Diablo - 20 years later

[ERYFKRAD]

Well D1 nailed isometric gloomy atmosphere real damn good.
And it wasn't a crazy item hunt.
Good times.

 

[Jed]

Played it back in '97 on a roommate's computer. I wouldn't even own a computer for 3 more years, heh. Used to go to the public library to check my email on Lynx.

I played as the lady with the bow. I loved finding chokepoints & piling up corpses. Played through about 9 or 10 levels, and eventually got bored. Seemed like a waste of time. I was more interested in going to shows & trying to get laid as often as possible.

Picked up Planescape in '99 or '00 and that's what did me in. Next were BG2 & Fallout. Then Arcanum. My life's been wasted ever since.

 

[Eirinjas]

Diablo 1 was alot of fun and hit all the right notes aesthetically. Diablo 2 was basically a convoluted gambling simulator that was also 10x the click-fest the first game was - I hated it. Diablo 3 lost me the moment I saw that they changed the art style.

 

[mixer]

I always liked D1, it was first game i ever played online (just a bit, phone bills were a thing). Spent countless hours farming Diablo with Sorc., even found an Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac in a barrel. funtimes.

D2 never really clicked for me that way, maybe since i was older. Atmosphere was worse and whole thing felt like a huge grind.

 

[Daedalos]

Diablo 3 is still the best one yet.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Playing Diablo over battle.net with your friends was the best shit ever. Then Diablo 2 came and made the gameplay good and oh my. Atmosphere was mostly lost, unfortunately. I still like to play both every now and then.

 

[prodigydancer]

Anyone who badmouths Diablo or Diablo 2 deserves to be tarred, feathered and set on fire.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Joined: Feb 16, 2015

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

The first thing that comes in mind when I think about D1 was the outstanding music and the fear if dying at every corner. D2 had good music also and loved the story and cinematics. D3 music is uninteresting and I often mute it, the story and cinematic in D3 are also shallow at best. D3 has the best content after the story ends tho.

Trimis de pe al meu Galaxy Nexus folosind Tapatalk

 

[Snorkack]

The dense and gloomy atmosphere of D1 still is almost uncontested in rpgs. The soundtrack and sound fx is superb. I still get the shivers when the drumrolls of the menu music begin or someone says 'the sanctity of this place has been fowled'. I still practise the tristram music on guitar, which is one of my favourite guitar tunes of all time. Gameplay was slick and not bloated at all.
Diablo 2 sucked for me because no atmosphere was to be found when fighting 'cold drool the cold' and gameplay started to primarily focus on getting more epic loot.

I still play D1 every now and then with the fantastic Beelzebub mod.

 

[mixer]

I still play D1 every now and then with the fantastic Beelzebub mod.

Great, why did you have to bring this up? There goes the weekend...

 

[Bloodwyn]

The problem with both games (don't know what Diablo 3 is) is once I have completed
them there is no reason to play them ever again.
It get's boring after completing it once.
Also Multiplayer couldn't help it for me.

 

[Aothan]

it is like a few games of that 2000ish era, the concepts and the ambience (artistry rather technological quality) gave the impression games were only going to get better and better, twenty years later there has been a dismaying and difficult to fully understand stagnation

Diablo is still an impressively ambient game, one has to wonder why the industry is so willfully ensuring persons are no longer cognitvely engaging players except by way of mechanics and technological sophistication

 

[Lord Azlan]

What the crap is Diablo anyway? I missed all that first time around, second time around and who knows what is coming.

First I heard about it was in a PC Zone or PC Gamer review for Titan Quest and the moron kept comparing the game to "Diablo".

In the end I found Titan Quest on sale somewhere and picked it up for a fiver and it became one of my favourite games - ever.

I don't know if Diablo was the first of its type but the legacy has certainly impacted on my gaming, with Titan Quest, Torchlight some of my most played games.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

What the crap is Diablo anyway? I missed all that first time around, second time around and who knows what is coming.

First I heard about it was in a PC Zone or PC Gamer review for Titan Quest and the moron kept comparing the game to "Diablo".

In the end I found Titan Quest on sale somewhere and picked it up for a fiver and it became one of my favourite games - ever.

I don't know if Diablo was the first of its type but the legacy has certainly impacted on my gaming, with Titan Quest, Torchlight some of my most played games.

Just find it and play it men

 

[skyst]

Diablo released a few weeks before my 12th birthday and my father brought me to an electronics store, Comp USA at the time, I believe, to make the purchase. He is a flawed man, but thankfully negligent of computer game ratings along with mostly everything else. Big-demon-face box in hand, I was quickly dropped off at my aunt and uncle's place for a few hours. I installed Diablo onto their desktop, my 8 year old cousin beside me (who would go on to become obsessively addicted to Diablo 2 in a few years, you're welcome), and we spent the next handful of hours taking turns sending a brave fighting man against legions of terrifying hell spawn and undead.

In retrospect, Diablo may have done more harm to the CRPG genre than good, though Blizzard's work with Diablo and Warcraft (with FF7 right around the corner) made fantasy gaming a highly profitable business and definitely brought it into the mainstream. Hard to say what would have happened if not for Diablo and I don't really care. For such a simple game, at 12 years old it was one hell of a good time.

