Diablo

Game History

Released in 1997 for the PC (and later the original Playstation), Diablo is a dark, gothic-fantasy game blending RPG and arcade elements to create an addictive, highly re-playable game.

The original game was known for endless mouse-clicking " hack and slash" action in a single dungeon consisting of 16 levels. The dungeon is located under the town of Tristram, a sparsely populated town which consists of 6 NPC's who serve primarily as shop keepers to buy and sell adventuring equipment to the PCs and give out the occasional quest. Critics of the game will point to this lack of interaction within the game and the focus on mouse-clicking, killing things and taking their stuff as weaknesses in the game, while fans of the game will point to these same elements as the core of the game's addictive gameplay. Owners of the game could create a "spawn" version for their friends to use. The spawned version was mostly an extensive demo.

Diablo was both popular and influential, spawning a number of sequels and spin-offs, including Diablo: Hellfire, a licensed add-on to the original game produced by Sierra Entertainment rather than the original development team of Blizzard North.

Finally the game spawned two direct sequels: Diablo II (which saw an official expansion created by Blizzard) and Diablo III.

Gameplay

Diablo had three character classes available for play, each with their very own character attributes, traits and specializations:

• Rogue -- these master archers have a slight level of magic, but are not nearly as expertise as that of the Sorcerer
• Sorcerer -- this ultimate master of the magic arts is trained to use pure magic to smite foes rather than combat
• Warrior -- the pure melee combat warrior, he is the master of weaponry

The Sorcerer Master of magic arts

Despite using a class-based system, character development was very free-form and was left largely up to the player. There were only a few elements directly tied to character class: each class had a skill available at 1st level that improved as the character gained level; the character's class determined his starting and maximum attributes; the character's class determined how many hit points and magic points were gained with each level increase; finally, a character's class determined his starting equipment. Of these, the two that had the strongest effect on gameplay were the starting and maximum attributed and the advancement of hit points and magic points upon gaining a level.

The Silent Rogue

Attributes in Diablo were the primary limitation on a character's abilities. A high Strength score would allow a character to wear heavy armor and melee weapons, a high Dexterity allowed a character to use devastating ranged weapons and a high magic allowed the character to learn high-level spells. Thus the Rogue class began the game with the highest Dexterity, the Sorcerer with the highest Magic and the Warrior with the highest Strength. These classes could also achieve a much higher maximum attribute in these areas, allowing them to attain the most powerful weapons suited to their character class.

The Powerful Lone Warror

Still, a Warrior could concentrate on Magic and become reasonably proficient in its use, a Sorcerer could work on Strength to wear heavy armor and so forth, allowing a player a great degree of flexibility in tailoring his character to his preferred play-style. This was one of the many game elements that increased re-playability.

Quest Monsters

The Butcher Emerging From his Lair

• The Butcher: A Demon killing the townspeople of Tristram. First (optional) boss.
• King Leoric: The former king of the land. Corrupted and twisted by Diablo. Now he wanders as a giant skeleton with his crown on his head.
• Gharbad the Weak: Offers the adventurer a magical item for mercy, then deems them unworthy.
• Snotspill: a Kobold that stole Ogden's sign.
• Zhar the Mad: Crazed sorcerer who gives the adventurer a spellbook.
• Warrior of Blood: Steel Lord who guards the entrance to the 14th level.
• Lachdanan: Blood Knight who seeks retribution which can be obtained by giving him the golden elixir.
• Archbishop Lazarus: a Priest who performed the ritual to tie the Lord of Terror to Leoric's son.
• Diablo The Lord of Terror: Demon who possessed the prince of the land. Main antagonist of the franchise.

Magic Items

Diablo also featured an extremely diverse array of magical equipment, with magic items being powered by a prefix and suffix. Since the power of each prefix and suffix was variable and they could be found in any combination, this led to a stunning variety in type and power of equipment. There were also extremely rare unique items that had individual names, a unique appearance and abilities that were not found in normal items.

