style that only affects high end groups, and while I’m sure these balance changes will somehow trickle down to more casual players like myself, I simply have no idea if there will be any tangible difference to how I play in Season 7. But as someone who has played the game on and off for the past 3–4 years, I’d say that the Diablo 3 that we have now is much better than the one that was released in 2012.

The Division is a game that’s clearly patterned on Diablo 3, with a ramp up to an end game where player levels mean much less than the rolls on the gear that you drop. The High Value Target system that was implemented in 1.2 is lifted straight from the Diablo 3 playbook, where the player is asked to complete bounties in order to unlock a mission to fight a boss that guarantees a set item drop. The Underground DLC expansion feels very much like the introduction of Greater Rifts, with high difficulty repeatable content meant to be played in groups that is guaranteed to drop some viable end game gear.

Being patterned after one of the best loot games on the market today is all well and good, but why did The Division seemingly flame out soon after the game came out? I don’t have any hard data to corroborate this conclusion of course, but anecdotally I can see the game’s inability to retain players by the empty friends list in the game and the general lack of interest on NeoGAF. Admittedly, Diablo 3 doesn’t have the same robust player base that it had in 2012, but there is a definite spike in players every new season — and for a 4 year old game, that’s saying something.

Perhaps the biggest factor is the developers being afraid of a player population min/maxing their gear too quickly. It’s a problem that Bungie tried to solve as well with Destiny, as they did their best to mete out gear drops in a weekly manner in order to artificially extend the time it took for a player to reach an optimal min/max gear level. This began with the so-called “Bullet King” patch, which took out the ability to constantly farm named elite enemies that appeared in set locations around the overworld. Then when the first Incursion was released, drops were limited to once a week, which meant that the only way a player could progress was to either keep logging on on a weekly basis or participate in PvPvE content (otherwise known as the Dark Zone). It was around this time, with the 1.1 patch, that the game lost most of the players on NeoGAF and in my friends list. For a game with so little to do, progression was the only thing that would keep the majority of players engaged in the game and by artificially gating the progression with weekly drops, most players opted to simply stop playing the game entirely.

Of course, the fear is that if you let players continually farm for gear, then the most dedicated players will reach the end of the progression curve quickly and have no reason to play the game at all. While that fear is certainly true, what this doesn’t acknowledge is that these players account for a small minority of the player base and that trying to cater a game for this audience will inevitably alienate players who are engaged, but in a much more casual manner.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the developers are tasked to parcel out the game via a season pass, which means that they are expected to find a way to keep the players interested in the game for an entire year. I’m sure in some meeting room somewhere, the designers at Massive assumed that slowing down gear progression is the best way to make sure players constantly engage with the game and will be playing the game as each piece of DLC content arrives. What this doesn’t take into account is that because each update will seemingly raise the gear quality, most gear will be made obsolete anyway. Even if a player optimizes their gear in one update, their gear is replaced two months later by better gear. By trying to stretch out a week’s content over eight weeks (or twelve if you’re on PS4), the developers have created the impression that there’s simply nothing to do in the game after players have completed the weekly content. Rather than come back the next week to play the game some more, most players simply opt to stop playing altogether because they feel that they are already “done” with the game.

One of the lessons learned at Bungie was that it was okay if people stopped playing the game. I haven’t touched Destiny since The Taken King, but the impression I get is that while the drops are still contained under a weekly lockout, they’ve loosened the reigns on the progression curve and have allowed people to upgrade their gear as quickly as they want. Of note, it’s perhaps not a coincidence that Blizzard supposedly consulted with Bungie around the time that The Taken King was developed, leading to the game that we have today. Now perhaps Massive didn’t have the Bungie example to work from, since it’s possible that they were designing their progression curves well before people were angry with Destiny. But there’s no excuse for not learning from Diablo 3’s mistakes, particularly when those mistakes were so public in nature.

But it’s more than just the limited nature of drops. The game is also extremely stingy with drops as well if you are not in the Dark Zone (and even if you ARE in the Dark Zone). This stinginess created two problems. First, the lack of drops made the game unfulfilling to play — particularly when you factor in the itemization problem that I will discuss later. You might spend half an hour finishing one of the Incursions and be left with a green and a gold drop that is completely worthless. Second, players were pushed to crafting as a source of better drops. This meant people were chasing after the perfect SMG and M1A weapon rolls through the crafting system rather than playing the game. But since crafting was, and perhaps still is, the only way to guarantee a usable piece of gear in the game players used it as a stopgap measure to wring some enjoyment out of playing the game. Sure, playing the game might not give me the item drops that I wanted, but at least I could deconstruct those items and then try to craft something that I can use. Of course, the developers responded by making it much more expensive to craft items, eliminating crafting as a viable option for many casual players who might not have hundreds of crafting materials saved up.

