Diablo vs. Darkest Dungeon: RPG devs on balancing punishment and power

It’s one of the oldest conversations in gaming. Do you play video games because you’re looking for a challenge and want to experience the thrill and satisfaction of overcoming obstacles? Or do you turn to games to feel empowered, for the escapist fantasy of possessing incredible abilities that are often unattainable in real life?

Nowhere is this question more relevant than in the role-playing game genre. The core of the genre is developing a character (or stable of characters) over time, watching their power grow and capabilities expand. Satisfying player power fantasies is at the heart of many RPGs, where you can watch your virtual avatar grow from an unknown serf clad in rags to a living god, wielding incredible power to dominate your enemies or redeem a broken world.

That said, the thrill of power is only really exciting when leavened with a little friction. Eventually, even being omnipotent gets old.

How do you find a healthy medium between a level of difficulty that feels satisfying to overcome while still ensuring players feel rewarded and empowered? How do you maintain a sense of challenge in a world where player characters develop at different rates or grow exponentially more powerful over time?

We spoke to designers at two ends of the development spectrum to get a broad perspective on how achieving this balance is possible.

On one side is the sprawling triple-A live service game Diablo IV, which not only needs to supply a satisfying experience over the course of a standard game but also requires constant updates and balancing in an evolving live environment.

On the other hand, there’s indie cult-classic Darkest Dungeon II, which has a reputation for being brutally challenging—but it, too, needs to provide some sense of character development.

Finding the challenge

Establishing the difficulty level of a game is a very challenging aspect of design, particularly in games as elaborate and sprawling as most modern RPGs. As players, some of us demand adversity to feel satisfied, while others are content to coast.

“I like to think of challenge as a vast ocean,” said Aislyn Hall, systems designer for Diablo IV at Blizzard Entertainment. “Some players are happy to stay the passenger, along for whatever ride is on the itinerary for today. Others would prefer to set sail on their own terms, free from any boundaries that we might tether them to.”

Hall recognizes that different players will be attracted to different levels of difficulty, so there’s no simple, one-size-fits-all approach that’s appropriate, especially for a franchise with the reach of Diablo.

“When a player goes on their maiden voyage, we’re going to be their captain—give them some guidance and security while they’re in uncharted waters,” Hall said. But she also emphasizes that the aim is to scale difficulty as players progress.

Unsurprisingly, the approach to a brutal gothic horror fantasy like Darkest Dungeon II is somewhat different. Tyler Sigman, the game’s design director, said one of the team’s core philosophies is building a game that’s uncompromising.

While Diablo IV is also gothic horror, Darkest Dungeon II represents that in the mechanics, not just the aesthetics.

Credit: Aaron Zimmerman

“We see that as distinct from being challenging for challenge’s sake,” he said. “Our interpretation of ‘uncompromising’ is that the game establishes a set of firm rules and plays within those rules. It’s a dungeon master who rolls their attack dice in the open rather than behind their screen. Dice are fair but uncompromising. So is a poker deck. They can both be alternately loving and cruel but aren’t by design intended to be either.”

For the Darkest Dungeon II team, the point was to make every step forward feel earned. To that end, they allowed the random elements at the core of the game to be truly random, which in many cases equates to a punishing outcome.

“We often get comments asking whether we shape our [random number generation] to purposefully inflict awful things on players. It’s actually the absence of RNG shaping that makes the game feel so brutal,” Sigman said.

Empowering players

One of the promises of roleplaying games, going back to their tabletop roots, is escaping reality to a place where we have true agency to shape the world around us. Part of the way games deliver this fantasy is by allowing us to build a character whose power grows over time, though how central that is for developers can vary widely.

“It’s absolutely critical that players feel powerful in any game they play,” Hall said. But that sense of power differs from genre to genre. “The medium of gaming is unique in that it provides control, which is a key element in what makes games such compelling experiences. In a nonviolent game about gardening, the way I feel power in my space is by choosing what crops I’d like to grow or where to plant them. In games where you’re slaying demons, power is felt in a vastly different way.”

In the latter scenario, you may feel empowered because of the number of tools at your disposal or how easily you’re able to dispatch hordes of hell’s minions, a far cry from the bliss of tending to a well-ordered and productive farm. In either case, however, Hall believes that a sense of power isn’t as meaningful without some level of difficulty.

“The way I think about how players can feel powerful is the concept of the immovable object and the unstoppable force. When a seemingly immovable object is put in front of a player yet the player is an unstoppable force, that sense of power emerges.”

For the Darkest Dungeon franchise, however, almost the opposite is true. The point isn’t to emphasize a character’s strengths but rather to expose some of their weaknesses.

“We knew from the beginning that we didn’t want heroes to feel like gods,” Sigman said. “They should always be vulnerable. ‘Heroes are human’ was an internal mantra from the beginning. This vision could only be achieved if the heroes’ attachment to life remained ever perilous.”

Sigman cited another classic fantasy property to illustrate the team’s commitment to its characters’ mortality.

“It felt interesting to focus on the inherent weaknesses of the person,” Sigman told us. “Courage, will, consistency—or lack thereof. The Riddle of Steel from Conan the Barbarian: ‘What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?’”

Striking a balance

In a game the size and scope of Diablo IV, finding that delicate balance between challenge and a character’s power level is a complex and ongoing problem. At the same time, there’s the question of a player’s skill and comprehension, which also grows over time. To help tune that balance, Hall said the team relies on a tool they call “complexity budget.”

“This budget often manifests on the tooltip of an ability, for example—how much text a player is ready and willing to digest based on their current understanding of the game,” she explained. “In the early stages, we have a low complexity budget. An ability needs to be straightforward, simple, and clear as to how it’s benefiting the player.”

