Allow me to quote Diablo developer David Brevik describing when he finally yielded to demands and hacked together a "real time" version of his turn-based Diablo, by making turns elapse the rate of 20 turns a second. 'I remember taking the mouse, and I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and and smacked the skeleton down, and I was like "Oh my god! That was awesome!".' 'And the sun shone through the wind…
Ultima Underworld (1993), Ultima Underworld II (1994), Ultima VII (1994), and The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) all come to mind quickly as computer-based action RPGs that preceded Diablo (1996). And the Japanese were making top-down action RPGs as early as the '80s, especially those made by Nihon Falcom (Ys) and Quintet (Soul Blazer). I would particularly cite Brandish (1991, Nihon Falcom) as a similar type of realtim…
The title should be "The original pitch for Diablo (1994)", the 4 is in the wrong place. It would be pretty weird to have a pitch for Diablo 4 in the 90s, before Diablo 3 was released. :)
It looks like it is corrected now. I didn't include the year in the original submission, so it must have gotten typo'ed by a mod.
Fond memories of this as a kid. I remember after playing it for a while with friends and coming across BoBaFett's trainer and DooM-Gaze's (sic?) trainer enabling god-mode, fast spellcast, maxed stats, Godly Plate of the Whale armor, King's Sword of Haste, dropping elixirs all over town around Deckard Cain, etc. I was legitimately scared at my age to step into the cracks of hell to go after Diablo when they opened beh…
There was a far more advanced cheat(a gamehack patch) called Soulburner's Editor that allowed to spawn items/monsters, teleport to any level and spy on other players with ghost mode(which allowed to join games unannounced) and various other hacks.
It was my early inspiration to programming:you could convert earlier (e.g. 1.07/1.08)hacks(which don't work in new version) by searching for the offset where the code content was identical in hex editor(usually new patch just changed the offset) and trying if they work again or crash the game.
That way you can make old hacks compatible with newer versions, but the code was still a mysterious string of hexadecimal digits that didn't make sense(outside of ascii content which looked like text in hex editor).
Then i found out you can disassemble the strings and the entire game was a huge megabyte long assembler dump(which i had no idea what to search at first).
There was a windows debugger called SoftICE which i got reccomended and i've started to tinker with it, it was extremely boring and tiresome pausing and single-stepping through thousands of lines of assemblers and if you modified anything wrong the game promptly crashed.
Still it was a fascinating look into the "Diablo hacking scene" despite having near zero skills i managed to get a general idea how the "gamehacks" worked: they overwrote memory without touching critical code and the hex strings functionality was often very simple, its disabled jumps or set bytes to specific values. Some of them were small assembler programs which added new functions(like Soulburner's editor) but the mystery of how it was created in the first place was beyond me(the only clue was it hooking into diablo console to add its own console commands). It was obvious it wasn't incrementally added(like simple godmode cheats it was distributed with), it was tested and programmed separately.
However i quickly got bored with it and diablo as a game itself, exploring everything it offered and even looking at beta content with MPQ editor and diablo-specific utilities.
It was also extremely discouraging when many people enjoyed crashing games with various hacks and competed on who didn't get crashed(by using various anti-crash patches).
The game turned into some online crashfest and real players migrated into password protected games and single-player.
Good to see plenty of people in the comments experiencing nostalgia due to fond memories of playing this great, great game :) You may be unaware that there is "Belzebub", a "HD mod" for the original Diablo, available today, that taches the original engine a few tricks (besides the obvious 1080p resolution), and also re-introduces a lot of the game's planned content that had to be cut from the final release shortly be…
Do you know if the mod includes features/content from the D1 expansion? It's hard to track down and I never played it (despite wanting to).
Ultima Underworld (1993), Ultima Underworld II (1994), Ultima VII (1994), and The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) all come to mind quickly as computer-based action RPGs that preceded Diablo (1996). And the Japanese were making top-down action RPGs as early as the '80s, especially those made by Nihon Falcom (Ys) and Quintet (Soul Blazer). I would particularly cite Brandish (1991, Nihon Falcom) as a similar type of realtim…
I'll add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faery_Tale_Adventure (1987) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_of_Lore (1988)
I'll disagree on all those (and the Ultima's etc in the grandparent comment). They were all focused on RPG and story first, then adding some action on top of that (via isometric, fps etc. modes).
Diablo changed things in that it focused on action first, whereas the RPG element is just an add-on. Its gameplay cycles between essentially going deeper in a dungeon that's becoming more difficult, obtaining/selling etc. of items/potions in town so that you can descend further. Its story isn't really of (heavy) importance.
Good to see plenty of people in the comments experiencing nostalgia due to fond memories of playing this great, great game :) You may be unaware that there is "Belzebub", a "HD mod" for the original Diablo, available today, that taches the original engine a few tricks (besides the obvious 1080p resolution), and also re-introduces a lot of the game's planned content that had to be cut from the final release shortly be…
Do you know if the mod includes features/content from the D1 expansion? It's hard to track down and I never played it (despite wanting to).
If by "expansion" you mean Sierra's "Hellfire", then no - there's no content overlap between it and Belzebub that I'd know of (that's not already included in the original Diablo, of course).
Fond memories of this as a kid. I remember after playing it for a while with friends and coming across BoBaFett's trainer and DooM-Gaze's (sic?) trainer enabling god-mode, fast spellcast, maxed stats, Godly Plate of the Whale armor, King's Sword of Haste, dropping elixirs all over town around Deckard Cain, etc. I was legitimately scared at my age to step into the cracks of hell to go after Diablo when they opened beh…
Moo. I said moo.
"Look I'm just a cow OK?"
I believe that was from Hellfire, right? Was it the character that you could give a moose suit to?
I'll add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faery_Tale_Adventure (1987) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_of_Lore (1988)
I'll disagree on all those (and the Ultima's etc in the grandparent comment). They were all focused on RPG and story first, then adding some action on top of that (via isometric, fps etc. modes). Diablo changed things in that it focused on action first, whereas the RPG element is just an add-on. Its gameplay cycles between essentially going deeper in a dungeon that's becoming more difficult, obtaining/selling etc. of…
So what about Zelda II: Adventure of Link? The RPG elements were clearly secondary, given that they were absent from the original LoZ.