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January 2, 2017 4:23 PM   Subscribe

Blizzard Celebrates 20 Years of Diablo [Battlenet] “Blizzard Entertainment is thrilled to commemorate twenty years of Diablo [wiki]. We’re ready to celebrate our passion for the world of Sanctuary and the brave heroes who inhabit it! Starting soon, you can experience special in-game events and goodies in Diablo III, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft to celebrate a few of the things we love about Diablo. These events and items will only be available for a limited time, so be sure to check them all out before they’re gone. A small taste of each tribute is below—keep an eye out for more details about these celebrations. . . and thank you, all of you, for allowing us to continue adventuring in the world of Sanctuary. Here’s to twenty years of loot!”

- 20 Years After Diablo, Every Game Is Diablo [A.V. Club]
“While its individual parts were not unique or exciting, it was the confluence of those underpinnings that turned out to be revolutionary. The randomness, the slight sheen of RPG conventions, the slow drip of desirable goodies among a constant deluge of junk, the instant gratification of its effortlessly repeatable action—when combined into one, it formed a new method for hooking players and keeping them playing. Over the last two decades, that has proven to be one of the most shrewd and influential game design innovations, working its way, in one capacity or another, into nearly every big-budget game that hits shelves.”
- Diablo 20th Anniversary Retrospective [YouTube] [Destructoid]
“The developers discuss how Diablo came to be and reveal some interesting tidbits about its development. For example, Diablo was originally conceived as a turn-based RPG with claymation characters. There's also talk about some of the rumors that swirled around the game and its sequel, including the Chat Gem and the infamous Cow Level. Diablo changed a lot of people's perceptions about what a computer game could be, and although the original doesn't hold up all that well anymore, it was easily one of the most iconic games of the late 90's. Happy birthday, Diablo. And Happy New Year.”
posted by Fizz (52 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
I feel about as old as Deckard Cain....20 Years....when the fuck did that happen!?
posted by Fizz at 4:28 PM on January 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


This was just below this post in my RSS reader:

Couple Meets Online Playing Diablo, Gets Married

Diablo bless us, every one!
posted by ejs at 4:46 PM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Click, click, click, click, click, cluck, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, cluck, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, cluck, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

: )
posted by Beholder at 4:51 PM on January 2, 2017 [16 favorites]


Moo MooMoo Moo. Mooooooo.

(loved the cow level.)
posted by martin q blank at 4:54 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I love playing Diablo 3 with my friends and recasting Decard Cain as Decard Bain.

"Demon Hunter, you think the shadows are your ally, but Dee-ablo was born in it."

I think it was a PvP comic that came up with the idea.
posted by Groundhog Week at 5:01 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


When Diablo came out my friends all were playing it and I didn't because it seemed like too much clicking. I was quickly swept up in other games and didn't mind, but in retrospect I do regret never having given it a chance.
posted by lazaruslong at 5:26 PM on January 2, 2017


This is making me look forward to this week's Tavern Brawl in Hearthstone, which I can rarely honestly say, so that's something!
posted by lazaruslong at 5:27 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Poor guy... "Yeah yeah, shaddap and identify my stuff." Nobody ever stayed a while and listened.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 5:38 PM on January 2, 2017 [12 favorites]


Ah...Fresh meat!
posted by nubs at 5:42 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Ah God, I need to do this. My husband told me about this a couple days ago, and I just haven't gotten around to starting it back up again yet.
posted by limeonaire at 6:20 PM on January 2, 2017


I just made diablo death barf sounds to my wife. She said it reminded her of comps from her PhD. I played while she studied. We have been a couple for 22 years now.
posted by srboisvert at 7:05 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I remember logging into Battle Net for the first time when Diablo came out. I died and someone stole all of my loot and equipment. I was pissed off for days and refused to wade into online play again for many years after.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:15 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


For what it's worth, even though it's a different genre, the Borderlands series is a really good spiritual successor to Diablo, especially the sequel which added the ability to swap gear between characters.
posted by Beholder at 7:24 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Two things that would have made me excited as an anniversary gift:

1. An ability to play Diablo 2 in a way that is resolution friendly on current monitors, and also reliably plays all of the cut scenes. You can play it in a window (more or less), but I would like a scalable option, like mods that exist for the original Starcraft. Native resolution in a window is too small, stretched full screen is too wonky, but scalable to, say, double the size works pretty well.

