25 years later, Diablo 2 director still hasn’t gotten over how much the stamina bar sucks: “It’s like a newbie tax almost”
25 years after the launch of the pioneering action-RPG Diablo 2, series creator David Brevik still has one major gripe: that stamina bar is no damn good, man.
Diablo 2 is an undeniable masterpiece that has shaped and influenced the action-RPG genre, and the RPG space broadly, to this day. And as someone whose childhood was more or less defined by the first two games in the series, even I can admit the stamina bar is an annoying, unnecessary obstacle to fun.
Although largely irrelevant at higher levels, earlier in the game, the stamina bar depletes frustratingly quickly, and when it does, it doesn’t refill unless you’re at a complete standstill. It’s one of the only pain points I still remember having with Diablo 2, and it’s one that unfortunately remains in the 2021 remaster.
Brevik himself has gone on the record to say “I don’t like Stamina in D2 and wish we hadn’t put that in” during a Reddit AMA from years ago. And now, in a back-and-forth with Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson as part of Diablo 2’s 25th anniversary shenanigans (via PC Gamer), Brevik takes it a step further.
“I hate the stamina bar in Diablo 2. It makes me cringe every time,” Brevik said. “It’s an irrelevant thing later in the game and it’s a punishing thing for the new player. It’s like a newbie tax almost.”
Brevik added that Diablo 2’s stamina bar “was supposed to be, ‘Hey, we just don’t want you running away from the enemies all the time. We got to limit your ability to constantly run away.”
Although they’re a lot less common today and aren’t in Diablo 3 or Diablo 4, stamina bars do have a time and place in modern RPGs like Elden Ring, where you’re often forced to flee an overwhelming enemy encounter and use your stamina strategically.
The issue with stamina in games like Diablo, where the primary goal is to click as many bad guys to death as possible in search of loot, is that it usually ends up simply slowing down your traversal across large, empty parts of the map.
“People don’t want to pass up the enemies,” Brevik said. “They want to fight them and they want to get the items. It’s not a passive kind of game. So the idea that somehow you could run away all the time and never die, I thought that was kind of silly.”
At one point, Wilson leapt to Diablo 2’s defense and called its stamina bar “a mastery mechanic” that gives players a sense of satisfaction when they level their way out of its confines, and Brevik conceded that “in some ways it was good” because “right off the bat, it encourages combat,” but he still maintained, “there probably could have been a better system to design there.”
Even some of the best RPGs out there have stamina bars, but they have no place in Diablo.
