[meitros]

An underrated choice of the original diablo is that it would only show you a subset of story quests and boss monsters in a single play-through. A few (like the butcher) would always show up, but for most others there'd be multiple options for which story quest would be in the game.

A lot of games since include every quest in every playthrough (or change it based on what choices you make), and games like the Witcher 3 nailed having really well written side quests that weren't just filler. But enough players are completionists that it can feel exhausting to play those, and if you're a completionist the game often becomes less challenging because you're earning extra experience/gold.

[klodolph]

The Butcher did not always show up. It just had a 2/3 chance of showing up. It’s easy to test for yourself, because you can restart the game and you only have to walk as far as the cathedral entrance to see if the quest appeared. It always appeared in multiplayer, but the quests are not randomized in multiplayer.

There are 16 quests in 6 groups, and 1 random quest from each of the first five groups is removed.

[bashwizard]

What? I've played D1 about 50 times and not once have The Butcher not showed up.

[Drakim]

It's true, that dying man giving the butcher quest will simply sometimes not be outside the entrance to the cathedral. I was surprised too.

[klodolph]

Were you playing multiplayer? Multiplayer always starts with Butcher and Skeleton King.

[CobrastanJorji]

There's a fascinating trade-off there.

Diablo (and much more so its sequels) was focused pretty hard on replayability. After beating the game once, the player is encouraged to play the again with the same character, continuing to level it up. Keeping some content back for those later playthroughs is a way to make the second or third trip through more interesting. The very nature of the randomly generated levels is a big part of this.

Games like Witcher 3 or Skyrim, on the other hand, are focused on one single, giant play session, chock full of content. You should be able to do nearly everything (except perhaps choosing a build) the first time. The exceptions are choices in particular quests, which need to have different results so that the players have a feeling of agency.

[nottorp]

Funny because Witcher 2 had the audacity to have a completely different chapter 2 (like 1/3 of the game) based on a choice at the end of chapter 1.

To the point that you need to play chapter 2 twice to get the whole story.

Then Witcher 3 went more mainstream.

[lloeki]

My memory is very blurry about it but IIRC in Skyrim you can reset your build with a spell or something, and even change class with a side quest (possibly even appearance, or even race, but that one may have been a mod), so you can really do everything in one playthrough with one character (Ship of Theseus notwithstanding)

IIRC a couple of quests had branches that were mutually exclusive on some conditions though (mostly either you get reward A xor B)

[az226]

Oh man. I remember playing the paladin/knight character and I was 6 years old, didn’t know English. Spent maybe 100 hours trying to kill a monster. Bugger just wouldn’t die. Couldn’t complete the game and had to play on other characters. A few years later I returned, now knowing some English, and turns out the monster was immune to swords. I think I bought a rinkydink bow or staff and killed the monster in a few seconds.

I do remember slight confusion as some things were the same and others weren’t.

[omni]

The only guaranteed quests are for Lazarus and Diablo at the end of the game. It was possible for the Butcher to not show up in any given playthrough. https://diablo-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Quests_(Diablo_I)

[jayd16]

If you're a completionist you'd have to do multiple play throughs.

But honestly, its a bit of a catch-22. No one wants to "roll a bad playthrough" and devs don't want to work on content that only a subset of players will be able to experience.

[hnbad]

Anecdotally, "unique custom experiences" like this sound great on paper but fall apart in practice. This is not just true for games but also for other digital media:

I remember reading about various techniques to adapt online trainings to each learner's performance by offering additional exercises and content when certain performance thresholds weren't met and from a technological standpoint this seemed exciting but in practice it meant learners could not be reliably expected to have received the same knowledge (which is bad for any form of compliance) and their results might be difficult if not impossible to compare (which is bad for any form of analytics, not to mention actual conclusions about individual performance).

It's cool and flashy and you can make great demos but when it comes to actual hands-on experience, the drawbacks usually outweigh the benefits, plus you end up creating a lot of content most people don't actually ever get to see.

For games the only counter-example I can think of is cosmetic changes like Zelda TOTK's dialog lines changing to take weather, time of day and sequences of events (e.g. getting a fetch quest for an item you already have in your inventory) into account. But those are fairly cheap to implement, add minimal extra code paths (which is important for QA) and don't change the overall experience.

[Cthulhu_]

In hindsight, I'd call it a roguelite; it's got the RNG and different playthroughs, but it's focused more on combat and you don't have to start from scratch when you die.

[mdemare]

Also which spells you could use was determined by which books you happened to find.

[LoveMortuus]

I loved this feature, because it doesn't really lock you into a static class.