Is Diablo a Roguelike?
Diablo is a franchise of action RPGs, well-known for their characteristic atmosphere, environments, and real-time gameplay. The first Diablo video game, Diablo (1997), was developed by Blizzard North and published by Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo video games have been praised for their real-time action RPG gameplay, storyline, atmosphere, and overall innovative gameplay with inventory management and character progression. Considering the popularity of Diablo video games, as well as the surge of action roguelike video games, as well as the many similarities between Diablo video games and action roguelikes, players may wonder whether Diablo video games are roguelikes, and whether Diablo is a roguelike video game.
Diablo is not a traditional roguelike, but an action RPG. Most Diablo video games are isometric action RPGs, featuring classic RPG elements, not traditional roguelike elements.
Diablo - The Action RPG Subgenre
While much is written about the original Diablo video game, Diablo (1997), having been planned as a turn-based RPG, the fact remains that Diablo (1997) was nonetheless a real-time action RPG, sometimes also described as an hack-and-slash action RPG due to the heavy emphasis on real-time combat. This gameplay characteristic would remain in subsequent Diablo video games, eventually becoming a pillar characteristic of this series, and influencing the action RPG subgenre as a whole, as well as the rest of the video games industry.
Many subsequent action RPGs were heavily influenced by Diablo, and its inventory system and gameplay also influenced new video game subgenres, such as looter-shooter video games, and some video game researchers also attribute relations between soulslike video games and the Diablo video games. Moreover, while the early Diablo video games were quite different from most of the other RPG video games of the time, they were also quite different from the traditional roguelike video games of the time.
Is Diablo a Traditional Roguelike?
While the definition of roguelikes and roguelites often inspires debates, many players and video game researchs agree on a single definition of roguelike, called the Berlin interpretation. This interpretation defines some standards as to the definition and classification of roguelikes, in regards to the presence or absense of specific characteristics. The most important characteristics of traditional roguelikes include random dungeon generation, permadeath, turn-based gameplay, among others.
Diablo video games feature random dungeon generation, as well as hack and slash gameplay, as well as some other characteristics of traditional roguelikes. At the same time, Diablo video games lack classic characteristics of roguelikes, such as permadeath and turn-based gameplay. For these reasons, while the Diablo video games may have been inspired by roguelike video games, the Diablo video games are not traditional roguelikes. Instead, they are action RPGs, and to be more precise, isometric acton RPGs.
While some roguelike fans and players may find that the gameplay of Diablo video games shares some similarities with traditional roguelikes, in terms of definition of subgenre, Diablo video games are not traditional roguelikes, but action RPG video games, as they lack important factors of the Berlin interpretation to be considered traditional roguelikes.
Analysis of Diablo - Similarities with The Action Roguelike Subgenre
Considering that the gameplay of Diablo video games shares many similarities with traditional roguelikes, it is reasonable to compare the subgenres of Diablo and traditional roguelikes. While it is quite reasonable that the action RPG subgenre may have evolved and taken inspiration from the roguelike subgenre, it is also undeniable that over the course of time these two subgenres have both evolved and changed in such meaningful ways that their differences have become much more evident than their similarities, even if some common characteristics remain.
Moreover, as action RPGs, Diablo video games are much more similar to action roguelikes than to traditional roguelikes. In the case of the definition of the roguelike subgenre, the Berlin interpretation is most often used in regards to traditional roguelike video games. Action roguelike video games, most often than not, blend the lines of the traditional roguelike genre and feature elements of various genres, such as in the cases of action roguelike video games that feature, for example, twin-stick shooter gameplay, deck-building gameplay, among other video game subgenres. At the same time, many action roguelike video games share the common characteristic of progression over the death of the main game character: in these video games, each time the main character is defeated, they either lose all of the progress or retain some forms of progress which will aid in the next playthrough, or "run" of the game. This is unlike Diablo video games, which present the classic RPG video game progression formula: if the character is defeated, not all progress is reset. Instead, the character may lose some items and some experience, but the defeat is merely a setback, and the character respawns in order to fight again. In many action roguelike video games, the playthrough is reset, and the character respawns with some new unlocked items or abilities, but must earn their experience from the very beginning again. In Diablo video games, the character will most often keep their achieved progress in the form of the experience levels already achieved, and most of the equipment will usually remain with the character. These are some of the important differences between Diablo video games and action roguelike video games.
Analysis of Diablo - Similarities with the Traditional Roguelike Subgenre
Considering that the Diablo franchise began with Diablo (1997), much before the surge of the action roguelike subgenre seen in the late 2010s and early 2020s, perhaps it would be more reasonable to analyze similarities between Diablo video games and traditional roguelike video games, than between Diablo video games and action roguelike video games. However, if one plays one of the classic traditional roguelike video games of the 1980s, one will evidently see a difference in the pace of gameplay between the original traditional roguelike video games and Diablo video games. Moreover, while Diablo (1997) does have some similarities to these traditional roguelike video games, these similarities become more blurred with subsequent Diablo video games, such as Diablo II (2000) and the subsequent games, in which the gameplay of Diablo increasingly became more fast-paced, in line with developments of other franchises of the action RPG subgenre. Traditional roguelike video games are turn-based by principle, an evident difference from the Diablo video games franchise.
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