2. An ability to play Diablo 1 natively at all on current machines, and which has the scaling abilities noted in #1. There are reported ways of getting D1 working on a current machine, but it's not easy. I've quit trying to make it work, and I have the motivation to get it done. I have very fond memories of playing this game, and I'm flummoxed that there is no reliable way to play it anymore.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:47 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


I did some voices for the Hellfire expansion. The mystic chanting gibberish at the beginning? Me, obvs slowed down. The squeaky sounds of dying bats? Me. (not the cow guy though I did meet him.) I only mention this so that if 2017 claims me, someone knows.
posted by The otter lady at 9:12 PM on January 2, 2017 [52 favorites]


I do miss the old Loot and PK days. I still login and play often. Diablo 3 has (IMHO) the best artwork of any RPG. Just hit the Z key to zoom in; slow down and watch the art and backgrounds and animations. Looking forward to this retro-flashback...tomorrow-now!
posted by CrowGoat at 9:35 PM on January 2, 2017


2. An ability to play Diablo 1 natively at all on current machines, and which has the scaling abilities noted in #1. There are reported ways of getting D1 working on a current machine, but it's not easy. I've quit trying to make it work, and I have the motivation to get it done. I have very fond memories of playing this game, and I'm flummoxed that there is no reliable way to play it anymore.

It took me the better part of two nights to get it up and running with a hacked exe and fiddling with compatibility modes, but its definitely do-able on Windows 7. Really don't want to try on 8 or 10.
posted by pan at 9:36 PM on January 2, 2017


Titan Quest was my favorite diablo for a long time, but now my favorite diablo is Marvel Heroes.
posted by straight at 2:30 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Echoing what SpacemanStix said, I wish Blizzard would give GoG the go ahead to make Diablo I and II playable on modern systems and go up for sale. They are the most requested title by the community (by some 2000 votes ahead of MechWarrior/Commander and 20000 over the third, Command and Conquer).
Sure, it wouldn't be a money-printing machine like their new releases, but it would breach the sales top 10 easily.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:54 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Interesting tidbit is that Diablo's first three levels were included in a PC Gamer demo disc, which is how I found out about it. I hadn't heard anything about the game, loaded the demo up, and 45 minutes later was shrieking as The Butcher chased me around the dungeon. I really miss those days when a game or movie could sneak up on you.
posted by Beholder at 3:45 AM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


>make Diablo I and II playable on modern systems

I'm just going to mention Path of Exile, a free to play D2-clone with very good production value. For sure scratches that same clicky loot farm itch.
posted by anti social order at 3:58 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also check out Grim Dawn, another excellent modern Diablo clone that will eat your life.
posted by MrVisible at 4:13 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


the slow drip of desirable goodies among a constant deluge of junk

This. So much of the "replayability" of the game, and so many others, is about hitting that lever in the Skinner box. One of the things about the Mass Effect franchise that I love is that they moved away from that mechanic, which was implemented in the first game and dropped in the second.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:04 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm just going to mention Path of Exile

I agree, this is fantastic. It feels more like a spiritual successor to D1 than the direction they actually went.

and 45 minutes later was shrieking as The Butcher chased me around the dungeon.

What gets me is that D3 makes good use of The Butcher in one of its earlier Boss fights. People who have a history of playing D1 "back in the day" are the ones who really appreciate what this is all about, as you can't go back and reliably play that part in the first game any more. I'm guessing there are a whole lot of people who are new to D3 that don't have a real understanding of how freaky that was in the first game, or perhaps even that the connection exists.
posted by SpacemanStix at 5:52 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


What gets me is that D3 makes good use of The Butcher in one of its earlier Boss fights.

At the same time that fight really demonstrates the massive distance between 1 and 3, in that the fight in 3 was literally a WWE cage match while the fight in 1 was an insane fighting retreat across the level if you didn't know what was coming.
posted by pan at 6:26 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Two things about Diablo make it special for me. The first thing I ever published on the internet was a review of the game, and that was the first step in the long process leading to my writing RPG books and self-publishing. So thanks to it for that.

The second thing was playing it so much over the course of a long weekend that by Monday I was having to use the mouse with my left hand as my right wrist was two painful after two straight days of clickclickclickclickclick. I get obsessive about games, but that was the first time that ever happened to me. Good times!
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:40 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


When I was newly married, I got my hands on Diablo II. At that point, the best thing about Diablo I was that the game disc came with both PC and Mac versions, so I could install D1 on my wife's machine and she didn't feel like a gamer widow.

