diablo Postmortem GDC 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc
Diablo
11–20 of 128 posts
Re: Diablo
#12Even Diablo 2 felt a little bloated to me - it's so much longer, and I burned out on all the click-click-click way sooner than most people. It felt like slog.
But the original Diablo...man. What a game. It feels "perfect" to me, in the same way that Scheme (the programming language) feels "perfect". Tight, hugely playable and replayable, atmospheric, unbelievably compulsively addictive. I maintain an personal list of best games ever; it's unranked, but D1 would be near the top.
Re: Diablo
#13This story and many others are captured really well in the Game Developer Conference (GDC) post-mortem talks, heartily recommended if you want to know about the human aspect behind game dev!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc
And, if that's not enough for you :P https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/search?q=diablo&re...
Re: Diablo
#14I tried to leave a comment on the article but it's down due to the hacker news hug of death. I wonder if the author plays new games and what their opinion is on Diablo 4. It's interesting to me that hacker news has become a place for this kind of niche content about old video games. Who would have known there is such a large audience that is willing to pay for magazine length / quality articles about the history of g…
Speaking of, I subscribed to this magazine for a few years (yes, on paper!) and I highly recommend: https://www.retrogamer.net/ They have a lot online but there is something very enjoyable about getting an actual magazine in the mail. They have a ton of glossy images and in-depth, well-researched articles - a breakdown of how Pitfall! was constructed for the Atari 2600 is a memorable one.
Bonus (or negative): it is from the UK and living in the U.S. there is a whole alternate dimension of retro games they feature that I've never heard of. But I enjoyed reading about those, too!
Re: Diablo
#15Even Diablo 2 felt a little bloated to me - it's so much longer, and I burned out on all the click-click-click way sooner than most people. It felt like slog. But the original Diablo...man. What a game. It feels "perfect" to me, in the same way that Scheme (the programming language) feels "perfect". Tight, hugely playable and replayable, atmospheric, unbelievably compulsively addictive. I maintain an personal list of…
Diablo 2 is the only one I played deeply, it seems fresher since it has many acts/environments. Even though any single one of them could have boring parts.
Re: Diablo
#16Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful. I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's ob…
I love Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, I don't care much for what the genre has become though (Diablo 3/4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, etc). The genre of loot focused ARPGs really took after the worst aspects of Diablo 2 LOD end game. An extreme focus on grinding and optimizing builds to maximize your ability to grind, so you can get gear to beat end game content that is otherwise impossible, to repeat the process. The genre to…
I think the loop that hooked me on game such as Diablo 1, Valheim, Subnautica, etc, is that cycle of safe place -> adventure -> "safe place, recharge, upgrade". The grindey aspect of Diablo 4 totally turned me off and if I buy the game it'll only be for the couch coop aspect.
Re: Diablo
#17Really a great, well written article. They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back. In Diablo 1, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon was meaningful. Coming back out of the dungeon, barely alive, to the peaceful yet gloomy music was impactful. I've played all the Diablo games when they were released. I'm sad about what they created for Diablo 4. It's ob…
> They've got the "Town" them embedded in the page and every time I hear that song it really brings me back.
That Town theme music is just a lovely piece of music. Totally nostalgia inducing.
8-Bit music theory did a nice breakdown of why it's so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F_zsDWJyrM
Re: Diablo
#18Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game.
The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it.
That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - and that's probably the point?
So I agree on many fronts with this article.
Diablo could have been so much more but they turned it into a highly engineered form of drug that can potentially destroy you, with little to nothing to gain for it. Nicotine? For sure it's more gambling than gaming - again to me mostly timeless yet inherently toxic coating - down to the systems level. So in a way, it's the original "mobile game", the ultimate computer based life waster.
So depending on the person and with the right .mpq file in hand this could either mean getting addicted to or maybe getting off of "cigarettes" completely:
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/blob/master/docs/...
(Devilution/X is amazing and maybe more interesting than playing the game itself, complete clean-room reverse engineered version of Diablo).
Edit disclaimer: local / in-sync multiplayer is (probably?) not as life wasting
Re: Diablo
#19Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…
> the lacking of significant strategic elements
Planning for your gear and doing sims / optimizing are strategic elements, though potentially a meta-strategy?
Re: Diablo
#20Even Diablo 2 felt a little bloated to me - it's so much longer, and I burned out on all the click-click-click way sooner than most people. It felt like slog. But the original Diablo...man. What a game. It feels "perfect" to me, in the same way that Scheme (the programming language) feels "perfect". Tight, hugely playable and replayable, atmospheric, unbelievably compulsively addictive. I maintain an personal list of…
Diablo 2 is the only one I played deeply, it seems fresher since it has many acts/environments. Even though any single one of them could have boring parts.
Diablo 1 has a single town, but there is a similar "new environments" part of the gameplay since as you go into the dungeon it changes. So theres the church -> catacombs -> caves -> hell. Though the whole game is maybe just a little longer than Act 1 in Diablo 2 (but its tough to say because its a much slower paced game).