Diablo. Or How To Quit Talking About It and Actually Do It.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 15, 2012

So I hear there’s some kind of action-RPG that was just released today? Kind of a niche action-roguelike or something? I hope their budget was small, because those kinds of games just don’t sell…

Seriously, though, I’m a big fan of the first two Diablo games. The reasons I’m holding off on picking up the long-anticipated third game are: #1 – I’m waiting until after my trip to France (dunno what my bandwidth will be in the hotels, friggin’ online-in-single-player mode thingy…), #2 – I promised myself I wouldn’t pick it up until I finished Grimrock, and #3 – I promised myself I wouldn’t pick it up until I got this dungeon rendering system for Frayed Knights 2 completely functional, and it’s just received yet another major overhaul (New engine, new way of handling dungeons).

I’m also kinda waiting to hear the reviews, but, you know, DUH. Like they aren’t going to gush about the awesomeness of the game?

But setting the wayback machine just a little… well, okay, something like 16 years ago (sheesh!), I wanted to comment a little on the importance of the original. Yes, I know, many of us blame Diablo for turning the RPG genre into a click-fest, but on the plus side it probably deserves a good share of credit for making the pronouncements of the death of the genre sound foolish.

But there were a few more interesting tidbits.

First of all, as some of you know, Diablo was originally planned as a turn-based game. The guys at the original Blizzard shop managed to convince the developers that it was a bad idea – and in retrospect, if selling a couple of million copies is your goal, they were probably right.

But there were two discussions that were going around in some of the magazines and Usenet groups for a few years before Diablo‘s release. (Wow, magazines and Usenet… it really has been a long time, hasn’t it?). I remember this because both topics really fascinated me. One was the commercial viability of roguelikes. Fans of roguelikes – particularly Nethack – wondered out loud (or at least in print, or digitally) what would happen if a quality RL had nice graphics and a mouse-driven, pretty user interface built onto the system. Granted, they already had their answer, as Rogue had long ago had a commercial release, and 1993’s Dungeon Hack was a roguelike using the Eye of the Beholder engine and D&D rules. But the discussion continued.

The second discussion, generating far more arguments over the years, is how one might implement a peer-to-peer RPG. MUDs and the like were already common, but the question was how a company could implement a system that did not require a server to store the characters and the game state. A lot of the ideas that found their way into Diablo were discussed. I don’t know if the original design team was ever a party to any of these discussions prior to beginning development. I wouldn’t expect so, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to hear that that anybody there was.

When Diablo was released, I won’t say it put an end to these discussions, but it certainly pounded a big ol’ gold-plated stake in the ground that forever changed the argument. My attitude when I played the game – especially playing multiplayer for the first time, was “Holy Crap! They did it! These guys finally did it.” These discussions and arguments had been going on for years, in the vacuum of the Internet and bulletin board systems. It had all been theory, and the talk had felt endless. Finally, it seemed to me, somebody had quit talking and done something about it. It was far from perfect. In fact, its imperfections were pretty glaring. But now, instead of talking in circles about nebulous ideas, we could talk about how things should be done better to “get it right.” But someone had to get in there and put a stake in the ground. It was a big step.

They took the idea and ran with it. And in this case, they were very successful at it.

Nowadays, while that’s not exclusively in the realm of indies, it seems like the larger studios and publishers are more focused on refining and polishing tried-and-true ideas than running with new ones. But we still need guys who will take ideas and run with them, proving (or disproving, as the case may be) some weird ideas. Someone needs to be first. Or second with a new twist. It’s where we’re getting games like Braid (experimenting with time-control mechanics), or Canabalt (experimenting with a single, simple control), Depths of Peril (adding dynamic worlds and competing factions on a Diabl0-style foundation).  Minecraft, Gratuitous Space Battles, and – yeah, I’ll crow even about Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon here and note how it was created on the idea of having that first-person party do the comic-book style dialog with each other.

We need the indies doing just that. Quit talking about it and do it.

Filed Under: Game Development, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



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