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An Oral History of Diablo II
- vernie 11y agoI'm always disappointed by an oral history that I can't listen to.
- hitlin37 11y agoone of the best games ever made.
- mhurron 11y agoOT, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqvXDTH-o_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqvXDTH-o_o
- seivan 11y agoI know Diablo 2 was much bigger improvement over Diablo 1, but I feel like what really made it was Battle-net. Back then most online RPG games required you to install shit like Gamespy to play online, at least that's the feeling I got. But I never played until Lord of Destruction exp though, maybe some stuff came after.
- hitlin37 11y agoI think in Diablo 2, they got almost everything right. It's almost as if it can't be remade as perfect as they did back then.
- pyrrhotech 11y agoFWIW Diablo 3 is now a worthy successor. It was terrible at launch, but the devs listened to the community and it's a great game now
- matwood 11y agoI recently picked up the PS4 UE version and as far as this style games goes I have to agree. My only complaint is it feels too easy most of the time, and I cannot make it harder until I beat the campaign once. My long experience playing D1 and then D2 are probably showing though :)
- abritinthebay 11y agoIt's better, but it's not a patch on D2 however. Go in expecting a decent game in that style though and you'll enjoy it a lot.
- d3notevenclose 11y agoIT IS NOT! Diablo 3 was the biggest disappointment in game history and that blizzard has not admitted what has been done wrong and those selfish developers that haven't even played d2 makes it even worse.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoSeriously, you created a new account to tell us that you don't like a video game?
- jlarocco 11y agoMeh. I tried playing a few months ago, and it's better than at launch and when the auction house came out, but it still can't compare to the first two, IMO.
- jsnk 11y agoSuch an amazing game. There's so much to learn from this game still that I think if we took the same basic structure of the game and balance it again, we'll have yet another masterpiece. Even the mishaps in the game like, Stone of Jordan dupes, overpowered Gambling feature in the original, some under powered classes in terms of PVP (eventually got more balanced) and so on, there are so many learning opportunities here. Addition of Runewords in 1.10 really balanced the game even further. Magic Finding (MF) which was an attribute you would want to farm set/rare/unique items were pretty much invested in Sorceresses only for her Teleporting skill. Other classes without teleporting simply could not farm as effectively as her. With a new runeword "enigma" that gave you teleporting skill, it opened up the avenue for other classes to do what Sorceresses do. I can just keep going on and on about this game and how fun it was (even the grinding in cow level for exp).
- msc 11y agoOne of the worst hacks was the Hostile Anywhere hack, especially for Hardcode mode. Apparently the Hostile button was disabled client side once you left town, but there were no server side checks. I also remember a gamble hack, where the server gave too much info to the client. The hack would tell you which were Unique/Rare/Magic gambles.
- renke1 11y agoI wholeheartedly agree. Try Path of Exile [1] if you are looking for a spiritual successor. For me, that's the only game that comes close to Diablo 2. [1]: https://www.pathofexile.com/ https://www.pathofexile.com/
- JTon 11y ago+1 for PoE. A bunch of friends and I had a weekend LAN party and took it for a ride. We all loved the additional features.
- gizmo385 11y agoTorchlight II is another fantastic successor for this genre!
- duskwuff 11y agoEh. I can't say precisely what was wrong, but the Torchlight games didn't quite hit the mark for me. Some details I can put my finger on, though, include: - The plot was, to put it bluntly, some of the most generic fantasy glop imaginable. The second game was particularly bad in this respect. - Item generation felt... off, somehow. Some combination of too many item bases and too uniform a distribution of affixes made items generally feel kind of boring. I personally found Path of Exile to be significantly better. Your mileage may vary.
- gt565k 11y agoSeeing this brought back some memories. I used to run farming bots for Diablo II when I was 13-16 years old and had about 20 copies of the game. Bots would run all day (while I was in school), and all night. I'd wake up early in the morning. Check the loot and transfer it to mule accounts, then restart the bots and go to school. I'd then try to trade items for general commodity items, like high runes, or certain skill items that were used as a form of trading currency due to their high demand. The bots had some custom features that would let you bypass IP bans by logging into your router's settings, changing the mac address, and restarting your internet connection so you can get a new IP address. One of the bots I used was written in the AutoIt Scripting Language. Since the bot was open source, I was able to see how the code was structured and modify it myself. I attribute my introduction to programming to this farming bot, and I believe is one of the reasons I chose to study Computer Science. The cherry on top was that I made about $600-$700 when I was 14 or 15 years old by selling a lot of farmed items on ebay. Personally, Diablo III was a big disappointment for me. The game felt quite different from a lot of aspects. Common loot was now split into player specific loot, too many crafting recipes, unique items were garbage, etc... I'd be happy to answer any questions regarding Diablo II or even the hacking/botting community around it.
- gadrfgaesgysd 11y agoCan you give a in-depth description of how the bots worked? You can assume the reader has good knowledge of programming, AutoIt and Diablo 2.
- jakobdabo 11y agoYou may also find this Diablo III story interesting - http://diablo3story.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-diablo-3-story.html http://diablo3story.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-diablo-3-story.ht...
- gadrfgaesgysd 11y agoI have already read that last year. Blizzard really screwed themselves( and the players ) with the Auction House.
