15 ms·

Diablo

242 points by doppp 3y ago

WaxProlix 3y ago
Site seems to be struggling. Archive doesn't have it yet, but it'll hopefully be at https://archive.li/wip/v3gsM https://archive.li/wip/v3gsM when it does.
- imachine1980_ 3y ago
  it does now :)
strictnein 3y ago
Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful. I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's obviously been really successful for them, but I have absolutely no want or need to play through the game again. It's a slog, running across the map, equipment with so many stats that I don't know what's actually better or worse, fighting monsters on the surface and in dungeons that all feel the same. There's hardly any time journeying into the depths of hell, or into deep, deep dungeons, but a lot of the plot instead revolves around the jungle for some reason and how the "jungle gives and takes". A big focus on builds and grinding as opposed to fun. It's been sacrificed on the altar of "live service" and, unlike Diablo 1, you won't be able to play it in 25 years, nor will you really want to.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  I love Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, I don't care much for what the genre has become though (Diablo 3/4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, etc). The genre of loot focused ARPGs really took after the worst aspects of Diablo 2 LOD end game. An extreme focus on grinding and optimizing builds to maximize your ability to grind, so you can get gear to beat end game content that is otherwise impossible, to repeat the process. The genre took this and ran with the concept and brought it up, but also kind of killed the simple parts of the game. A lot of older 90s / early 2000s games had this game first, that then maybe had this end game aspect which some communities played towards. But now the industry plays towards the end game aspect, and neglects the person that just wants to sit down and fight into the dungeon for a while.
  - troebr 3y ago
    I think the loop that hooked me on game such as Diablo 1, Valheim, Subnautica, etc, is that cycle of safe place -> adventure -> "safe place, recharge, upgrade". The grindey aspect of Diablo 4 totally turned me off and if I buy the game it'll only be for the couch coop aspect.
    - ohashi 3y ago
      The latest patch is an abomination to make it even slower, grindier and less fun. Save your money.
    - strictnein 3y ago
      Just an fyi - the couch coop for Diablo 4 is a little more work to get going than Diablo 3. Requires that the second player sign into their own PSN/XBL account and have that account tied to a Battle.net account: https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platforms-2160924/ https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platform...
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    I'm in the same boat. I loved Diablo 1 and 3, but Diablo 3 is just meh and I haven't even bothered with 4. The first two games it could be fun going through loot you'd found and try to optimize your character. There were only a few dimensions to each piece of equipment so finding the "best" a relatively easy. Even if you didn't have the absolute best stuff you could still play the game. The character optimization was an emergent part of the game, not the core focus of the game. Diablo 3, especially with real money used to buy equipment, turned the CharOp into a core aspect of the game. If you didn't pay attention to that aspect the game could be mercilessly hard. So I couldn't just mindlessly play, I had to pause half way through the dungeon to go further tune all my gear across a dozen different dimensions. The extra cognitive load means there's more steps between me sitting down and engaging something fun. If I have an hour to play a game having to spend ten minutes out of that time dealing with loot is just a tax on fun. It's bad enough that unless I play every day I have to wait some unbounded amount of time waiting for updates because of the forced online component.
  - 3y ago
- belfalas 3y ago
  > They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. That Town theme music is just a lovely piece of music. Totally nostalgia inducing. 8-Bit music theory did a nice breakdown of why it's so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_zsDWJyrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_zsDWJyrM
- chrisdfrey 3y ago
  This writer (Digital Antiquarian) has a lot of interesting articles on early computers and computer games.
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/v3gsM https://archive.ph/v3gsM
babblingfish 3y ago
I tried to leave a comment on the article but it's down due to the hacker news hug of death. I wonder if the author plays new games and what their opinion is on Diablo 4. It's interesting to me that hacker news has become a place for this kind of niche content about old video games. Who would have known there is such a large audience that is willing to pay for magazine length / quality articles about the history of games?
- lubujackson 3y ago
  Speaking of, I subscribed to this magazine for a few years (yes, on paper!) and I highly recommend: https://www.retrogamer.net/ https://www.retrogamer.net/ They have a lot online but there is something very enjoyable about getting an actual magazine in the mail. They have a ton of glossy images and in-depth, well-researched articles - a breakdown of how Pitfall! was constructed for the Atari 2600 is a memorable one. Bonus (or negative): it is from the UK and living in the U.S. there is a whole alternate dimension of retro games they feature that I've never heard of. But I enjoyed reading about those, too!
