What happened to the so called hack and slash genre? You know what I’m talking about, right? Diablo clones? Third person looters? Does that ring a bell? I remember a time when there were tons of games being built around the Diablo like mechanic of exploring dungeons, looting corpses, leveling up and kicking over exploding barrels. But at some point everyone just stopped making them. What happened?
I never really thought about it, until I Shamus Young mentioned it on his blog. In his review of Kivi’s Underworld he said:
These games sort of came and went in mainstream circles a decade ago, and fans of the genre must rely on retro games and indies to sate their desire for hacky and/or slashy gameplay.
I’m not sure why the genre died when it did. Real-time-strategy games rose up alongside Diablo clones hack-n-slashers. They flourished together, and then RTS matured and HnS languished.
Ever since I read that post I have been wondering why did these games fall out of grace in the recent years. After all, there are still legions of enthusiasts who enjoy the hack & slash game play. Hell, some people still play Diablo online – or at least they did few years ago. In fact, this used to be the go-to game for RPG fans who wanted to do some muliplayer co-op gaming or some pvp. Then of course MMO’s took over that segment of the market, but…
Diablo used to be *the* multiplayer game for both co-op and PVP
And then it dawned on me. Hack & Slash games did not fade. They underwent a metamorphosis and became massive, multiplayer and moved online. Think about it – your average MMO is almost strikingly similar to your average hack & slash game only we replace a multi-level dungeon with an open world with smaller dungeons scattered everywhere. But we still have the isometric view, the leveled foes that drop totally inappropriate loot (ie. sewer rats that drop full plate mail and an enchanted +1 sword). We have the same focus on leveling up and obtaining better loot. We have loot management, trade, socketed items, health and mana potions. We have the familiar skill trees that allow for specialized character builds. We have enemies in respawning mobs with aggro radius. We have elite mobs, mob bosses as well as major bosses at the end of each dungeon. We even have the same, mandatory trapped chests and exploding barrels in most of the titles.
Your average MMO is really nothing more than a glorified Hack & Slash experience – only more drawn out and more repetitive (after all you want people to spend as much time paying the subscription fee as possible). Or a Diablo like game, can be described as a time condensed, single player MMO like experience.
An MMO of course is more difficult to make, but when done right it will also be much more profitable. We are talking about monthly subscriptions, spread over many years. Not to mention that games like World of Warcraft are like crack. Once you hook some demographic on the product, it will spread like wildfire among their peers, family and etc. So you are potentially looking at a much wider user base – some people signing up just for the social experience rather than just the hack & slash.
If you were a video game company with a division or group of developers really good at making Hack & Slash games, it would make a perfect sense to get them behind a new MMO title. Chances are they already had tons of experience in crafting both co-op and PVP multi-player systems that limit abuse and are fun and enjoyable.
And that’s exactly what I think happened here. Most gaming studios decided that it is more profitable to make MMO’s rather than 3rd Person Looters. And since the pool of talent required to make both, and their respective user bases overlapped quite a bit, they simply stopped making the latter and focused on the former.
In fact, I suspect that if you would go and pitch a classic Hack & Slash game to a major game studio they would probably try to mold it into a MMO type game. Especially since in the recent years everyone is obsessed with multiplayer. Mainstream reviewers will actually dock points from single player only games like Fallout 3 or Oblivion because they didn’t include a feature internet co-op or PVP. So if you are building a HnS game you will be most likely required to create a strong multiplayer mode. And if you are doing that… Well, why not make the multiplayer massive?
This is why RTS games flourished and HnS games did not. There is no such thing as Massive Multiplayer Real Time Strategy (thank God!). It simply wouldn’t work. The RTS formula just works, and strapping internet/lan play is relatively straightforward.
Fully fledged RPG games on the other hand rely on dialog and scripted events which wouldn’t work well in multiplayers scenarios. The multiplayer options in HnS games on the other hand were a bit week. At least compared to what MMO’s offer today.
So that’s what happened. Release of Diablo 2 may bring a short revival of the Hack & Slash genre. Or not. I don’t suspect it will ever regain it’s former position on the market. MMO’s have that spot covered for years to come.
If someone attempted an MMRTS, I would at least be interested to see how the mechanics of it work out… you’d need a very large space to play in.
Makes me think of the Space stage in Spore (not that I ever got that far before giving up in frustration) – one player per planet. The problem would be preventing massively unbalanced conflicts between a fledgling civilisation and a pan-galactic empire, and getting over the very basic hurdle of what happens when a player logs off.
You’d need to gear it away from any one player being able to be a significant force in the world – like a normal MMO where it doesn’t matter if people sign out because there’s always other players around. But then how does it function with whole world coming in and out of play. Maybe with some degree of automation… set things running on your world and to a limited extent they do your bidding while you’re gone. But then it’d become a game of watching your automatons play for you.
There’s something in me saying that there’s potential for something here, but I’m not sure if a workable end result of this kind of musing would actually be an RTS.
Actually,
[quote]Shattered Galaxy, the world’s first published massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game, combines the excitement of real-time strategy with the character development of role-playing in a persistent online world. (…) Over 50 players controlling upwards of 500 units can imultaneously skirmish within a single battle.[/quote]
Never played it, though.
