6 ms·

The excellence of Diablo lies in the atmosphere of the game. I think it is one of the best games in terms of the overall atmosphere and that general feel of pla

by haddr 11y ago

The excellence of Diablo lies in the atmosphere of the game. I think it is one of the best games in terms of the overall atmosphere and that general feel of play. All the pieces work perfectly together to deliver this unique sensation while playing the game. Especially the music. Matt Ulemen has created a masterpiece soundtrack! PS. It is very funny that reading this pitch document I haven't noticed any of that ephemeral things that build this unique atmosphere. Funny how such pitches are evaluated only on the sole raw description the gameplay and nothing else...

agumonkey 11y ago
I only played the 1st half way but I think you're right. It had a very tangible aesthetic that I rarely felt in other games. I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much.
- rubber_duck 11y ago
  >I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much. I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3. The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination. I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover. What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful. The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
    - Scuds 11y ago
      > The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era. Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that. It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too. Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
        11y ago
Reedx 11y ago
Yeah, Diablo had an very well realized atmosphere and solidified tone. The soundtrack played a big part of that. I can still remember how great it felt simply walking around the town and being absorbed by the world. In the Diablo postmortem last week at GDC, David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder) said[1] that Matt Ulemen bugged them until they gave him the job. That worked out pretty well to say the least! [1] https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225 https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Interestingly that guy was working on Marvel Heroes until recently, having been hired after the initial launch went sour to help rework the game. Its an online only ARPG where everyone can play a number of heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel universe (the in game justification is that a very powerful artifact is screwing up reality, allowing multiple variants of the characters to exist at the same time).
  - zf00002 11y ago
    The cool thing is that David Brevik didn't just work at Gazillion on Marvel Heroes, he actually played it. And he still does. He and his wife stream on twitch and play every week as they've done for years now. Every now and again he'll talk about game dev type stuff, few weeks (maybe months now I forget) he talked about the tile generation in Diablo. He also still plays Everquest 1 of all things.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Yeah i think that quite a number of people in the game production business are basically not gamers. They are storytellers, they are animators, they are artists of various stripes, but they are just not gamers. Thus there is a big risk that they will concoct schemes that will drive a gamer up the wall.
devonkim 11y ago
I somewhat have to disagree in that the popularity of Diablo is similar to that of WoW - the underpinnings in pure addiction. Random positive reinforcers are really, really powerful.
- kup0 11y ago
  Yeah and it doesn't seem that knowing about them makes any difference. I actively know that Diablo and other similar games are doing this and yet I find that I like it. The games do lose replay value over time a bit (I'm worn out on D3) but if you wait a while and go back it's fun again. For now, I'm playing similar games (Path of Exile, Grim Dawn) and finding I'm enjoying the different styles of art, even though it's essentially the same exact gameplay. Maybe what I think is fun is more addiction than fun? Hard to tell. Obtaining random loot sure is addictive.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    There's a hymn in the ancient Rigveda scriptures, known as "Gambler's Lament." > The trembling hazelnut eardrops of the great tree, born in a hurricane, intoxicate me as they roll on the furrowed board. The dice seem to me like a drink of Soma from Mount Mujavant, keeping me awake and excited. > [...] > The dice goad like hooks and sting like whips; they enslave, deceive, and torment. They give presents as children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey - an irresistible power over the gambler. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html
- barbs 11y ago
  I would agree with you in the case of Diablo 2 (and probably 3, though I haven't played that one). But the first Diablo holds a special place in my heart precisely because of the atmosphere. Gameplay-wise it was actually pretty broken. Gold takes up space in your inventory, and there was no concept of a stash, so you'd just dump your gold on the ground in town. The best strategy was to fight through the dungeon until your inventory fills up, then go back to town, sell off everything, buy the best stuff you can see, rinse and repeat. Online multiplayer wasn't much better, mostly because of the "duping" bug which allowed players to easily duplicate items. That said, it's still a fun game to play through, because of the atmosphere of it. Multiplayer is also great with friends so long as you don't break the game. And you can set challenges for yourself to make it more fun (e.g. "Ironman" mode, where you can't buy items or go back to town without dying). Diablo 2 and 3 are great games in their own way, but as you say, they rely on that addictive random loot-fest, which I never really liked.
digi_owl 11y ago
Heh, i still recall me and friends checking out the demo with a lan setup and running into the butcher boss room. From the ouside you see a darkened room with some blobs that may be raw flesh inside. Open the door and you hear "ah, fresh meat" as a voiceover. Right after that a big, bulky demon with a bloodstained apron and a meat cleaver walks into view.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  That was a genuinely scary moment for me.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Yeah we all jumped in our seats and in-game scrambled away the first time.
- brobinson 11y ago
  There was supposed to be a cutscene [1] which played when you opened the door (similar to when you first encounter Lazarus), but it was apparently disabled. The video file was still left on the game disc. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And having the cutscene there would perhaps not have been as effective, as it would have removed the player from the "world" if only for a split second.
  - Raphmedia 11y ago
    When I was a kid, I was messing around with the files on the disc and stumbled on that. Showing it around was a nice 5 minutes of "fame" in school.
- Jordrok 11y ago
  Yes! That's one of my all time favorite gaming moments/memories.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Negative1 11y ago
While this is the pitch they made while David was at Condor it was not the origin of the idea for the game. As David mentioned on Friday at the GDC Post-mortem, he had the original idea in Highschool for a more traditional turn-based, tile-based RPG. The music, art direction and many other elements that made Diablo an innovative game actually came organically and much later.
antjanus 11y ago
I really loved that atmosphere. Can you recommend another game that captures the same kind of feel and atmosphere? The dark, brooding mythology, idk how to even describe it.
- Vaskivo 11y ago
  I would say Dark Souls. But it's a different kind of RPG (third person, action oriented, difficult and unforgiving. But fun!)
norea-armozel 11y ago
Catacombs music was scary as hell to me when I was a teenager especially when a horde of champion goatmen were hiding in a room ready to snipe me with their archers.
bunnymancer 11y ago
Pitches aren't sold through fi-fis, it's sold through pew-pews