baristavibes 3y ago
This story and many others are captured really well in the Game Developer Conference (GDC) post-mortem talks, heartily recommended if you want to know about the human aspect behind game dev!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc
- corysama 3y ago
  And, if that's not enough for you :P https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/search?q=diablo&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/search?q=diablo&re...
giobox 3y ago
Jimmy Maher's writing on old PC video games continues to be some of the best around, at least if you are of a similar age to Jim. When the site recovers, I highly recommend reading his back catalog - one of the best collections of articles on 90s PC gaming I've seen. The site is especially great because Jimmy writes so well and he has obvious passion for the period.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  He also covers a lot of 80s PC gaming. I find the periods I'm unfamiliar with as (or more) enjoyable than the periods I'm intimately familiar with.
aidenn0 3y ago
This quote resonates with my experience playing Diablo (though as a teenager I definitely couldn't put my finger on it): > One nice thing about getting older is that you learn what makes you feel good and bad. I’ve long since learned, for instance, that I’m happiest if I don’t play games for more than a couple of hours per day, even on those rare occasions when I have time for more. But I want those hours to have substance — to yield fun stories to tell, interesting decisions to remember, strategies or puzzle solutions to muse about while I’m cooking dinner or working out or taking a walk, accomplishments to feel good about. For me, Diablo is peculiarly flat; I went, I saw, I clicked on monsters. For me, it feels less like a time waster than a waste of time. I almost find myself wishing the game wasn’t so superbly polished in every particular, just to relieve the monotony. [edit] And it's not due to an inherent grindy-ness of Diablo either (as one comment on TFA suggests). I have enjoyed other games that were about as grindy before and since.
imachine1980_ 3y ago
diablo Postmortem GDC 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc
wk_end 3y ago
Even Diablo 2 felt a little bloated to me - it's so much longer, and I burned out on all the click-click-click way sooner than most people. It felt like slog. But the original Diablo...man. What a game. It feels "perfect" to me, in the same way that Scheme (the programming language) feels "perfect". Tight, hugely playable and replayable, atmospheric, unbelievably compulsively addictive. I maintain an personal list of best games ever; it's unranked, but D1 would be near the top.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Diablo 2 is the only one I played deeply, it seems fresher since it has many acts/environments. Even though any single one of them could have boring parts.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    Diablo 1 has a single town, but there is a similar "new environments" part of the gameplay since as you go into the dungeon it changes. So theres the church -> catacombs -> caves -> hell. Though the whole game is maybe just a little longer than Act 1 in Diablo 2 (but its tough to say because its a much slower paced game).
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    > Even though any single one of them could have boring parts. The jungle areas in Act 3 were a particularly weak section, IMO.
    - fishtoaster 3y ago
      That's what immediately sprang to mind when wk_end mentioned slogging. I was never a serious player, but played through it a number of times and that was always my least favorite section. So repetitive, and the river maps often included long sections of back-tracking if you got unlucky with the procedural generation.
    - nullindividual 3y ago
      Act 3 has a large difficulty spike and is frustrating (especially due to the dolls, etc.), but Kurask is a favorite farming area. Act 4 is boring, though easy to get rewards in due to how open the spaces are.
musha68k 3y ago
Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - and that's probably the point? So I agree on many fronts with this article. Diablo could have been so much more but they turned it into a highly engineered form of drug that can potentially destroy you, with little to nothing to gain for it. Nicotine? For sure it's more gambling than gaming - again to me mostly timeless yet inherently toxic coating - down to the systems level. So in a way, it's the original "mobile game", the ultimate computer based life waster. So depending on the person and with the right .mpq file in hand this could either mean getting addicted to or maybe getting off of "cigarettes" completely: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/blob/master/docs/installing.md https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/blob/master/docs/... (Devilution/X is amazing and maybe more interesting than playing the game itself, complete clean-room reverse engineered version of Diablo). Edit disclaimer: local / in-sync multiplayer is (probably?) not as life wasting
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  > the lacking of significant strategic elements Planning for your gear and doing sims / optimizing are strategic elements, though potentially a meta-strategy?
