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Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

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Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#71

Post by jayd16 »

kosei wrote: post #15

It was a different time: “Condor plans to spend one year in the development of Diablo. Personnel will consist of: one designer, one chief programmer, 2 junior programmer, 2 art director/artists, 1 illustrator/sculptor, 3 pixel artists, and 1 sound FX person” So, 11 people for a year for Diablo. Meanwhile Diablo 4 took 300+ people 6+ years. So over 150x the cost, not accounting for the fact that game developers are pa…

AAAs are paying for consistency. The marketing budget is fixed. This makes the goal something that's certainly good enough and hopefully great.

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#72

Post by fermentation »

mikepurvis wrote: post #33
hourago wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results are also vastly different as the expectations, the number of platforms to support, the quality of the cut-scenes, ... and the revenue. But there are still indie games developed with such small teams. So, that is still a viable possibility.

And there's a massive trickle-down in terms of what very small teams are able to accomplish now by leveraging modern tools, engines, and art pipelines. It astonishes me to this day that Hollow Knight was basically developed by three people, including all the writing, art, design, and programming— there's definitely more content in that game than what passed for triple-A in the PSX era, maybe even PS2.

The downside of this is of course that there are so many high quality games to compete with now

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#73

Post by nemo44x »

logicchains wrote: post #65
eek2121 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I have to say this: Diablo was more fun. Diablo 2 is pretty great. My only complaints about it surround harder difficulties. Those of us with accessibility issues (like me with a gimped hand) found hell to be super challenging. Diablo 3 sucked when it launched, however, right now, it is absolutely amazing. Blizzard has absolute gold with the tiered difficulty/rift/season design. Unsure why they didn't improve upo…

Diablo 4 has no sense of progression because enemies level up as you do. In fact they increase in power faster than you, under the assumption you'll be itemising optimally, so if you level up but don't update your items fast enough, you'll find that mobs actually get harder and harder to defeat as you increase in level.

That’s what great I think. Levels give you skill and paragon points which eventually makes you stronger so you can go to higher tiers where better gear drops. They give you many ways to customize your gear (affix modifications, aspects, gems) with your build and paragon board. That’s what it’s all about.

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#74

Post by bee_rider »

bpicolo wrote: post #36
fargoth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting to me, because I always figured the Diablo series was prized for its moment-to-moment gameplay, rather than for its story or cinematics.

Blizzard cinematics have always set a high bar. The WoW expansion teasers are always phenomenal.

Their cinematics are pretty, but their plot is basically “spin the roulette wheel to find out which protagonist catches The Corruption.”

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#76

Post by haydenchambers »

luag wrote: post #52
bexsella wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an honest typo, but it did make me think that at some point with the heat of the idea of the "Metaverse" in some circles, that Google could roll out a competing "Adverse". Note: typo corrected.

Ad platform for the meta verse

[dead]

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#77

Post by nlawalker »

Salgat wrote: post #49
qingcharles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote the isometric engine for this game in about 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje... It was planned to be a totally 2D game in the vein of Diablo, but as this brief lays out, the amount of 2D assets required for all the rotations of the characters gets out of hand extremely quickly. After we started development we figured this out and decided to switch the characters to 3D and kee…

I like the way Diablo 2 did it, where they created 3D models then had a script render to create the animation frames at all the different angles. I did something similar for my very amateurish attempt at a game, and it saved a massive amount of time. http://salgat.blogspot.com/2014/12/new-2d-sprite-model.html

Ah, that reminds me of this post about Hades: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1145360/discussions/0/1864993...

Just insane amounts of work and data. There's a cool video they did about the part of the process that comes before that - creating the models from the character artist's 2D art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYJ6d1ifSqA

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#78

Post by TinkersW »

bpicolo wrote: post #36
fargoth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting to me, because I always figured the Diablo series was prized for its moment-to-moment gameplay, rather than for its story or cinematics.

Blizzard cinematics have always set a high bar. The WoW expansion teasers are always phenomenal.

They were pretty but I mostly just wished to skip them..

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#79

Post by logicchains »

nemo44x wrote: post #73
logicchains wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diablo 4 has no sense of progression because enemies level up as you do. In fact they increase in power faster than you, under the assumption you'll be itemising optimally, so if you level up but don't update your items fast enough, you'll find that mobs actually get harder and harder to defeat as you increase in level.

That’s what great I think. Levels give you skill and paragon points which eventually makes you stronger so you can go to higher tiers where better gear drops. They give you many ways to customize your gear (affix modifications, aspects, gems) with your build and paragon board. That’s what it’s all about.

> Levels give you skill and paragon points which eventually makes you stronger so you can go to higher tiers where better gear drops

Paragon points are only granted around level 50, and skill points stop making much difference around level 20-30 when all the core skills are unlocked. I got so bored of combat I stopped playing at around level 40. Particularly annoying is after getting a few items with good aspects, it's rare to find another item with the same or better aspect, so I have a choice of either sticking with the old item with bad stats and the good aspect (and dying really quickly due to low armor), or picking a new item with better stats but no good aspect. Yes it's possible to extract the aspect from an item and use it on another, but that can only be done once.

Re: Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

#80

Post by somat »

aidenn0 wrote: post #50
bexsella wrote: post #7

My favourite story of Diablo's development (as relayed by David Brevik in the Diablo Postmortem - see below) is the part where Diablo was made real-time. He passionately championed that it should be more like Rogue or Moria purely turn-based and permadeath. That was until he implemented real-time movement in an afternoon and attacked a skeleton. This was a directive from Blizzard, and it effectively created the ARPG…

I have no clue why, but the Diablo style dungeon-crawler ARPGs are literally the only subgenre of game that I have not found a single game from which I like. I keep trying examples because it's such a strange (and popular) hole in my tastes. Games I've tried: - Diablo - Diablo II - Nox - Dungeon Siege - Divinity - A few others I'm probably forgetting.

Same here, after a bit of thought I think it is because I bounce hard off the control scheme. the controls are for a rts, which would be fine if I was controlling a bunch of units but I am not. I am controlling only one unit. I keep concentrating on how much the controls suck and how much fun it would be as a run and gun(or twin stick shooter if you prefer that terminology).
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