His presentation is roughly an hour long and he talks rather fast, but he covers a lot of ground. In it, he covers missteps and valuable lessons Grinding Gear Games learned from startup until present day.
Particularly brilliant is how Grinding Gear Games (GGG) will reuse assets, but also reuse content in a sane way. Much more sane than some of the very wasteful ways Blizzard does, particularly in regards to World of Warcraft, in which every new expansion pack of WoW throws out numerous babies in bathwater, simply because it's not new.
Seriously, watch the presentation. There's a lot of lessons you can learn and parallels you can draw, not just between Diablo-like games, but in almost every genre.
With the latest large update of Path of Exile, GGG's flagship title, there's a hidden problem that I had never realized was possible until I read a post from Reddit that gave me an epiphany.
See, GGG is very good about reusing assets and content, but the content of the last four large updates (leagues) has been very... pace-breaking. These pace-breaking systems encourage players to stop normal play and to hurry up and go do their content. Now, when it was released this wasn't so terrible, since the way the game is designed you'll be playing like normal, and every once in a while you'll get 'unlock' an extra area which you feel compelled to do since it's just one thing and the rewards are rather good.
If you wanted to ignore the system completely, you could, but if you wanted to be efficient with your rewards you had to interact with it every time the system wanted you to. Again, not the worst thing in the world since compared to the game as a whole, they're rather very minor things and don't eat up much of your time.
Last league however, as part of content reuse, GGG rolled in three of those pace-breaking systems into the baseline game. And with the current league, there are four of them.
This causes a problem because it's increasing pressure on the player how they must play. And that is not the mental state you want to be in as a game developer, to be some sort of tin-pot dictator, since it unnecessarily limits your audience. Not only that, but having multiple features that compete for your attention is stressful for a player. Having a few can be fine, even fun, but there's a point where it becomes not worth the hassle.
Thus it becomes a hydra of opportunity. Accomplishing these systems gives you rewards in game, but when they keep coming back when you don't want them to and seemingly in greater numbers than you want to deal with, it becomes an enemy and not an opportunity.
And you can apply that lesson to other games and genres too.
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