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    That was a thing in Diablo 2 and that's when the IP peaked, this got lost with Diablo 3 and, i believe even more so with Diablo 4.. all the builds are all discovered and in front of you, there is no tinkering with incredible skill interaction possible like we used to do in Diablo 2 It's kinda similar to how Bethesda manages the Elder Scrolls IP, ~ a decade between titles and they casualize(? is it a word)/simplify mechanics that made them popular, they became a shadow of themselves, as a result their titles, while successful, doesn't give the same satisfaction, and I don't think it's due to nostalgia, there are specific design decisions that emphasis with my point, lvl-scaling and simplified damage/defense stats in D4 for example The story and world building are both nailed, hence the commercial success, but the gameplay... what a let down.. exactly like Oblivion -> Skyrim transition I don't think the game would have been a success if "Diablo" wasn't attached to the name, I'm pretty sure it sold less than Diablo 3 Hopefully they evolve the genre/IP with Diablo 5, perhaps focus as a single player game and explore new gameplay mechanics This "game as a service" ruins this IP Hopefully Bethesda don't fall into the same trap and actually move the IP forward, similar to how Fromsoftware evolved their Souls like genre Dark Souls -> Elden Ring, that's what I expect from both Blizzard / Bethesda, they both play too safe and ends up becoming the shadow of their past..
haunter 3y ago
>Poor character-building choices or a general lack of skill can, in other words, always be compensated for with patient grinding. This is why I fell in love with JRPGs. Generally most of them allow endless grinding and for me, and for a lot of people, grinding itself is relaxing and on top of that it's fun being strong. It's fun being a demi-god and just kill every boss in 5 seconds or less. And even better when you can exploit some janky game mechanic to become strong (which nowadays would be patched 1 week later by the devs...)
- butlike 3y ago
  [dead]
ghastmaster 3y ago
> They knew that multiplayer deathmatches had made DOOM what it was, and they knew that, long after players had finished Warcraft II‘s single-player campaign, it was multiplayer that kept them going there as well, turning the game into a veritable institution This is what kept me playing for so long. I eventually played solo trying to find better loot when bnet dried up. There is now an active community on discord and plenty of people playing devilutionx. If you have a hankering for Diablo 1 community nostalia, I have over 700 links to current and archived Diablo 1 fanpages on my website https://mgpat-gm.github.io https://mgpat-gm.github.io
hirundo 3y ago
This game murdered me. I discovered Diablo a few months after it came out and played obsessively for a few weeks. I had lots of cool stuff. Then one day wandering through a dungeon minding my own business, someone invisible killed me. Boom you're dead. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they just went away. I really felt murdered. I read mystery books with murders in them all the time, but the punch never connected like that. Video games really are a uniquely expressive medium. I closed the game and never went back to it.
- butlike 3y ago
  [dead]
Paul_S 3y ago
Back when Diablo was released it wasn't uniformly praised like it is today. Aside from caricaturised RPG fans' scoffing there was a lot of criticism of its what we call today streamlining and what we used to call dumbing down. Interestingly back then there wasn't yet the research or even the vocabulary of addictive dopamine hit mechanics but there was already a not very well articulated feeling of a hamster wheel experience. But yes, I did play Diablo 1 to completion. With all 3 characters.
1letterunixname 3y ago
I played a lot of Diablo in high school while listening to Alice in Chains. For what it was, it was quality, different, and addictive. Modem and local IPX play with friends was interesting. D2 was a letdown IMO. D3 is pretty good overall but lacks the charm of D1. I haven't tried D4 because it's $$$ and I'll wait until it's sold on sale. During the pandemic, I bought CD copies of Diablo and Diablo: Hellfire because I wanted to patch, nocd, and mod them without intermediary tainting of modern distributions.
1letterunixname 3y ago
The sanctity of this place has been fouled.
mbwgh 3y ago
I got a SSL_NO_CIPHER_OVERLAP for the archive.X links here, which was a first. Since curl worked, I configured Firefox to use NextDNS instead of Cloudflare for DNS over HTTPS, and it worked. So, is Cloudflare blocking archive.ph since today?
- duskwuff 3y ago
  Other way around -- archive.ph (which operates under a variety of TLDs) has been blocking users who use Cloudflare DNS for quite some time now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
whartung 3y ago
