Diablo and Diablo 2 dev heavily criticized modern action RPGs. Due to one factor, they aren't expected to stand the test of time, unlike Blizzard's classics
According to David Brevik - a former employee of Blizzard Entertainment - modern action RPGs don't benefit from ideas known from older games, including Diablo 2. Thus, they reduce gameplay to killing and leveling up.
David Brevik - one of the main developers of Blizzard's iconic series.
I think that a RPGs in general have started to lean into this: kill swaths of enemies all over the place extremely quickly. Your build is killing all sorts of stuff so you could get more drops, you can level up, so you can like, and the screen is littered with stuff you don’t care about - Brevik explained in VideoGamer Podcast.
The veteran of the industry accuses modern action RPGs of reducing the fun to eliminating enemies as quickly as possible, completing the stage, and advancing to a new level. According to Brevik, the emphasis on rapid progress lowers the quality of experiences and shortens the journey that the player undergoes. The dev underlines the well-known saying that the journey to the goal matters, not the goal itself.
I don’t find that as kind of personal and realistic [experience] as like Diablo 2. The pacing on Diablo 2, I think is great. That’s one of the reasons it’s endured. I just don’t find killing screen-fulls of things instantly and mowing stuff down and walking around the level and killing everything, very enticing. I just don’t feel like that is a cool experience. I find it kind of silly.
David Brevik left Blizzard Entertainment in 2003, while in 2019... He founded an independent company, Graybeard Games. So far, the only title of the studio remains the two-dimensional RPG It Lurks Below, which hit PCs and the Xbox One console.
It's worth mentioning that "Diablo 2" will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. On September 23, 2021, the game also received a remastered edition titled Diablo II: Resurrected, available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Nintendo Switch.