The ramp gets steeper as players delve further into the game. As they become more familiar with the game’s systems, they get more goodies to play with.

“That budget grows as the player continues to play,” said Hall. “Abilities and bonuses become more complex and interesting as the player has the capacity to appreciate them.”

Balancing the level of challenge happens simultaneously. Hall points out that too much early challenge can be off-putting for players, while laying off in the later stages can make the experience fall flat. We’ve all played games where after finishing every side quest and finding every collectible, you reach a point where you’re so overpowered the rest of the game is trivial (and unsatisfying).

With the release of Diablo IV‘s first major expansion, Vessel of Hatred, the team had the opportunity to reexamine the existing difficult curve.

“We knew that player power was expanding more rapidly than our previous difficulty system could manage,” Hall remembers. “When we were designing the Torment system for Vessel of Hatred, we took a step back and audited the power of player builds, then compared that against how many difficulties we thought would be appropriate to progress through.”

Diablo IV allows players to tweak the difficulty to fit where they’re at at the moment, affecting damage values and more.

Credit: Aaron Zimmerman

The Torment system is a fully elective system that adds four new tiers of difficulty to the previously existing four. Players can choose what level of difficulty they want to take on, with rewards commensurate with the challenge. Alongside higher monster damage and hit points and lower survivability stats for players, Hall said the key was how enemies were distributed.

“It’s about stratifying the difficulty of enemies out among those tiers, with the weakest foes living in the lowest tier and the strongest at the highest. It’s a fairly straightforward approach that solves a lot of problems in the action RPG space,” Hall told us. Critically, for a live service game, the Torment system also ensures that the game is almost endlessly playable.

For Darkest Dungeon II, the scales are intentionally heavily weighted toward challenge. The idea is to give players a deeply satisfying experience of overcoming a truly savage test.

“For the Darkest Dungeon games,” Sigman said, “we err on the side of layering in substantial challenge very early on.” Unlike many games, which tend to ease players into their worlds by providing very little challenge in the early going, Darkest Dungeon ensures your characters are vulnerable from the jump. In fact, as Sigman points out, it’s possible for your heroes to get butchered even in the tutorial.

“With Darkest Dungeon,” he warned, “you are in peril constantly.”

According to Sigman, many games vacillate between neutral difficulty and allowing players to feel overpowered, often at inflection points like when they pick up new gear or level up. With Darkest Dungeon II, the goal is to push the needle to the other side of the scale.

“We keep the player in the neutral to underpowered bands almost always,“ he said. ”The net effect is that the player can never totally relax or be complacent. It is fundamental to our intent to make every accomplishment in DD feel hard-earned.”

But Sigman clarified that the point isn’t to punish or demoralize players. We’ve also all experienced moments of such intense frustration with a game’s difficulty that we rage-quit, vowing never to return.

“We definitely want players to feel a sense of accomplishment and growth,” he said, “while still never letting them totally escape gravity and ascend into the heavens like a god. There’s the concept of power growth within a given run but also meta-progression. Within a run, you experience growth by upgrading skills and also finding equipment. With metagame progression, you experience growth by unlocking new heroes and skills, increasing base stats, and adding more items to the item pool.”

Like Hall, Sigman also believes that one of the most important kinds of progression happens in players themselves.

“Knowledge is arguably as important as stat increases,” he said.” Knowledge is one of your crucial defenses against the RNG. It’s a little like poker—RNG can still get you, but if you play strategically over a period of time, you’re likely to see much better results than someone who relies only on luck.”

Sigman also recognizes that, like the Diablo IV player base, not all Darkest Dungeon players are looking for the same level of challenge.

“The reality is that our large player base is very far from homogenous,” he acknowledged.

To try to accommodate that breadth of players, the team includes a number of optional difficulty elements, some designed to make the experience harder, some to give players a helping hand. After building a core game that was meant to be very difficult for most, the team then included optional elements to allow players to further tailor the difficulty to their own play style.

There’s the Radiant Flame system, for instance, that provides buffs that grow stronger the more consecutive runs you fail. On the other side, Infernal Flames allow players who find the core experience too easy to attempt punishing themed challenges. Like the Torment system in Diablo IV, it gives you some agency in determining what level of difficulty they experience and the ability to adjust it on the fly if their tastes change.

In a nod toward more traditional game design, Darkest Dungeon II also added a difficulty system by way of a free update called Kingdoms. This way, you yourself get to make an early decision about how much challenge you want to experience or how much you want to feel like a badass.

“When you start the Kingdom, you choose the Radiant, Normal, Stygian, or Bloodmoon ruleset,” Sigman said. “This determines some fundamental rules like whether heroes respawn or suffer permadeath but also some other frameworks like time limits.”

Iterating on design

The challenge with running a live-service game is that, even if you’ve established a fine-tuned balance that you’re satisfied with, you constantly need to be ready to pivot and evolve. Adding new elements through updates, or in the much more disruptive form of a large expansion, can totally upset the fragile balance between power fantasy and challenge established during a game’s initial development.

“The balance can shift frequently,” Hall told us. “A lot of it has to do with the audiences you’re seeking to serve.”

It’s a common experience, coming late to a game (or returning to one you love) after an expansion and feeling lost in deep water. There’s also the inverse, however, when you’ve been loyally playing a game for months or years and don’t want to be treated like a newcomer when fresh content comes out.

“When we launched Vessel of Hatred, our focus was on the early- to mid-game progression, as we knew many new and returning players would be joining us,” Hall said. Those players need that early- and mid-game experience to be as polished as possible, so it was a big deal for us to nail that. As seasons have passed, we find that a large portion of our audience has naturally shifted to experienced players. These invested players typically care more about the late game being polished and replayable, so our focus shifted to that stage of the game. And the cycle will continue!”