I caused physical damage to my hand with Diablo 1 and all the incessant clicking (vs the "hold to attack and keep attacking" mechanic in D2 and D3). I had some good times in D2, played it pretty deeply until I got to the Physical Immunes. That's when I gave up because I didn't want to have to level up, regear, and respec a new character. I played D3 when it first came out, the Real Money Auction House destroyed that game as it became a game of "gold", not gear. The "world wide" loot table just wrecked it. When you have a 1 in 10M chance of getting the right weapon drop, that's only "1 in 10" across a million players, but it's still 1 in 10M for you. You also had to become knowledgeable about not just your own class and gear, but every other class and gear so your Barbarian doesn't salvage some random Staff that may have been one of those 1 in 10M drops for a Sorcerer, and thus worth a heap of currency. D3 rewards time invested, especially later on. It rewards skill to a point, but in the end, it's determination to grind long enough to get enough gear and to get the right level to clear the content. You watch videos of someone clearing high level content, and it's almost always the same map they're clearing as some maps are outright impossible to succeed on compared to others. When it's all boiled down, it makes the end game pretty moot. That said, I like the dynamic playstyle of D3. An "ok" geared Demon Hunter is a cat on fire through the levels, obliterating everything and everyone, and it's just flat giggly fun. And I liked the story of D3, it was a great story.
rpastuszak 3y ago
I remember playing the first demo as a kid[1] and almost falling off my chair when I accidentally triggered the healing spell (I had no idea that I triggered it). It was scarier than Butcher grunting "aaah fresh meat" from a cold dark room, deep in the dungeon. Then, for reasons not relevant here, to buy the full version of the game I had to drive 60 km to the nearest big city, get it at a shady bazaar, suspiciously only displaying CDROM covers at their stalls, but no disks. The game was so much better due to almost 2 years of anticipation! And then, a few days later the nanny robbed us (= disappeared), and it took my parents more than a day to come back. So we played D1 for 23 hours, changing seats with my brothers, one of us making tea, another one snacks, rotating every 30 minutes. The moral of this story is: Diablo was a wonderful game when it came out, but ffs never leave 3 kids at the age 7-10 alone for more than a few hours. xd [1] Two rednecks playing D1: https://days.sonnet.io/#:~:text=I%20play%20Diablo%20for%20the%20first%20time https://days.sonnet.io/#:~:text=I%20play%20Diablo%20for%20th... (if not on chrome, search for "I play diablo")
Erwin 3y ago
The complex ARPGs have some unlikely competition: rogue-lite bullet-heaven games. The "rougue-lite" gives you short playing sessions where you die, but can still progress for the next game. The "bullet-heaven" turns your character into a source of powerful and explosive attacks, where your actions during the game may be limited to just moving around and selecting upgrade paths. These lo-fi 5 EUR games give a lot of the monster-slaying fun of Path of Exile, Diablo etc. but with less grind -- and extreme variety. Yet the same idea of killing thousands of monsters with visually and mechanically varied attacks remains. Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Bio-Prototype and Halls of Torment are some of the ugly-looking but addictive games which make me question returning to another only slightly different season of Path of Exile.
- anthk 3y ago
  Isometric != lofi. Some games with 2D isometric setups can have gorgeus graphics.Even libre ones like Flare.
anthk 3y ago
Diablo it's just a real time watered down Moria :). Get the real thing and play Nethack/Slashem. Moria feels repetitive in comparison. If you feel combat oriented instead of thinking out of the box a la NH/SLSM, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
- User23 3y ago
  Tales of Maj’Eyal does a great job of streamlining the roguelike gameplay loop without dumbing it down. And it’s GPL licensed! Amusingly it has some pay to hoard mechanics if you play with the official servers. I’ve thrown about a hundred euros to the author that way because I like the idea of supporting free software game dev and it’s just a fun game.
  - anthk 3y ago
    wait, TOME4 it's GPL, but tome-sx and friends, not :|. It's a pity, because the older TOME games were Moria like but at least they put some overworld gameplay with several kinds of towns to make it more fun. On NH/SLEM, you have towns, but inside the "dungeon".
ralmidani 3y ago
I agree with the drug analogies. I bought Diablo in 1996, I stayed up about 40 hours playing it. To the point that I started to literally hallucinate and click on things that weren’t actually there. I downloaded the relatively new iOS Diablo game a few months ago and sank tens of hours into the game before waking up and putting an end to the madness. I’m morally opposed to “pay to win” games and wasn’t tempted to buy anything, so fortunately I escaped without financial damage (but the time I put into the grind can’t be replaced). Granted, there are people who are more susceptible to addiction, and I appear to be one of them (thankfully, I was raised in an observant Muslim family). But that doesn’t absolve Blizzard of responsibility for what they’ve unleashed.
- cwkoss 3y ago
  typo? do you mean "pay to win"?
  - ralmidani 3y ago
    Thanks! Fixed.
holografix 3y ago
The only way to play Diablo is on hardcore mode and multiplayer. Suddenly you are walking dungeons slowly, waiting for cooldowns to refresh in a corner, planning what area spells to combo with your party, exchanging items that were dropped. I don’t know if HC players get rewarded in any way, with special dungeons or items but they should. It forces you to appreciate and think about the game much more. Otherwise it’s just mindless click frenzy.
evo_9 3y ago
I still think Baldur’s Gate:Dark Alliance is the best of those old dungeon crawlers, way more replayable.
senectus1 3y ago
ahh man that audio track in the middle of the article really kicked off some nostalgia for me.

242 points by doppp 3y ago

Site seems to be struggling. Archive doesn't have it yet, but it'll hopefully be at https://archive.li/wip/v3gsM https://archive.li/wip/v3gsM when it does.

imachine1980_ 3y ago
it does now :)

strictnein 3y ago

Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful. I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's obviously been really successful for them, but I have absolutely no want or need to play through the game again. It's a slog, running across the map, equipment with so many stats that I don't know what's actually better or worse, fighting monsters on the surface and in dungeons that all feel the same. There's hardly any time journeying into the depths of hell, or into deep, deep dungeons, but a lot of the plot instead revolves around the jungle for some reason and how the "jungle gives and takes". A big focus on builds and grinding as opposed to fun. It's been sacrificed on the altar of "live service" and, unlike Diablo 1, you won't be able to play it in 25 years, nor will you really want to.

ecshafer 3y ago
I love Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, I don't care much for what the genre has become though (Diablo 3/4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, etc). The genre of loot focused ARPGs really took after the worst aspects of Diablo 2 LOD end game. An extreme focus on grinding and optimizing builds to maximize your ability to grind, so you can get gear to beat end game content that is otherwise impossible, to repeat the process. The genre took this and ran with the concept and brought it up, but also kind of killed the simple parts of the game. A lot of older 90s / early 2000s games had this game first, that then maybe had this end game aspect which some communities played towards. But now the industry plays towards the end game aspect, and neglects the person that just wants to sit down and fight into the dungeon for a while.
- troebr 3y ago
  I think the loop that hooked me on game such as Diablo 1, Valheim, Subnautica, etc, is that cycle of safe place -> adventure -> "safe place, recharge, upgrade". The grindey aspect of Diablo 4 totally turned me off and if I buy the game it'll only be for the couch coop aspect.
  - ohashi 3y ago
    The latest patch is an abomination to make it even slower, grindier and less fun. Save your money.
  - strictnein 3y ago
    Just an fyi - the couch coop for Diablo 4 is a little more work to get going than Diablo 3. Requires that the second player sign into their own PSN/XBL account and have that account tied to a Battle.net account: https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platforms-2160924/ https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platform...
- giantrobot 3y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I loved Diablo 1 and 3, but Diablo 3 is just meh and I haven't even bothered with 4. The first two games it could be fun going through loot you'd found and try to optimize your character. There were only a few dimensions to each piece of equipment so finding the "best" a relatively easy. Even if you didn't have the absolute best stuff you could still play the game. The character optimization was an emergent part of the game, not the core focus of the game. Diablo 3, especially with real money used to buy equipment, turned the CharOp into a core aspect of the game. If you didn't pay attention to that aspect the game could be mercilessly hard. So I couldn't just mindlessly play, I had to pause half way through the dungeon to go further tune all my gear across a dozen different dimensions. The extra cognitive load means there's more steps between me sitting down and engaging something fun. If I have an hour to play a game having to spend ten minutes out of that time dealing with loot is just a tax on fun. It's bad enough that unless I play every day I have to wait some unbounded amount of time waiting for updates because of the forced online component.
- 3y ago
belfalas 3y ago
> They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. That Town theme music is just a lovely piece of music. Totally nostalgia inducing. 8-Bit music theory did a nice breakdown of why it's so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_zsDWJyrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_zsDWJyrM
chrisdfrey 3y ago
This writer (Digital Antiquarian) has a lot of interesting articles on early computers and computer games.

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.ph/v3gsM https://archive.ph/v3gsM

babblingfish 3y ago

I tried to leave a comment on the article but it's down due to the hacker news hug of death. I wonder if the author plays new games and what their opinion is on Diablo 4. It's interesting to me that hacker news has become a place for this kind of niche content about old video games. Who would have known there is such a large audience that is willing to pay for magazine length / quality articles about the history of games?

lubujackson 3y ago
Speaking of, I subscribed to this magazine for a few years (yes, on paper!) and I highly recommend: https://www.retrogamer.net/ https://www.retrogamer.net/ They have a lot online but there is something very enjoyable about getting an actual magazine in the mail. They have a ton of glossy images and in-depth, well-researched articles - a breakdown of how Pitfall! was constructed for the Atari 2600 is a memorable one. Bonus (or negative): it is from the UK and living in the U.S. there is a whole alternate dimension of retro games they feature that I've never heard of. But I enjoyed reading about those, too!

baristavibes 3y ago

This story and many others are captured really well in the Game Developer Conference (GDC) post-mortem talks, heartily recommended if you want to know about the human aspect behind game dev!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

corysama 3y ago
And, if that's not enough for you :P https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/search?q=diablo&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/search?q=diablo&re...

giobox 3y ago

Jimmy Maher's writing on old PC video games continues to be some of the best around, at least if you are of a similar age to Jim. When the site recovers, I highly recommend reading his back catalog - one of the best collections of articles on 90s PC gaming I've seen. The site is especially great because Jimmy writes so well and he has obvious passion for the period.

aidenn0 3y ago
He also covers a lot of 80s PC gaming. I find the periods I'm unfamiliar with as (or more) enjoyable than the periods I'm intimately familiar with.

aidenn0 3y ago

This quote resonates with my experience playing Diablo (though as a teenager I definitely couldn't put my finger on it): > One nice thing about getting older is that you learn what makes you feel good and bad. I’ve long since learned, for instance, that I’m happiest if I don’t play games for more than a couple of hours per day, even on those rare occasions when I have time for more. But I want those hours to have substance — to yield fun stories to tell, interesting decisions to remember, strategies or puzzle solutions to muse about while I’m cooking dinner or working out or taking a walk, accomplishments to feel good about. For me, Diablo is peculiarly flat; I went, I saw, I clicked on monsters. For me, it feels less like a time waster than a waste of time. I almost find myself wishing the game wasn’t so superbly polished in every particular, just to relieve the monotony. [edit] And it's not due to an inherent grindy-ness of Diablo either (as one comment on TFA suggests). I have enjoyed other games that were about as grindy before and since.

imachine1980_ 3y ago

diablo Postmortem GDC 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

wk_end 3y ago

Even Diablo 2 felt a little bloated to me - it's so much longer, and I burned out on all the click-click-click way sooner than most people. It felt like slog. But the original Diablo...man. What a game. It feels "perfect" to me, in the same way that Scheme (the programming language) feels "perfect". Tight, hugely playable and replayable, atmospheric, unbelievably compulsively addictive. I maintain an personal list of best games ever; it's unranked, but D1 would be near the top.

kzrdude 3y ago
Diablo 2 is the only one I played deeply, it seems fresher since it has many acts/environments. Even though any single one of them could have boring parts.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  Diablo 1 has a single town, but there is a similar "new environments" part of the gameplay since as you go into the dungeon it changes. So theres the church -> catacombs -> caves -> hell. Though the whole game is maybe just a little longer than Act 1 in Diablo 2 (but its tough to say because its a much slower paced game).
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > Even though any single one of them could have boring parts. The jungle areas in Act 3 were a particularly weak section, IMO.
  - fishtoaster 3y ago
    That's what immediately sprang to mind when wk_end mentioned slogging. I was never a serious player, but played through it a number of times and that was always my least favorite section. So repetitive, and the river maps often included long sections of back-tracking if you got unlucky with the procedural generation.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    Act 3 has a large difficulty spike and is frustrating (especially due to the dolls, etc.), but Kurask is a favorite farming area. Act 4 is boring, though easy to get rewards in due to how open the spaces are.

musha68k 3y ago

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - and that's probably the point? So I agree on many fronts with this article. Diablo could have been so much more but they turned it into a highly engineered form of drug that can potentially destroy you, with little to nothing to gain for it. Nicotine? For sure it's more gambling than gaming - again to me mostly timeless yet inherently toxic coating - down to the systems level. So in a way, it's the original "mobile game", the ultimate computer based life waster. So depending on the person and with the right .mpq file in hand this could either mean getting addicted to or maybe getting off of "cigarettes" completely: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/blob/master/docs/installing.md https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/blob/master/docs/... (Devilution/X is amazing and maybe more interesting than playing the game itself, complete clean-room reverse engineered version of Diablo). Edit disclaimer: local / in-sync multiplayer is (probably?) not as life wasting

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
> the lacking of significant strategic elements Planning for your gear and doing sims / optimizing are strategic elements, though potentially a meta-strategy?
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  That was a thing in Diablo 2 and that's when the IP peaked, this got lost with Diablo 3 and, i believe even more so with Diablo 4.. all the builds are all discovered and in front of you, there is no tinkering with incredible skill interaction possible like we used to do in Diablo 2 It's kinda similar to how Bethesda manages the Elder Scrolls IP, ~ a decade between titles and they casualize(? is it a word)/simplify mechanics that made them popular, they became a shadow of themselves, as a result their titles, while successful, doesn't give the same satisfaction, and I don't think it's due to nostalgia, there are specific design decisions that emphasis with my point, lvl-scaling and simplified damage/defense stats in D4 for example The story and world building are both nailed, hence the commercial success, but the gameplay... what a let down.. exactly like Oblivion -> Skyrim transition I don't think the game would have been a success if "Diablo" wasn't attached to the name, I'm pretty sure it sold less than Diablo 3 Hopefully they evolve the genre/IP with Diablo 5, perhaps focus as a single player game and explore new gameplay mechanics This "game as a service" ruins this IP Hopefully Bethesda don't fall into the same trap and actually move the IP forward, similar to how Fromsoftware evolved their Souls like genre Dark Souls -> Elden Ring, that's what I expect from both Blizzard / Bethesda, they both play too safe and ends up becoming the shadow of their past..

haunter 3y ago

>Poor character-building choices or a general lack of skill can, in other words, always be compensated for with patient grinding. This is why I fell in love with JRPGs. Generally most of them allow endless grinding and for me, and for a lot of people, grinding itself is relaxing and on top of that it's fun being strong. It's fun being a demi-god and just kill every boss in 5 seconds or less. And even better when you can exploit some janky game mechanic to become strong (which nowadays would be patched 1 week later by the devs...)

butlike 3y ago
[dead]

ghastmaster 3y ago

> They knew that multiplayer deathmatches had made DOOM what it was, and they knew that, long after players had finished Warcraft II‘s single-player campaign, it was multiplayer that kept them going there as well, turning the game into a veritable institution This is what kept me playing for so long. I eventually played solo trying to find better loot when bnet dried up. There is now an active community on discord and plenty of people playing devilutionx. If you have a hankering for Diablo 1 community nostalia, I have over 700 links to current and archived Diablo 1 fanpages on my website https://mgpat-gm.github.io https://mgpat-gm.github.io

hirundo 3y ago

This game murdered me. I discovered Diablo a few months after it came out and played obsessively for a few weeks. I had lots of cool stuff. Then one day wandering through a dungeon minding my own business, someone invisible killed me. Boom you're dead. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they resurrected me. Then they killed me again. Then they just went away. I really felt murdered. I read mystery books with murders in them all the time, but the punch never connected like that. Video games really are a uniquely expressive medium. I closed the game and never went back to it.

butlike 3y ago
[dead]

Paul_S 3y ago

Back when Diablo was released it wasn't uniformly praised like it is today. Aside from caricaturised RPG fans' scoffing there was a lot of criticism of its what we call today streamlining and what we used to call dumbing down. Interestingly back then there wasn't yet the research or even the vocabulary of addictive dopamine hit mechanics but there was already a not very well articulated feeling of a hamster wheel experience. But yes, I did play Diablo 1 to completion. With all 3 characters.

1letterunixname 3y ago

I played a lot of Diablo in high school while listening to Alice in Chains. For what it was, it was quality, different, and addictive. Modem and local IPX play with friends was interesting. D2 was a letdown IMO. D3 is pretty good overall but lacks the charm of D1. I haven't tried D4 because it's $$$ and I'll wait until it's sold on sale. During the pandemic, I bought CD copies of Diablo and Diablo: Hellfire because I wanted to patch, nocd, and mod them without intermediary tainting of modern distributions.

1letterunixname 3y ago

The sanctity of this place has been fouled.

mbwgh 3y ago

I got a SSL_NO_CIPHER_OVERLAP for the archive.X links here, which was a first. Since curl worked, I configured Firefox to use NextDNS instead of Cloudflare for DNS over HTTPS, and it worked. So, is Cloudflare blocking archive.ph since today?

duskwuff 3y ago
Other way around -- archive.ph (which operates under a variety of TLDs) has been blocking users who use Cloudflare DNS for quite some time now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

whartung 3y ago

I caused physical damage to my hand with Diablo 1 and all the incessant clicking (vs the "hold to attack and keep attacking" mechanic in D2 and D3). I had some good times in D2, played it pretty deeply until I got to the Physical Immunes. That's when I gave up because I didn't want to have to level up, regear, and respec a new character. I played D3 when it first came out, the Real Money Auction House destroyed that game as it became a game of "gold", not gear. The "world wide" loot table just wrecked it. When you have a 1 in 10M chance of getting the right weapon drop, that's only "1 in 10" across a million players, but it's still 1 in 10M for you. You also had to become knowledgeable about not just your own class and gear, but every other class and gear so your Barbarian doesn't salvage some random Staff that may have been one of those 1 in 10M drops for a Sorcerer, and thus worth a heap of currency. D3 rewards time invested, especially later on. It rewards skill to a point, but in the end, it's determination to grind long enough to get enough gear and to get the right level to clear the content. You watch videos of someone clearing high level content, and it's almost always the same map they're clearing as some maps are outright impossible to succeed on compared to others. When it's all boiled down, it makes the end game pretty moot. That said, I like the dynamic playstyle of D3. An "ok" geared Demon Hunter is a cat on fire through the levels, obliterating everything and everyone, and it's just flat giggly fun. And I liked the story of D3, it was a great story.