In the last para, did you mean Diablo 3 instead of 2?
One HnS I really liked is Depths Of Peril. I think I’ve mentioned it somewhere here before. It’s the game which spun off Kivi’s Underworld. The cool thing about DoP is the quest system, where failure to complete quests has repercussions in the game world. It is also unique such that the main objective of the game is not to explore further into a particular dungeon, but to win control of the town you’re in from other groups. It’s difficult to categorize the game into a genre, probably something like a stretegic HnS.
Hack and Slash games didn’t all morph into some kind of MMO. Dungeon Siege 1&2 were there after Diablo 2, and did I spend time on these two… Titan Quest (and its multiple extension) is an excellent game and has all the ingredients that makes Diablo great (massive dungeons, loads and loads of loot, etc…). There’s also the two Sacred games that don’t stray far from the original formula. These games have satisfied all my hacking and slashing needs, and Diablo 3’s coming to take back its throne. There’s also a french HnS called Silverfall I heard good things of but never tried.
I never quite compared MMO to Hack and Slash games, because the rhythm is different. The mechanisms feel the same but the pacing changes everything. Hack and Slash games (at least good ones) are usually fast paced and epic, with a single character obliterating hundreds of enemies with massive AoE and powerful strikes, making the player click everywhere in a frenzy while hitting the potion hotkey. Most MMO gameplay rely on auto-attacking for a majority of the fight, carefully selecting your foes to make sure you don’t aggro too many and occasionally activating powers that do a little more damage.
Speaking about the French, Luke, have a look at this. The infamous Hadopi law has been passed in France. Which means that people who download illegal copies of software, music and videos will face huge fines and jail terms. This includes fines for parents of children who download stuff and fines for people who let their WiFi unprotected so that others use their connection to download. Although in both later cases, the fines are reduced and no jail term can occur.
@ Matt`:
Yeah, interesting how that would work. Turn based massive multiplayer strategy games have existed for years now. A lot of them are these browser based, spreadsheet like things.
Then again, RTS games are usually played in “rounds” – after you exhaust the local resources and finish your tech tree and sprawl your bases and troops all over the map there is not much else to do. So you start over. An MMO could be implemented the same way. Basically, you sign into the server and get dropped into an environment with bunch of other players who just signed in. You duke it out for few hours, a winner is established, points are tallied and etc. You can then use points to purchase resources, upgrades etc. Then you get dropped to a next battle area.
@ IceBrain:
Heh, good find. I have never even heard about it.
Mart wrote:
Yes.
@ Zel:
Hmm… Good point about the rhythm. Maybe I’m wrong her.
@ Alphast:
Well, it just shows that French law makers are delusional.
I don’t think France can afford to put 80% of their population in the age range of 18-35 in prison. And if they don’t, then statistically you are still more likely to be hit by a lightning than get caught this way.
Sure, there will be few unlucky people that will get slapped with maximum sentences to be made an example. There will also be few high profile negative PR cases of 90 year old grandma getting slapped with a huge fine because she didn’t know how to configure encryption on her wireless router. In fact I do suspect there will be vast public backlash and negative press around every single case.
Piracy will continue as usual though. The end result of this will be that French teenagers will likely know more about proxies, VPN tunnels and Tor than their peers from neighboring nations. And even that is not certain.
HnS and by extension MMOs are all fueled by a basic human urge to succeed. This is where the addiction stems from. I wrote a little bit about the two reasons video games work here
also, aaside from the fact that MMOs have become the spiritual successors to HnS games, aspects from the HnS formula also found their way into other genres as well. We’re finally seeing HnS in FPS (Fallout 3, Bordelands [been waiting 3 years for that one]. I think that the action RPG genre was borne from HnS progeny as well. Tactical RPGs like the disgaea series have many HnS aspects.
There are more, but my point is that HnS is less of a genre than it is a mechanic. Diablo was the one game that took the mechanic and made a game out of it.
@ Alphast:
It’s not there yet, thank god. It still need to be approved by both chambers in its final form, and pass the following examinations by the Constitutional Court or the European Commission.
As it is now, illegal download is considered as counterfeiting and perpetrators face up to 300.000€ fine and 3 years of jail. Sentences aren’t much higher with the new law (you can also lose your internet connection), so they aren’t the real infamy here.
The major point the law wants to introduce is the automation of the punishment system, by using what we call “ordonnances pénales”. Basically, you no longer need to go to court to be found guilty. Hypothetically, once the download has been observed by the “HADOPI” agency, a judge can sentence you to either receive an email, receive a letter or get your internet connection cut, without ever speaking to you or your lawyer. You only go to court if you want to prove your innocence, and suspend the execution of the sentence.
It’s a system we mainly use for minor infractions that are easy to prove. Its purpose is to save courts the hassle of having a contradictory debate for an infraction that won’t be denied because the proof is rock-solid (like a picture of you in your car, speeding…). The problem with applying this to illegal downloads, is that the proof is not at all as solid. An IP address just isn’t a reliable way to identify someone on the internet, and proving you are the person that actually downloaded the file is a very difficult issue. I hope our Constitutional Court won’t fail to point that out.
@ Luke Maciak:
Actually, the government is quite clever in that it tries to bend the law to make possible what shouldn’t.