 

[DeepOcean]

Diablo 1 is a hell of a slick game, the moody music, Tristam theme, the black menus with spinning pentagrams on fire, simple premise of entering the Cathedral. Diablo 1 was one of the old games where you are absorbed since you enter the main menu and everything is designed to give you an experience. Funny that today's overbudget and bloated games can't offer the same thing.

 

[octavius]

That reminds me...a woman at work once asked me if I had any games her son (about 10) could borrow. So I lent her Diablo and he got so hooked she eventually had to hide the game from him.

 

[prodigydancer]

In retrospect, Diablo may have done more harm to the CRPG genre than good

Why would Diablo (or any ARPG for that matter) do any harm to the CRPG genre? It's like saying that MOBA games harmed RTS games.

Some people believe that if ARPGs never happened true CRPGs would hold their market share now - an unfounded sentiment. Even when there's a connection different genres are different and they don't always appeal to the same audience. True CRPGs with their C&C, complex character systems and dialogue-heavy gameplay will never be as popular as action games. Even Fallout was just a cult/niche thing until Bethesda dumbed it down.

 

[Fowyr]

Why would Diablo (or any ARPG for that matter) do any harm to the CRPG genre?

Because we got hordes of bleating morons who thought that CRPGs = DIablo as result. Many developers were happy to oblige them.

Diablo was basically graphical roguelike with terrible clicky-clicky combat. Fun for a walkthrough or two, but ultimately hardly an PRG. Four stats, arcade-style real time combat and no complex levels. Summoning >> Diablo.

P.S. I saw Diablo in 97 or 98 and thought that it's pretty amusing.

 

[prodigydancer]

Because we got hordes of bleating morons who thought that CRPGs = DIablo as result. Many developers were happy to oblige them.

You're a perfect illustration to my post. You think that if Blizzard didn't make Diablo, developers would - for some unfathomable reason - rush to make true CRPGs. That's spurious logic. By mid-1990s it was already well-known throughout the industry that CRPGs were time consuming to develop and not very profitable (when profitable at all). 3D had opened the door for easy-to-digest action games and that's where the money were (and still are).

 

[Telengard]

Ya missed the point. The point isn't - if Diablo wasn't there, there would still be real crpgs. (There wouldn't.) The point is -if Diablo wasn't there, we wouldn't have to listen to the sheep bleat about the great crpgs of Mass Effect 2 and HALO, because the name of 'rpg' wouldn't have devolved so much.

Think of the peace.

 

[skyst]

In retrospect, Diablo may have done more harm to the CRPG genre than good

Why would Diablo (or any ARPG for that matter) do any harm to the CRPG genre? It's like saying that MOBA games harmed RTS games.

Some people believe that if ARPGs never happened true CRPGs would hold their market share now - an unfounded sentiment. Even when there's a connection different genres are different and they don't always appeal to the same audience. True CRPGs with their C&C, complex character systems and dialogue-heavy gameplay will never be as popular as action games. Even Fallout was just a cult/niche thing until Bethesda dumbed it down.

Whenever something becomes immensely popular, the culture reacts to it and changes. It happens in gaming, music, film, auto industry, practically everything. Diablo was one of the top selling PC games of the 90s when CRPGs were not exactly selling well. Look at all of the Diablo clones that followed. Would they have been proper turn based RPGs in a world without Diablo? Who knows. Personally, I think the FPS/RTS and early 3D dominance of the 90s contributed more to the downfall of CRPGs than Diablo did.

 

[octavius]

Ya missed the point. The point isn't - if Diablo wasn't there, there would still be real crpgs. (There wouldn't.) The point is -if Diablo wasn't there, we wouldn't have to listen to the sheep bleat about the great crpgs of Mass Effect 2 and HALO, because the name of 'rpg' wouldn't have devolved so much.
.

So Diablo diluted the name or concept of CRPGs? Yeah, I can agree with that.
But Diablo didn't ruin the genre, after all the top 5 Codex games (Fallout 1-2, Arcanum, PST, BG2) were all released after Diablo.

 

[prodigydancer]

Look at all of the Diablo clones that followed. Would they have been proper turn based RPGs in a world without Diablo?

No. Developers en masse follow the money. AAA studios definitely follow the money because they have costs to cover and publishers to satisfy.

Personally, I think the FPS/RTS and early 3D dominance of the 90s contributed more to the downfall of CRPGs than Diablo did.

FPS and RTS of that era were pretty hardcore compared to what we see now but still their systems and gameplay were less sophisticated than those of hardcore CRPGs. As for the downfall of the latter - it happened naturally. And before you blame any specific genre (be it ARPG, FPS or RTS), think about what happened to the market as a whole. 3D, higher resolution displays and more advanced sound cards caused production value potential to explode and so AAA studios were born. Games, and especially PC games, quickly turned from a unremarkable hobby for nerds into a relatively big market. CRPGs in the 80s were made by small studios or even individual enthusiasts on pitiful budgets. In the 90s those who couldn't adapt to the new reality slowly faded into obscurity and went bankrupt.