Applications: Affinity Designer
Summary: A deconstruction of what I consider to be the game pillars of Diablo 4 and how they work together to create a successful gameplay experience for a player to come back wanting to play more.
Summary: A deconstruction of what I consider to be the game pillars of Diablo 4 and how they work together to create a successful gameplay experience for a player to come back wanting to play more.
The Core Of Diablo 4
Diablo 4 is a dungeon-crawling action role playing game that was released on June 5th, 2025 and has received praise from reviews and players alike. It's a pretty successful game, but why is it successful? One of the reasons is due to its gameplay. Diablo 4 focuses on three key aspects that I believe are its game design pillars.
These three feed into each other. The player gets a sense of satisfaction when they engage with any of the three as it leads into the others as well. This has the player wanting to scratch that itch for "One More Thing" as they play. You know, the feeling of one more turn in a 4X or strategy game. Just one more quick quest (which doesn't turn out to be quick) in an RPG. And in order to create that feeling, I'll explain how Diablo 4's combat, loot, and progression work together to achieve it.
Design Pillar 1: Loot
There is a strong feeling defeating an elite enemy, opening a big chest after a boss, or clearing a long dungeon and seeing loot rain down onto the ground. Loot of varying colors denoting rarity can give you (the player) excitement that what you picked up is better than what you have.
Just look at all that shiny loot waiting to be picked up!
Loot is the physical reward for winning a fight or completing an activity, and Diablo 4 gives you a lot! Loot can involve equipment/gear for the player to wear, resources to spend at shops, and keys to enter special dungeons. The most immediate relation for loot is for combat. Better equipped gear allows the player to survive and challenge stronger enemies. Gear can also provide increases to players' skills and to current abilities or offer new ways for a player to play through combat differently.
Acquiring stronger loot over time also leads to the feeling of progression for the player. Finding and equipping higher rarity loot (from gray colored loot to orange and purple loot for higher rarities) is the quickest way to visually identify for the player they have something powerful. Increases to a player's armor or a player's preferred skills from loot gives the vertical progression feeling of telling a player is stronger with their stats going up.
It also just feels good to amass an assortment of gear and seeing your character decked out in high-quality equipment. It's rewarding to see all of your acquired loot on your character and being shown the results of your work in combat or feeling like you're slowly progressing towards the powerhouse you're planning for because of the loot.
Design Pillar 2: Progression
Diablo 4 uses both horizontal progression, acquiring new abilities that changes how a player plays, and vertical progression, increasing stats from gear and skills. One place this can be found is when leveling up and getting a skill point to spend on passive and active skills in the skill tree. A skill point can have a passive increase for a certain type of damage you do or give a new power to throw at enemies in combat.
The necromancer's skill tree, showing active skills (squares) and passive skills (small diamonds and circles) I've acquired.
With new skills and loot that the has player acquired, this feeds back into combat and allows the player to challenge tougher enemies and dungeons to eventually level up and get better loot to feed the progression of getting stronger. For loot, some of it can only be used when the player is at a specific level. Some loot may be useless/outdated for what you're going for but can be turned into resources for other uses to get that feeling of gaining something.
After the character max level (60), paragon boards introduce new vertical progression from leveling up to keep getting stronger.
What's also really neat about the skill tree and paragon board is that you're allowed to take back any skill points you've spent in them and reallocate them elsewhere. Which allows for freedom in trying out different ways of playing a class without having the player feeling like they're losing any progress or resources. Combat and loot always feed into progression and none of it feels lost.
Design Pillar 3: Combat
In order to get stronger and find cool loot, you gotta fight the demons of Hell, the cultists that think they're cooler than you, and whatever else impedes your path. Combat is where you put whatever you have on you and whatever you can cast to the test. As you slay everything in your path, and make a mess doing so, you'll be seeing loot drop in front of you and always gain XP for leveling up. These, along with other forms of loot and progression, is a constant of the other two design pillars reacting to the player engaging in combat.
The Pillar Support: Activities
With the three pillars listed, activities is what helps create variety. Activities offer different enemies to fight and objectives to complete that offers loot and XP as rewards. All of these activities offer many different ways to play and they usually average out to about 10-15 minutes of play per activity, which may vary based on how many other people are in the activity with the player.
This is what helps create the "One More Thing" feeling. Playing an activity that lasts around 10-15 minutes makes each activity feel like you can cram in one more activity to engage with the gameplay.
The Pit, for example, has a hard 15 minute time limit that diminishes with each death from the group. Going through The Pit offers up glyph upgrades for the paragon board for progression, the final boss at the end of The Pit drops a treasure chest filled with loot, and the dungeon gives different objectives to progress through with combat. This activity goes right into all three of the listed pillars and all the other activities do the same thing.
The gameplay of Diablo 4 depends on all three pillars to make an engaging player experience, whereas the activities help the player experience it in condensed chunks. This makes it easy for the player to gauge how long it'll take and know that they'll always get something out of it. All of this culminates into making the player say:
