End game

The "end game" is a term used to describe the play style, game features, and player behavior engaged in by expert players with high level characters.

At that point in the gaming experience, high level characters have completed all of the quests and other challenges, and players are no longer entertained simply by grinding through the normal game. Players want greater challenges at that point, and many turn to item finding, PvP dueling, or other non-traditional occupations.

Many game designers end up producing most post-release content for the end game, since that's where most players are spending their time, rather than simply making new level 1 characters and going through the whole experience again. The Pandemonium Event, added to Diablo II in the v1.11 patch, is a good example of added end game material, since it was only available on the realms, and only possible to engage in with very high level, well-equipped characters.

Official Comments

The D3 Team has not given many details about their end game plans, but they have stressed that they want players to have a lot of options and activities even with high level characters.

Blizzcon 2009: [1]

Jay Wilson: It’s definitely better if the players explore more of the game. It will be a lot more fun for them, but players will gravitate toward the route that is fastest for what they want. Even if that route makes them crazy… even if that route is not fun at all. It’s not their fault. It’s our fault as designers. It’s our job to make sure that the path of least resistance is also the path of most fun.

We do have specific systems planned for the late game and our goal for those systems is to make sure that players are experiencing as much of the content over again as possible.

The best example of where we feel we do this well in our other games, in World of Warcraft, is the quest system, which really gets you to move all over the world and do lots and lots of different things. The basic, core actions of the game are very repetitive. It’s not that they’re not fun, but the boredom with anything comes with repeating the same thing in the same way. If you could repeat the same thing in a different way it stays interesting a lot longer and that’s definitely going to be a goal for us.

Blizzcon 2009: [2]

Jay Wilson: a player's tendency is to follow the path of least resistance. We learned this in World of Warcraft, if you make the fastest way to level killing boars until your eyes bleed, then that's what players will do. They won't do the most fun thing. They'll do what gets them progression the fastest. So we put in this massive quest system, it's a ton of work, but what it does is, it says, go kill some dudes over there, run over there, grab me three of those things, do this thing over here. When the player's always doing something different, the game stays fresh, it stays fun to play for a long time.

This is the philosophy we've put into the Diablo endgame. So it's not that you're not doing runs, it's that you're not doing the same run over and over again. There's a reason for you to kill this boss, then that boss, then maybe explore that dungeon. There's a benefit that pushes you around through all the content. We have some systems planned for that, but that's definitely our focus, to get out of that…I'm doing one run over and over again, and get to the idea of, I'm doing every possible run that can be done. To show off the broadest array of content.

Leonard Boyarsky interview, October 2009: [3]

Hellforge: Yeah that was a huge problem in D2 where people did Bloody runs or Baal runs over and over.

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, we have ideas about how we want to handle those things, specifically it’s something we’ve talked about at length and we have a solution that we think is gonna work really good and keep people from having to continually do the same runs over and over.