Since these items were generated randomly as they were dropped in the game, a player never knew what item could be in the next chest or held by the next monster. This increased both the addictive nature of the gameplay as well as the replay value. Indeed, a player could continue to play the same character, moving to a higher difficulty level with the same character, where the monsters would be more powerful but would drop items of increasing rarity.

Randomness

A final element of the game that increased replay value was the fact that the dungeon maps were randomly generated every time a player started a new game. Because of this, it was impossible for a player to have an advantage in a second or third game because he knew where quest objectives were. This required each new game's dungeon to be mapped anew (which the game assisted with through an auto-map feature), meaning the player never knew where critical quest objectives or opponents could be found.

In addition to the level randomization, many other aspects of Diablo's gameplay could change from game to game:

• Monsters on each level of the dungeon would vary, meaning a player might face entirely different opponents, requiring different tactics and abilities to succeed.
• As mentioned above, the way magic items were generated meant that a player was unlikely to see the same item twice over the course of multiple games not every quest was available in every game, meaning different tasks and rewards for each instance of the world.
• The quests in Diablo were also handed out randomly by the NPC's throughout the town. Usually all quests could not be completed in one playthrough.
• These random elements made each game of Diablo feel fresh and different and led to many late nights playing the game, something players of other Blizzard games were used to as well.

Ports

The PlayStation North American Box Art

In March 1998, Electronic Arts released Diablo for the PlayStation. The PlayStation version lacked the key component of being able to go online. The work around was to allow two players the ability to play on the same screen at the same time, something the PC version lacked. However save games for Diablo were very large; a single save game could take as many 10 blocks on a PlayStation memory card.

Early MORPG

A final element of the game that increased its appeal was the free multiplayer component, available through Blizzard's Battle.net servers.

As a multi-player game, Diablo's gameplay changed radically and resembled what we today would recognize as a Multiplayer Online RPG or MORPG. In fact, Diablo and Ultima Online could be seen as the two games that most strongly influenced the most popular online games of all time, Everquest and Blizzard's own World of Warcraft.

In multi-player, players could team up and the number of players in the dungeon made creatures more powerful. Item drops were also increased based on the size of the player party. Many elements of the modern MMORPG were introduced into this environment, such as player to player economies, where rare items were bartered or bought with enormous sums of gold.

Another unfortunate element of MMOs was introduced here, with players cheating to gain a competitive advantage over other players, or to get the rarest of the rare items. Blizzard's experience running Battle.net and managing both the economy as intended but also cheating was to prove invaluable in their development of World of Warcraft.

Influence

Diablo inspired a host of imitators who sought to recapture its addictive, simple gameplay. The most important of these are probably Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and its sequel on the PS2. Other games to follow Diablo in the Action RPG genre on consoles include Champions of Norrath and its sequel Champions: Return to Arms, which were Action RPGs set in Norrath, the world of the popular MMO Everquest.

The action RPG was adapted to other genres as well. Some were extremely well-done such as the super-heroic X-Men Legends, X-Men Legends II and especially Marvel Ultimate Alliance all three set in the Marvel Comics universe.

Less successful was the attempt to turn the classic Fallout RPG's into action RPG's with the Brotherhood of Steel game for the PS2.

The action RPG has also returned to its PC roots with games such as Titan Quest, Fate & Torchlight, a workmanlike attempt to recapture the magic of Diablo on the PCs.

Critical Reception

Diablo was widely praised by critics, with a Metacritic average of 94. Many critics gave the game perfect or near perfect scores. Notably, Computer Gaming World, an influential game review magazine for PC games gave the game a perfect score of 100.

Game review site Gamespot gave the game a 9.6 which makes it one of the highest-rated computer games in the history of the site.

Soundtrack

Cover Art

The soundtrack for Diablo was composed by Matt Uelmen.

System Requirements

PC

• Operating System
• Processor: 60Mhz Pentium
• RAM Memory
• Graphics Card: SVGA compatible graphics card

Mac

• Operating System
• Processor: Power Macintosh or compatible
• RAM Memory