Legendary Roll Roll Reliels: Diablo - Die Processing Hack & Slay

Who persecutes our article series about legendary role play series diligently, who already knows: In the mid-1990s, it did not look perfect for PC players with a fat for RPGs. The old series of Ultimo to Wizardry hounds with technical progress, and potentially new hits like The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) were rare and controversial among the players.

At the same time, Japanese role plays made their breakthrough in the US and Europe, not the least thanks to the first PlayStation. Suddenly titles such as suicides (1995), Final Fantasy 7 (1997) or Throne Cross (1999) The domestic living room because they put more emphasis on stories, characters and emotions compared to computer role games.

Blizzard Entertainment in turn was a small fish under the players, who had to earn his spores first. Under the Label Silicon & Synapse, the company started with adaptations such as Battle Chess II for the Amiga (1991) or RPM Racing (1992) for the Super Nintendo (implementation of Racing Destruction Set). Then followed with the racing Rock & Roll Racing as well as the puzzle platform The Lost Vikings (both published in 1993) two perfect in-house developments.

The Americans first gained the Americans with the double strike Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) — two real-time strategy games in the fantasy robe that loosely held with the Genre-Giant Command & Conquer (1995). With a reason for the great popularity of Diablo, the great artworks, which also look like the official cover picture of Diablo 2: Resurrected like a small artwork. Source: Blizzard Activision

by Condor to Blizzard North

And then there was still Diablo. Inseparably associated with the history of the classic is the US developer David Break, who founded the studio Condor in 1993 with the brothers Max and Erich Schaefer. In the mid-90s, Blizzard and Condor got to know each other thanks to a lucky maternity closely related to a superhero game called Justice League: Task Force: Blizzard was responsible together with Sun soft for the Super Nintendo version, which turned out to be pretty lousy job work. Condor had the implementation for the Sega Mega Drive delivered, which was different in some respects, but not much better than the Blizzard variant. Thanks to Justice League: Task Force came to know the developer — a real stroke of luck! Because David Break grabbed the concept for Diablo at a meeting that he had been in the drawer for some time.

And behold: the interest of Blizzards responsible for a gloomy roleplaying game was awakened quickly. They offered Condor to act as Publisher for Diablo and market the game. This resulted in a fruitful cooperation that ultimately resulted in the emergence of Blizzard North: Just before the official release of Diablo on 3 January 1997, Blizzard Entertainment took over the colleagues of Condor and founded the North branch in Redwood City, California.

Diablo: Once through the hell and back

But now to the recipe for success from Diablo: What made the game Anna in 1997 so special that millions of players fell? Team leader David Break rummaged for Diablo with Rogue (1980) one of the oldest roleplaying concepts at all from the moth box to modernize it. Exactly speaking, the offshoot of Telegram (1982) inspired him to shake players by randomly-generated dungeons and fighting against hundreds of uncanny and monstrous creatures.

Blizzard trusted at Diablo Consequently on a procedural level design, in which the computer arranged a handful of prefabricated spaces differently in each pass. The advantages and disadvantages were then the same as today: On the one hand, the total of 16 floors, divided into four areas with similar opponents and environments, felt interchangeable. On the other hand, the constantly new construction of the areas ensured a lot of variety. The hunter in the first Diablo felt most well when she could dance her opponents from the distance with arrow and bow. Source: Blizzard Activision / Gameness Break, however, had another concern in the heart: He wanted to make the genre accessible. In fact, role plays were known to date for their bulky control or long training time until their stories properly ride. Diablo, on the other hand, should take a fun with the first click and still fetter the player to the screen for a long time.

The first requirement satisfied Diablo with Barbour: After choosing one of the three classes — warriors, hunter or wizard — it was right on the adventure. The only city called Tristan, located in the fantasy world SANKTUUUERIO, seemed aware of the roleplaying competition, consciously and gloomy, and it only consisted of a few houses and residents.

But after a few dialogues and short footpath, the catacombs were entered below the Cathedral Tristan — and was in the middle of the merry monster crossing!

The point-and-click mechanics was so simple and the fighting happening so fast that Diablo strongly stretched his genre borders and invented a new form of action role playing. Therefore, not everyone agreed at that time whether Diablo is actually a roleplaying game and not more an action game with some RPG elements.

Action game with RPG mechanics or real role-play? Looking back, Diablo was a historic step for video games. Source: PC Games

Today we know that Blizzard was simply ahead of his time. One could call the game even in the broadest sense as a starting signal of a new generation of Rogue likes, after all, thanks to the procedural dungeons, it fulfilled one of the most important genre criteria. And would it have gone purely to Break, then Diablo would have had — as in the rocket — lap-based battles and from house from Permanent on board! Only Blizzard had convinced Break to try it with a real-time model. Luckily, you have to say, the simple struggles also invited non-role players to faded hack & slay orgies, which were highlighted by crunchy boss fights to the final battle against the Hellenfürsten Diablo highest personally.

Another, significant playing stimulus was the steady preservation of new weapons and armor of a wide variety of style, which Diablo sparked the mighty addiction to Loot. Again, it was especially important for Break that the player should have success experiences as early as possible.

The last and perhaps the most important aspect of Diablo: the ambitious multiplayer mode, which allowed games for up to four people. For this, Blizzard founded his to date today's online platform Battle.net, which the adventurers were free to exchange free and meeting a joint meeting. However, there were no manufacturer servers in the Battle.net early days. Instead, the calculator had to serve a player while the others learn almost with him.

from the unloved add-on to the grandiose Sequel Diablo 2

Also in 1997, with Hellfire, an add-on came to the market, but discreet displease up. First, it was created under Protest of Developer Blizzard, because Publisher Sierra On-Line had put the order work in another team called Synergistic Software. It came out a quantitatively solid extension with fresh finish types, which was missing the fine-tuning of the original. In addition, the new monk character class could hardly score over the lack of multiplayer mode, which was later, later by patch. After all, in Hellfire, it was now possible to race in the city — compared to the normal Diablo quite a comfort advantage, you often had to return to Tristan to visit dealers and NPCs. The add-on light fire certainly did not belong to the best extensions in the Diablo history, but in the first line with the monk, but at least a fourth grade introduced. Source: Blizzard Activision / Gameness 1998 Created Publisher Electronic Arts PlayStation owner with the implementation of Diablo developed and surprisingly sophisticated by Climax. After that, the fans had to wait something until the millennium with Diablo 2 satisfied the official continuation. For this Blizzard was not only responsible as a developer, but also as a publisher. The makers took the groundwork of the predecessor and sent the player again to the Kingdom of Honduras in the west of Sanctuary, where there were a lot of randomly-generated dungeons. A typical fighting situation in Diablo 2: While the player beats with this skeleton, his colleagues lurked in the background to heart around him. Source: Blizzard Activision / Gameness As in its predecessor, the player was overrun by demonic creatures and confronted with all sorts of collection objects. However, the classification of armor parts was much more diverse in the second Diablo, some weapons or breastplates now carried, for example, the term RAR or unique.

Blizzard shared the story in four files this time and left out of the stereotypical caves, among other things, explore a desert and a jungle. The number of Classes rose to five and, among other things, housed the innovative deadlocked who could transform fallen opponents to allies such as skeletons or golems. Each class had its own skill tree, with which one could design its character individually. For example, you should decide early to specialize his Amazon on the melee with spears or on arrow and bow. The system later found himself in the form of the talent trees, as they existed to the World-of-Warcraft extension Cataclysm. So here every character class also had three different skill trees. And the experience address bar now at any time visible in Diablo 2 has inspired the WoW makers later to implement them in their success MMO.