rpastuszak 3y ago

I remember playing the first demo as a kid[1] and almost falling off my chair when I accidentally triggered the healing spell (I had no idea that I triggered it). It was scarier than Butcher grunting "aaah fresh meat" from a cold dark room, deep in the dungeon. Then, for reasons not relevant here, to buy the full version of the game I had to drive 60 km to the nearest big city, get it at a shady bazaar, suspiciously only displaying CDROM covers at their stalls, but no disks. The game was so much better due to almost 2 years of anticipation! And then, a few days later the nanny robbed us (= disappeared), and it took my parents more than a day to come back. So we played D1 for 23 hours, changing seats with my brothers, one of us making tea, another one snacks, rotating every 30 minutes. The moral of this story is: Diablo was a wonderful game when it came out, but ffs never leave 3 kids at the age 7-10 alone for more than a few hours. xd [1] Two rednecks playing D1: https://days.sonnet.io/#:~:text=I%20play%20Diablo%20for%20the%20first%20time https://days.sonnet.io/#:~:text=I%20play%20Diablo%20for%20th... (if not on chrome, search for "I play diablo")

Erwin 3y ago

The complex ARPGs have some unlikely competition: rogue-lite bullet-heaven games. The "rougue-lite" gives you short playing sessions where you die, but can still progress for the next game. The "bullet-heaven" turns your character into a source of powerful and explosive attacks, where your actions during the game may be limited to just moving around and selecting upgrade paths. These lo-fi 5 EUR games give a lot of the monster-slaying fun of Path of Exile, Diablo etc. but with less grind -- and extreme variety. Yet the same idea of killing thousands of monsters with visually and mechanically varied attacks remains. Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Bio-Prototype and Halls of Torment are some of the ugly-looking but addictive games which make me question returning to another only slightly different season of Path of Exile.

anthk 3y ago
Isometric != lofi. Some games with 2D isometric setups can have gorgeus graphics.Even libre ones like Flare.

anthk 3y ago

Diablo it's just a real time watered down Moria :). Get the real thing and play Nethack/Slashem. Moria feels repetitive in comparison. If you feel combat oriented instead of thinking out of the box a la NH/SLSM, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

User23 3y ago
Tales of Maj’Eyal does a great job of streamlining the roguelike gameplay loop without dumbing it down. And it’s GPL licensed! Amusingly it has some pay to hoard mechanics if you play with the official servers. I’ve thrown about a hundred euros to the author that way because I like the idea of supporting free software game dev and it’s just a fun game.
- anthk 3y ago
  wait, TOME4 it's GPL, but tome-sx and friends, not :|. It's a pity, because the older TOME games were Moria like but at least they put some overworld gameplay with several kinds of towns to make it more fun. On NH/SLEM, you have towns, but inside the "dungeon".

ralmidani 3y ago

I agree with the drug analogies. I bought Diablo in 1996, I stayed up about 40 hours playing it. To the point that I started to literally hallucinate and click on things that weren’t actually there. I downloaded the relatively new iOS Diablo game a few months ago and sank tens of hours into the game before waking up and putting an end to the madness. I’m morally opposed to “pay to win” games and wasn’t tempted to buy anything, so fortunately I escaped without financial damage (but the time I put into the grind can’t be replaced). Granted, there are people who are more susceptible to addiction, and I appear to be one of them (thankfully, I was raised in an observant Muslim family). But that doesn’t absolve Blizzard of responsibility for what they’ve unleashed.

cwkoss 3y ago
typo? do you mean "pay to win"?
- ralmidani 3y ago
  Thanks! Fixed.

holografix 3y ago

The only way to play Diablo is on hardcore mode and multiplayer. Suddenly you are walking dungeons slowly, waiting for cooldowns to refresh in a corner, planning what area spells to combo with your party, exchanging items that were dropped. I don’t know if HC players get rewarded in any way, with special dungeons or items but they should. It forces you to appreciate and think about the game much more. Otherwise it’s just mindless click frenzy.

evo_9 3y ago

I still think Baldur’s Gate:Dark Alliance is the best of those old dungeon crawlers, way more replayable.

senectus1 3y ago

ahh man that audio track in the middle of the article really kicked off some nostalgia for me.