NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9377164" data-attributes="member: 18">The issue you face is that the financial and time investment in making a campaign-based Diablo-style ARPG is pretty similar to the investment in making more long-term replayable Diablo-style ARPG, but the latter is potentially many times more profitable in the longer run. Because the campaign-based game needs just as many assets - art, animation, sound, music, props, levels, etc. - as the long-term replayable game. The "extra" is mostly design/rules/procedural level gen, which is, relatively speaking, incredibly cheap to develop - you also probably need to maintain servers etc. but the cost of that is a joke if people are spending really anything at all on your game. There are different ways to do this - you can sell expansions (Grim Dawn), you can sell cosmetics (Path of Exile), you can do both (as D4 is), but there's no real financial upside to designing a Diablo-style ARPG that isn't replayability-oriented.That particular niche has been really squeezed by roguelikes which incorporate some Diablo-esque elements of randomization, but have much shorter play-sessions and more rewarding (in the short term) gameplay loops - Hades, Dead Cells, Gunfire Reborn, etc., and by games which are "action RPGs" in the broader sense, and which have much stronger storytelling, immersion, and so on, and usually ditch the Diablo-style loot/advancement - some of them Soulslikes, like Elden Ring. There's also competition from weird angles like action-y survival gamesThere have been attempts, but they've mostly been either outright bad (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, not to be confused with the earlier Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, for example) or just not very successful. One recent attempt is merging elements of Diablo-style and Soulslike with a campaign focus and a lot of visual flair - that's No Rest For The Wicked, which is extremely stylish and pretty fun but the company who owns the company making it are in financial trouble (not because of No Rest, but that kind of doesn't matter), so I worry for it a bit.</blockquote>

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