The reason the lack of drops is frustrating is that when you look at the Diablo 3 endgame, where players are grinding content at high Greater Rift levels or on Torment X, the game feels incredibly generous with its drops. Killing a Rift Guardian at a high level very much feels like cracking open a pinata, with bright green and gold drops splashing across the screen in a wonderfully exciting explosion that presumably replicates the endorphin high that one might feel when hitting 21 at the blackjack table. It’s not uncommon to find several set item drops in a single run, and each run by design takes no more than 15 minutes to complete. This generosity has the added bonus of making the players feel that the game respects their time, so that even if a player doesn’t get what they want or need from this particular rift run, there is always the chance that the next run will have the elusive Ancient set item that they need.

Perhaps a more subtle problem that affects The Division is the lack of defined player classes. At first, it was very freeing to be able to change skills on the fly, adapting the skills you used to the gear you dropped and the way that you wanted to play the game. It certainly encouraged experimentation as players tried different abilities and item combinations to try to find what worked for them and their group. The unfortunate side-effect of this freedom was that it ruined the itemization of the gear drops in the game. This itemization problem isn’t an issue on the ramp to level 30, because you are constantly replacing your gear as you level up. But it became readily apparent once you reached the endgame and began to think about optimizing your gear for your particular style of play. This meant that you might have dropped a great armor piece with a high Firearms roll, but since you were trying to optimize for Electronics, the gear drop loses a lot of its value. This problem was compounded by the introduction of set items that had clear defined player roles — Sentry gear is for snipers, Striker gear is for assault, Tactician gear is for support. But if you are aiming for a Tactician build and kept dropping Striker gear, you are essentially out of luck. When you factor in the fact that high quality drops are limited to once a week, and that you only got one single viable drop from these weekly events, then it’s very possible that you could spend a week playing the game and not make any progress at all.

Diablo 3 did have a similar problem with itemization, as mentioned earlier, but would ultimately tune drops so that players would almost always receive class-appropriate gear. Not only that, but with the introduction of the Kunai Cube system, players are able to take one set item and re-roll it to either get a better version of that item or for another piece of the set. So even if the game isn’t already tremendously generous with its item drops, the game offers players the ability to try to mitigate the random nature of these drops by letting them choose the drops that they need.

To be fair, the Underground expansion seems to address at least some of these concerns. Perhaps most importantly, it introduces repeatable PvE end-game content, much like the Greater Rift system from Diablo 3. The question becomes whether or not players will return to The Division with this update or if the game has already lost the goodwill it generated at launch.

For me, I think it’s useful to just look at my progress with both games and see where I’m at.

Here is my character from The Division, which I stopped playing at 1.2:

Although the meta has clearly changed with the nerfing of Striker and Sentry set bonuses, at the time this was one of the optimal builds (with some leeway for the weapon talents). The game says my playtime is around 13 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes (let’s say 336 hours for simplicity’s sake). It’s a fair amount of time, even discounting all the downtime that exists in the game when you’re trying to matchmake or change servers or whatever busy work the game forces you to do. What’s important to note is that at this point, I had no clear way to improve my gear other than to outright replace it and change builds — to Tactician or to any of the other new sets. Ultimately what this meant is that I hit a wall and had nowhere to go.

Here’s my Season 6 Diablo 3 character:

This is my Monk after 98 hours and 37 minutes of play (again, including some downtime), but it’s nowhere near optimized because I would need to find Ancient versions of my gear pieces, then hope they have optimal rolls, then level up legendary gems for the Caldesann’s Despair infusion, and so on. Also keep in mind this is a character that I started sometime in May and finished playing at the end of June. Assuming I wanted to play more, I certainly could, but when I think of the playtime numbers and see that in a third of the time my Diablo 3 character is not only miles ahead of my character from The Division but also has more potential to grow, it can’t help but serve as proof — at least for me — that something went wrong with how Massive decided to design player progression in their game. For more than three times the effort spent killing bad guys in the streets of New York City, I should have a character that’s way more optimized than the Monk who was punching Diablo to death. More importantly, I should see a clear path to continue to improve myself in both games — but that path only exists in Diablo 3. In The Division, I’ve crashed into a wall constructed by the developers to artificially gate my progress in order to extend the longevity of the game.

I do intend to at least try the new Underground expansion to see what Massive might have done to try to to improve the experience for PvE players first hand. But when Diablo 3’s season 7 starts on the same day? It’s hard not think about how much potential The Division had before the game was designed to death. Perhaps like Destiny, The Division will have a new life when the inevitable sequel launches and they tune the game to encourage players to play more of their game rather than less.

The truth is, loot drops aside, the actual moment to moment gameplay of The Division is really fun and satisfying. It’s what makes this entire project all the more frustrating — it’s a game that I want to play, but all of the systems in place prevent me from doing so.