by haddr 11y ago

agumonkey 11y ago

I only played the 1st half way but I think you're right. It had a very tangible aesthetic that I rarely felt in other games. I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much.

rubber_duck 11y ago
>I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much. I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3. The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination. I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover. What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful. The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
  - Scuds 11y ago
    > The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era. Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that. It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too. Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
      - 11y ago

Reedx 11y ago

Yeah, Diablo had an very well realized atmosphere and solidified tone. The soundtrack played a big part of that. I can still remember how great it felt simply walking around the town and being absorbed by the world. In the Diablo postmortem last week at GDC, David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder) said[1] that Matt Ulemen bugged them until they gave him the job. That worked out pretty well to say the least! [1] https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225 https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225

digi_owl 11y ago
Interestingly that guy was working on Marvel Heroes until recently, having been hired after the initial launch went sour to help rework the game. Its an online only ARPG where everyone can play a number of heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel universe (the in game justification is that a very powerful artifact is screwing up reality, allowing multiple variants of the characters to exist at the same time).
- zf00002 11y ago
  The cool thing is that David Brevik didn't just work at Gazillion on Marvel Heroes, he actually played it. And he still does. He and his wife stream on twitch and play every week as they've done for years now. Every now and again he'll talk about game dev type stuff, few weeks (maybe months now I forget) he talked about the tile generation in Diablo. He also still plays Everquest 1 of all things.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Yeah i think that quite a number of people in the game production business are basically not gamers. They are storytellers, they are animators, they are artists of various stripes, but they are just not gamers. Thus there is a big risk that they will concoct schemes that will drive a gamer up the wall.