I got to listen to her freak out about the Butcher for the first time while she heard me curse out whatever that bug thing was that ended Act II.
posted by nubs at 7:15 AM on January 3, 2017


(loved the cow level.)

There is no cow level
posted by ersatz at 7:34 AM on January 3, 2017 [7 favorites]


First CD-ROM I ever burned was a copy of Diablo! Blizzard made more than their money back on my WoW subscription though, I think.
posted by davros42 at 9:36 AM on January 3, 2017


Griswold's "well! what can I do for you?!" is even more burned into my head than Cain's "stay awhile."

I insist that it was one of Diablo 2's most tragic missed opportunities that when you return to Tristram in it and meet him again in updated form, he didn't have a reverb-and-distorted version of it as his battlecry.
posted by Drastic at 11:04 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


One of the things about the Mass Effect franchise that I love is that they moved away from that mechanic, which was implemented in the first game and dropped in the second.

So... much... Omni-gel
posted by ejs at 12:51 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


My favorite D2 story was my Druid and my little brother's Bowazon taking on Andariel.

The entire battle consisted of my Druid running frantically in a circle around the room just in front of Andariel's poison breath while my little brother plinked away. Still surprised that worked.
posted by Samizdata at 1:31 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Running in a circle with some kind of DoT attack while someone else attacked from a distance was always a good strategy.
posted by minsies at 3:31 PM on January 3, 2017


On the subject of boss strategies: the first time I played through D2, my Paladin kept getting demolished by Duriel. I eventually decided to just put on Thorns and let myself get killed over and over again. It worked! If you can really call it that. Later I got into playing hardcore (thus beginning of my love of games with permadeath) and I had to come up with better approaches.

Never played D1, though, and although I enjoyed D3 well enough it never grabbed me quite the same way. I think I missed the character-construction, which was always my favorite part of D2.
posted by egregious theorem at 3:38 PM on January 3, 2017


So, what I remember about the first Diablo is that it was remarkably susceptible to hacking. It had the effect of simultaneously ruining the online component of the game, and making it something really special. Hacked spells that automatically killed players gave way to hacked protection scrolls that subverted the scripting used to make the auto-kill spells work. And then the hackers got really creative.

A friend of mine made a battle axe that shot flaming arrows when he swung it. I remember armor that concealed artificially inflated hit point totals behind a shield charged by Mana. Lethal resurrection spells, spammed to hold a player suspended both alive and dead in a strobing pillar of light. Madness. I heard rumors there was a way of forcing Hardcore mode onto standard characters, making it possible to actually delete another player's character from the game, but I never saw it myself. Maybe it was just a legend.

It was the wild west in there. An arms race played out in hex editors, and illustrated with gothic knights and demons. Anyone online not participating in the hacking communities thought the game was unplayably broken. I remember innocent players closing their Town Portals and hiding in the catacombs deep beneath Tristram when a stranger joined an open server, not knowing if they were dealing with a regular player, or someone who could crack the game open and swallow their character whole. Given the choice, they took their chances alone in the dark with the monsters.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 5:03 PM on January 3, 2017 [6 favorites]


There are only two things I know about Diablo.

1. My roomie in college preferred playing it to reading Bleak House.

2. It's sampled in the theme to cortex's horror film podcast.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:50 PM on January 3, 2017


The entire battle consisted of my Druid running frantically in a circle around the room just in front of Andariel's poison breath while my little brother plinked away. Still surprised that worked.

My favorite variation on that was the boss fight with Duriel. Tough fight, since you were in a very small space with an enormous maggot with huge scythe arms. But the easiest class to fight Duriel was the sorceress, which you'd think would be at a serious disadvantage being your typical glass cannon, because she could turn on Blaze and run in that little circle, with Duriel close behind... always in the fire that Blaze left in the sorc's wake. Easy-peasy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:21 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Diablo was originally conceived as a turn-based RPG ... although the original doesn't hold up all that well anymore, it was easily one of the most iconic games of the late 90's.

