Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

From the document:

> The world of Diablo will have a dark, evil tone. Initial levels will be set in an abandoned Gothic church. A marble mausoleum and progressively darker, dingier crypts and catacombs follow.

As someone who has been down in the crypt of an abandoned Victorian Gothic church, I can confirm that they definitely do not look like the level in Diablo does!

What's astounding to me is how well the Diablo and Diablo II team took the design decisions that Angband made (and Brevik based Diablo on Angband, not Moria) and were able to fix almost all of them.

It's actually kind of sad, that Brevik effectively stole the basic design of a FOSS game and commercialized it, but the end result is very much a better game for it.

To wit, Angband is supposedly the fortress of Morgoth, but it's an empty mine where the enemies are blobs and ants for any n levels. Diablo fixed this by actually gradating the dungeon as strata rather than the same level type over and over again. They likewise reduced the monster types to thematically fit. In Angband you can still encounter level 1 monsters on the 100th dungeon level

Angband had one set of artifacts (random artifact sets came later). There were and are very few that actually appear before well into mid-game. Diablo I did this, discovered that it was pretty boring and added in rares and sets in Diablo II that were accessible immediately.

Angband decided to have big loot that was dropped by unique monsters, but because the drop rate was too low and the unique list too small, made "vaults" of rooms that are loaded with artifacts. Diablo II just allowed you to grind uniques with decaying drop rates, as well as adding in super monsters and chests.

Angband is 100 levels of sameness. Diablo I cut it down to 16, if I remember correctly, whereas Diablo II took the 100 level formula and broke it up into three difficulties and made it a linear adventure rather than only a descent. And even though you repeat it three times, there's enough time between repetition that it feels fresh.

Diablo II did the exact same thing with base items as well. In Angband, there's a dagger (1d4). From dungeon level 1 to 100, a dagger will only be 1d4. Diablo II gave you three tiers of base items that actually made using them feasible.

In Angband, gold becomes useless because the stuff you can buy in town is pegged to level 1 beginner gear. Diablo I had level scaled gear gambling and Diablo II made tiers of cities with scaled equipment and also included gambling.

In Angband, you can haul around 99 potions of various tiers of healing. In Diablo I/II, you are capped to what can reasonably fit into your inventory, with rapid access limited to belt size.

There are dozens if not hundreds of other decisions that were the right ones to make that Diablo I/II made that Angband didn't that makes Angband look like an archaic dinosaur that deserved to have its lunch eaten.

Now, Angband is still being updated, but instead of making the type of choices that Diablo made, they've been just "streamlining" it and bugfixing. The ID game is almost completely gone, you no longer sell gear in town by default, and the majority of players skip the middle 70 levels of the game.

I recently added in needed quality of life improvements to a fork of Angband like DCSS-style autoexplore and tab-combat (no one seemed to actually try it) but the game needs a drastic overhaul to coopt all the improvements that Diablo I/II made on the town-dungeon-sell-loop game so that the game's player base doesn't die off completely. Currently, the only two *band games with sizable player bases are Sil-Q (a tightly designed "modern" and Tolkien-faithful Angband) and FrogComPosBand (a kitchen-sink variant), but Angband's is all but dead.

Unfortunately, the current maintainer and grognard player base want to keep the design fixed roughly at the norms of 1992 with a cleaner code base. So it goes I guess.

Angband: The game that invented epic loot: http://homebrewhomunculus.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-game-that...

My fork: https://github.com/3m4r/angbandv

we can go that route too when talking about EV batteries production emissions vs ICE but sure we don't because that's not the point, right?

It's interesting of course to see such outlandish features as the complex race/sub-class system for character creation (which was replaced with a handful of predefined distinct archetypes) or the turn-based combat system.

But what strikes me most is the sales pitch: it's not intended to simply be another game, it's basically a game generator and players would be expected to buy expansion packs (what we would now call DLCs) which add a handful of things to the generator. The document even compares this to Magic The Gathering.

Considering the actual game only received one (rushed) expansion and that expansion was very different in scope (offering two additional, smaller, dungeons, one new character class (including two unfinished ones left in the source code) and a handful of new features and content) this seems honestly the most surprising to me.

This design document is pretty much built to sell the idea of content pack DLCs a decade ahead of their time. I wonder what finally caused the change of heart.

Zelda didn't have experience points and levelling (except Zelda II) but there were many other games that were clearly RPGs and that had real time combat. Secret of Mana would be a classical action RPG. I never heard the term being restricted to Diablo.