The Hack'N'Slash Genre: A look at incetivized repetition, part 1: Summary

How many of you have played Diablo 2? It is one of the pinnacle crowning achievements of the Hack and Slash genre.

However, one of Diablo 2's major gameplay faults can be summed up with one word: Repetition.  Because Diablo 2 is so defining to the genre, most of the Hack and Slash genre has also been infected with similar pains.

So, a quick overview of the things I'm going to talk about, taking Diablo 2 as the specific context for analysis:
 
1. Non-specific loot pinatas - Non-specific loot pinatas are encounters or events that give randomized distributed loot across a wide variety of power levels.  These are fun because you always have the chance of getting some godly item. These tend to be bad because you are then encouraged to always play in the area which is the easiest for you.

2. Encounter makeup - The types of encounters have both direct impacts on repetitiveness and indirect ones. The direct impact is when the monster encounters all tend to be the same horde of monsters fighting you. The indirect impact is when players optimize for 90% of the game and then use similar tactics against the last 10%. This tends to create symptoms such as making AoE spells king, even in single target encounters.

3. Disincentives to party - Diablo 2's party system was a heavy disincentive to partying in many ways. Shared loot drops, experience penalties and insufficient scaling vs. the number of players made solo'ing much more profitable overall.

4. Healing Paradigms and Attrition - Healing paradigms and attrition mechanics help force uncomfortable situations onto the player.  These can create periods where the players must adapt their skills and mechanics to face the situation at hand.

5. Skill Tree and Specializations - Specializations make characters unique but often at the cost of making characters marginal in areas which they did not choose to specialize in. This often leads to the syndrome of players only having or needing one tool to deal with everything in the game.