devonkim 11y ago

I somewhat have to disagree in that the popularity of Diablo is similar to that of WoW - the underpinnings in pure addiction. Random positive reinforcers are really, really powerful.

kup0 11y ago
Yeah and it doesn't seem that knowing about them makes any difference. I actively know that Diablo and other similar games are doing this and yet I find that I like it. The games do lose replay value over time a bit (I'm worn out on D3) but if you wait a while and go back it's fun again. For now, I'm playing similar games (Path of Exile, Grim Dawn) and finding I'm enjoying the different styles of art, even though it's essentially the same exact gameplay. Maybe what I think is fun is more addiction than fun? Hard to tell. Obtaining random loot sure is addictive.
- mbrock 11y ago
  There's a hymn in the ancient Rigveda scriptures, known as "Gambler's Lament." > The trembling hazelnut eardrops of the great tree, born in a hurricane, intoxicate me as they roll on the furrowed board. The dice seem to me like a drink of Soma from Mount Mujavant, keeping me awake and excited. > [...] > The dice goad like hooks and sting like whips; they enslave, deceive, and torment. They give presents as children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey - an irresistible power over the gambler. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html
barbs 11y ago
I would agree with you in the case of Diablo 2 (and probably 3, though I haven't played that one). But the first Diablo holds a special place in my heart precisely because of the atmosphere. Gameplay-wise it was actually pretty broken. Gold takes up space in your inventory, and there was no concept of a stash, so you'd just dump your gold on the ground in town. The best strategy was to fight through the dungeon until your inventory fills up, then go back to town, sell off everything, buy the best stuff you can see, rinse and repeat. Online multiplayer wasn't much better, mostly because of the "duping" bug which allowed players to easily duplicate items. That said, it's still a fun game to play through, because of the atmosphere of it. Multiplayer is also great with friends so long as you don't break the game. And you can set challenges for yourself to make it more fun (e.g. "Ironman" mode, where you can't buy items or go back to town without dying). Diablo 2 and 3 are great games in their own way, but as you say, they rely on that addictive random loot-fest, which I never really liked.

digi_owl 11y ago

Heh, i still recall me and friends checking out the demo with a lan setup and running into the butcher boss room. From the ouside you see a darkened room with some blobs that may be raw flesh inside. Open the door and you hear "ah, fresh meat" as a voiceover. Right after that a big, bulky demon with a bloodstained apron and a meat cleaver walks into view.

enraged_camel 11y ago
That was a genuinely scary moment for me.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Yeah we all jumped in our seats and in-game scrambled away the first time.
brobinson 11y ago
There was supposed to be a cutscene [1] which played when you opened the door (similar to when you first encounter Lazarus), but it was apparently disabled. The video file was still left on the game disc. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And having the cutscene there would perhaps not have been as effective, as it would have removed the player from the "world" if only for a split second.
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  When I was a kid, I was messing around with the files on the disc and stumbled on that. Showing it around was a nice 5 minutes of "fame" in school.
Jordrok 11y ago
Yes! That's one of my all time favorite gaming moments/memories.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Negative1 11y ago

While this is the pitch they made while David was at Condor it was not the origin of the idea for the game. As David mentioned on Friday at the GDC Post-mortem, he had the original idea in Highschool for a more traditional turn-based, tile-based RPG. The music, art direction and many other elements that made Diablo an innovative game actually came organically and much later.

antjanus 11y ago

I really loved that atmosphere. Can you recommend another game that captures the same kind of feel and atmosphere? The dark, brooding mythology, idk how to even describe it.

Vaskivo 11y ago
I would say Dark Souls. But it's a different kind of RPG (third person, action oriented, difficult and unforgiving. But fun!)

norea-armozel 11y ago

Catacombs music was scary as hell to me when I was a teenager especially when a horde of champion goatmen were hiding in a room ready to snipe me with their archers.

bunnymancer 11y ago

Pitches aren't sold through fi-fis, it's sold through pew-pews