- fierycatnet 11y agoThat's the game that I've dedicated most of my time in high school. It was gritty, challenging and full of possibilities. I managed to trade and find enough gear to buy high runes and elite rune words. I had a lance barb. It was different and frowned upon, but holy hell the amount of damage he would do. I think the greatest thing about D2LOD was their dueling system, especially in hardcore mode. I had a friend (RIP) who used to have high level barbarian with teleport amulet. In the older patches it was a rare item, before the crazy rune words and so on. So naturally he was able to assassinate a quite a few naive players, who tried to run away, to collect the ear. Oh man, the rush of playing in hardcore. The thrill was real. There was a real consequence to your mistakes. I think that was the fun part until Blizzard sanitized the game to prevent easy PK. One thing I wish Blizzard could do is to make a figurine of your character and send it to you. I'd love to have a small figurine of my lance barb that I've dedicated a lot of my time to. Too bad it's all gone now.
- atomical 11y agoI would be interested in an oral history of Dungeon Siege.
- brownbat 11y agoIn part, from Scott Bilas, from Gas Powered Games during its development: http://scottbilas.com/games/dungeon-siege/ http://scottbilas.com/games/dungeon-siege/
- abritinthebay 11y agoI used to work with Stieg Hedlund (the sole designer of D2) and it was really interesting to hear him talk about the issues he used to have to both solve and create (game design is often about creating problems - for players as well as solving technical problems). Would like to have seen more of the nitty gritty about the game. This is a very project-manager-ish view of its development and as such sadly misses a lot of the work involved. That said - it's also invaluable. Very interesting read.
- listic 11y agoGreat game designers are not necessarily great game historians and/or have good memory. > It's amazing how many new standard things came out of Diablo and Diablo II. [...] The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense. While Diablo certainly helped popularize quite a few such features and even arguably gave birth to a genre (I heard people calling various other games a Diablo), it would be overconfident for them to claim inventing it: Magic the Gathering [1] had it years prior. There, rarity was implemented with printed pages: you print all your common cards on a Common sheet, uncommon cards on an Uncommon sheet and rare on Rare sheet; then put 1 card from Rare, 3 from Uncommon and 9 from Common into each booster pack. (not actual numbers! there are also Mythic Rares and each card has a tiny chance to be a Foil version, which complicates the situation, but the basic idea is something like that; from memory) Same goes for the idea of a quest log: I don't have a specific example in mind, but I have a hard time believing no game had it before Diablo II. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering
- legohead 11y agoMUDs have had stuff like this since the early 90s. I haven't seen a graphical RPG come close to the complexity of some of the MUDs I've played (and are still around today).
- listic 11y agonods They very well might be, though I never encountered explicit item rarity in my MUDs. Also, they mention being inspired by Ultima Online. Creators of Ultima Online were inspired by MUDs. btw, Magic: the Gathering debuted in 1993.
- aidenn0 11y agoYou took that quote out-of-context: > The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense. In some roguelikes, they would have your common item and your magic item, so they were different colors of text or whatever. If it was a magic item it was blue, if it was a normal item it was white, that kind of thing. And, so, we took a step further and went with the rarity levels. The rarer something is then it has a different color. M:tG did not have a visual distinction for rares versus uncommon versus common when I played it in the mid 90s, and that is what they are talking about here, a visual indication of the rarity of an item.
- panic 11y agoIt's interesting that the cinematics were made by an entirely separate team that barely communicated with the game developers. Somehow it produced a better story than Diablo 3's more traditional mixing of story with gameplay.
- danharaj 11y agoIn some ways advancing the story was a reward for playing, which can feel more compelling than trying to craft the illusion that the player's actions effect the advancement.
- stormbrew 11y agoWell, I don't think this is why. Diablo 3's problem is just that the story writing, and particularly the dialog writing, is extremely trite. Diablo and Diablo 2 had fairly simple but compelling stories that were dropped in at key moments. Diablo 3 is largely progressively more annoying demons telling you how unlikely you are to beat them. It just gets tiresome. That'd be true if they were separated cut scenes as in Diablo 2 or integrated dialog as in 3.
- jonhohle 11y agoI was a fan of the "Death" diplomacy in D3 /sarc. At least for the barbarian role, the solution to all problems was to murder the current antagonist, even when it seemed like the antagonizer's goal was effectively the same as the hero's; they just weren't the hero. The hero him/herself was responsible for as much or more death than any of the enemies.
- derptacos 11y agoAlso recommend reading Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - David L. Craddock http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G8UL474 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G8UL474 Really interesting read, covers Diablo/Warcraft development from its humble beginnings.
- Legion 11y agoI can't stand articles with pagination that lack a "single page" view, defeating convenient read-it-later offline saving.
- lobo_tuerto 11y agoI hope all those working on it like this got a great compensation back for the extra hours/days: "...to the point where everyone was having to work seven days a week, all waking hours, for almost a year."
- lamontcg 11y agoDiablo didn't invent cheating in internet games. I was writing bots for nettrek back in 1992, and it had been going on for a lot longer than that. Nettrek probably invented anti-cheat practices including RSA signing the binaries and moving most of the logic to server-side. You could program info borgs to give you better display of information than other humans, and you could program combat borgs that simply reacted faster than humans could (particularly with automatic tractor/pressors, auto phasers at close distance, and auto aiming torps), but cloaked ships had their positions randomized server side so you couldn't get magic accuracy to lock on them, and torp wobble and hits were all computed server side so there was no way for client hacking to change the basic physics.