That's very much a matter of taste. Having started life as a turn-based game, Diablo was much more about carefully creeping through a dungeon and using doorways, corners, and corridors to try to keep from getting overwhelmed by mobs or stomped by bosses. Diablo 3 is much more of an action game where you jump into a room and blow everything up. Some people still prefer the original game.
posted by straight at 9:38 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


minsies: "Running in a circle with some kind of DoT attack while someone else attacked from a distance was always a good strategy."

As always, I was tragically beyond my depth, so I didn't really have a good DoT attack. OTOH, had there been a cow level, Bone Spear's railgun-like effect coupled with a lot of backpedalling and a few golems would have worked really well.
posted by Samizdata at 12:53 PM on January 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Gonna have to crack Diablo III open again. The wife and I have beaten the corpse of Diablo III into a bloody pulp and sipped our smoothies over the remains of Torment XIII on all character classes.

Still, it's something new in what we think is the best co-op dungeon crawler that has ever been made, so we'll play it and we'll probably play it multiple times.
posted by Revvy at 1:01 PM on January 4, 2017


I saw someone mention Path of Exile. I have hated that game intensely since they wiped my skill trees during a patch. No, I don't want to redo an hundred point route around a thousand point skill graph for three characters, thank you very much.

I regret the minimal purchases I did make. And the netcode! Don't get me started on that.
posted by quillbreaker at 10:40 PM on January 4, 2017


I did the Darkening of Tristram event last night. Wasn't bad! The levels aren't that big, but the real shame is that the level layouts are entirely Diablo 3 layouts- the levels felt nothing like Diablo 1. That said watching the D3 heroes walk stiffly around is a hoot, and there's a special surprise when you kill Diablo.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:14 AM on January 5, 2017


The Heathstone tavern brawl is kind of a bust. The sound effects and visuals were kinda cool, but the actual mechanic is sort of just shot in the dark easter egg finding thing. I'll watch Kripp play it instead of doing it myself.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:26 AM on January 5, 2017


Re: Path of Exile - They did recently completely revamp the netcode, so it's much better now (I know how it used to be)

As far as the skill-tree wipe, I believe they do this when they update the tree sufficiently that the old routes would make no sense. I've found it's most-fun to play in the leagues, where they have new mechanics they're testing and it lasts a couple few months before resetting.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:29 AM on January 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


Maybe I'll give it another try, but it is devastating to a casual player when you want to play for an hour and all of your characters are unplayable and you lack the knowledge to make them playable.

As Ralph Koster (sp) put it on mud-dev, it's an opportunity for exit. What casual player is going to put in time rebuilding characters when they can have fun right away in another game?
posted by quillbreaker at 3:02 PM on January 5, 2017


I remember that after binging on D2, I would walk about outside in, like, nature? and see large rocks and have a compelling need to flip them over to find whatever was underneath.
Also, Twistram township in the Goat MMO Simulator is hilarious.
posted by Capybara at 7:16 PM on January 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


quillbreaker: "Maybe I'll give it another try, but it is devastating to a casual player when you want to play for an hour and all of your characters are unplayable and you lack the knowledge to make them playable.

As Ralph Koster (sp) put it on mud-dev, it's an opportunity for exit. What casual player is going to put in time rebuilding characters when they can have fun right away in another game?
"

Plus, unfortunately, I never seem to remember the skill choices I had previously and my character never seems to work as well as they once did.
posted by Samizdata at 9:23 AM on January 6, 2017


Titan Quest was my favorite diablo for a long time

Speaking of, Grim Dawn - which has been mentioned up thread - was developed by some of the same people who developed Titan Quest. I'm enjoying GD; it's scratching my ARPG itch in a way that Path of Exile just hasn't.
posted by nubs at 9:26 AM on January 6, 2017


Since nobody's mentioned it yet, I'll just remind everyone that Torchlight and Torchlight 2 are Diablo-like games made by most of the same team that made Diablo and Diablo 2. It took me embarrassingly long to discover those games, but they're awesome.
posted by suetanvil at 6:40 PM on January 8, 2017


Yes! Torchlight is great. One of the best things about Torchlight is having the little companion that follows and picks up all the loot for you - no clicking on all the little gold pieces and stuff.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:29 AM on January 9, 2017


The best thing about the pet in Torchlight is that it TAKES YOUR EXCESS STUFF TO THE SURFACE AND SELLS IT, which is amazing. Well, assuming you trust your pet...
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:29 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yes! I totally forgot that the pet will sell it too. Man, I need to play Torchlight again. It's been too long.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:32 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


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