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David Brevik, the creator of Diablo, has plenty of experience with live-service development. From his regret-filled departure from Marvel Heroes to his early plans for Diablo 3, Brevik’s career has evolved alongside what we now know as a “live-service” game.
For many modern developers, including current head of Diablo Rod Fergusson, ARPGs and live-service go hand-in-hand. Some say the early success of ladders in Diablo 2 led to the rise of live-service later on, but Brevik believes there’s a huge difference between players deciding to play a game as a lifestyle game and a game being designed around it.
Diablo 2 didn’t create live-service
Speaking on the latest episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, Brevik explains that the claims of Diablo kicking off live-service is “probably true to some degree”. However, when Diablo 2 was seeing massive online success in the early 2000s, that success wasn’t coming because of continued updates, it was because the game was fun.
“The audience that played for the ladders and things like that, they were a hardcore audience,” Brevik explained. “But a great majority of the people who played Diablo 2 didn’t play it as a lifestyle game to be on the ladders, they just played it as a lifestyle game because they enjoyed the game.”
Brevik believes that Diablo 2 eventually “became kind of a lifestyle game” but “not in the same way they are now.” As Diablo was exploding in popularity, MMOs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft were actually creating the foundations of what a live-service game would be. It just happened to be a formula that would slot into ARPGs very well more than a decade on.
As for ARPGs like Diablo 2 being the origin of live-service, Brevik doesn’t believe that to be true. While it is true that Brevik’s work on Hellgate: London and Marvel Heroes helped to popularise live-service ARPGs, even those games had inspiration from games like WoW.
“[Ladders are] not the same as some of the live-service games now where you’re competing in this particular thing or you’ve got some kind of special mechanic for this season and you’ve got a season pass,” Brevik said. “That stuff didn’t really come out of Diablo 2.”
Nowadays, Diablo 2 can be enjoyed as a live-service game. Project Diablo 2, which Brevik helps with occasionally, has seasons, new uber bosses and more coming to the game all the time. As Brevik explained, there’s a great link between ARPGs and live-service, they slot together well, extremely well, but the genre can, has, and will, live without live-service.
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