An Oral History of Diablo II

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/in-their-own-words-an-oral-history-of-diablo-ii-with-david-brevik-max-schaefer-and-erich-schaefer

by fitzwatermellow • 11 years ago

150 80 11 years ago

usgamer.net

vernie• 11 years ago

I'm always disappointed by an oral history that I can't listen to.

simoncion• 11 years ago

Feed the text of the article through Festival? >:D

Strom• 11 years ago

It's not that the audio is missing, it's that you can't hear the emotion when the history was told. That extra data is missing from the text.

hitlin372• 11 years ago

one of the best games ever made.

mhurron• 11 years ago

OT, but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqvXDTH-o_o

seivan4• 11 years ago

I know Diablo 2 was much bigger improvement over Diablo 1, but I feel like what really made it was Battle-net. Back then most online RPG games required you to install shit like Gamespy to play online, at least that's the feeling I got.

But I never played until Lord of Destruction exp though, maybe some stuff came after.

hitlin372• 11 years ago

I think in Diablo 2, they got almost everything right. It's almost as if it can't be remade as perfect as they did back then.

degenerate• 11 years ago

Battle.net was perfect, absolutely perfect.

santaclaus• 11 years ago

The sequels, while super fun games, didn't really capture the atmosphere that made the original so haunting. The desperation in the original was palpable, and moving through the dungeons really felt like a descent into hell and madness. Everything from the spanish guitar theme in the main town to the progressively more manic tone of the journals in the dungeons to the crazy ending just fit so perfectly.

jsnk• 11 years ago

Such an amazing game. There's so much to learn from this game still that I think if we took the same basic structure of the game and balance it again, we'll have yet another masterpiece.

Even the mishaps in the game like, Stone of Jordan dupes, overpowered Gambling feature in the original, some under powered classes in terms of PVP (eventually got more balanced) and so on, there are so many learning opportunities here.

Addition of Runewords in 1.10 really balanced the game even further. Magic Finding (MF) which was an attribute you would want to farm set/rare/unique items were pretty much invested in Sorceresses only for her Teleporting skill. Other classes without teleporting simply could not farm as effectively as her. With a new runeword "enigma" that gave you teleporting skill, it opened up the avenue for other classes to do what Sorceresses do. I can just keep going on and on about this game and how fun it was (even the grinding in cow level for exp).

msc• 11 years ago

One of the worst hacks was the Hostile Anywhere hack, especially for Hardcode mode. Apparently the Hostile button was disabled client side once you left town, but there were no server side checks.

I also remember a gamble hack, where the server gave too much info to the client. The hack would tell you which were Unique/Rare/Magic gambles.

renke1• 11 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree.

Try Path of Exile [1] if you are looking for a spiritual successor. For me, that's the only game that comes close to Diablo 2.

[1] https://www.pathofexile.com/

JTon• 11 years ago

+1 for PoE. A bunch of friends and I had a weekend LAN party and took it for a ride. We all loved the additional features.

gizmo385• 11 years ago

Torchlight II is another fantastic successor for this genre!

gt565k6• 11 years ago

Seeing this brought back some memories.

I used to run farming bots for Diablo II when I was 13-16 years old and had about 20 copies of the game. Bots would run all day (while I was in school), and all night. I'd wake up early in the morning. Check the loot and transfer it to mule accounts, then restart the bots and go to school. I'd then try to trade items for general commodity items, like high runes, or certain skill items that were used as a form of trading currency due to their high demand.

The bots had some custom features that would let you bypass IP bans by logging into your router's settings, changing the mac address, and restarting your internet connection so you can get a new IP address.

One of the bots I used was written in the AutoIt Scripting Language. Since the bot was open source, I was able to see how the code was structured and modify it myself.

I attribute my introduction to programming to this farming bot, and I believe is one of the reasons I chose to study Computer Science.

The cherry on top was that I made about $600-$700 when I was 14 or 15 years old by selling a lot of farmed items on ebay.

Personally, Diablo III was a big disappointment for me. The game felt quite different from a lot of aspects. Common loot was now split into player specific loot, too many crafting recipes, unique items were garbage, etc...

I'd be happy to answer any questions regarding Diablo II or even the hacking/botting community around it.

gadrfgaesgysd3• 11 years ago

Can you give a in-depth description of how the bots worked? You can assume the reader has good knowledge of programming, AutoIt and Diablo 2.

fein2• 11 years ago

One of the bots I used was written in the AutoIt Scripting Language

MMBot or Roots Pindle Bot? I was a forum mod and helped folks out with tech issues on the mmbot forums, and was in the community before Manus Magnus released MMBot to our forum admin. I still talk to Nicotine (MMBot siteadmin) every once in a while.

ohashi2• 11 years ago

They are actually improving Diablo 3. A big patch came out last month adding even more positive improvements imo. Uniques/Sets matter again. They've come up with a way to deal with special powers they give with their new cube recipes. No auction house anymore, items can't be traded/given away except to people in the game when it dropped and only within 2 hours. So you can play with friends, share loot, but there's no secondary market. They also added greater rifts which allow you to push the end game difficulty indefinitely along with paragon level, which gives infinite 'leveling' via stat bonuses.

unethical_ban• 11 years ago

They killed common loot and put on lots of trade restrictions precisely because of the behavior you participated in with D2.

They have brought it back around to more D2-ish style gameplay in the most recent patches.

executesorder662• 11 years ago

changing the mac address

As far as I am aware, the mac address is burned onto the hardware by the manufacturers, and there is no way of changing it. (Unless you are using a VM and you can give it any mac address you want)

How did you change the mac address?

fierycatnet• 11 years ago

That's the game that I've dedicated most of my time in high school. It was gritty, challenging and full of possibilities. I managed to trade and find enough gear to buy high runes and elite rune words. I had a lance barb. It was different and frowned upon, but holy hell the amount of damage he would do.

I think the greatest thing about D2LOD was their dueling system, especially in hardcore mode. I had a friend (RIP) who used to have high level barbarian with teleport amulet. In the older patches it was a rare item, before the crazy rune words and so on. So naturally he was able to assassinate a quite a few naive players, who tried to run away, to collect the ear. Oh man, the rush of playing in hardcore. The thrill was real. There was a real consequence to your mistakes. I think that was the fun part until Blizzard sanitized the game to prevent easy PK.

One thing I wish Blizzard could do is to make a figurine of your character and send it to you. I'd love to have a small figurine of my lance barb that I've dedicated a lot of my time to. Too bad it's all gone now.

atomical• 11 years ago

I would be interested in an oral history of Dungeon Siege.

brownbat• 11 years ago

In part, from Scott Bilas, from Gas Powered Games during its development: http://scottbilas.com/games/dungeon-siege/

abritinthebay2• 11 years ago

I used to work with Stieg Hedlund (the sole designer of D2) and it was really interesting to hear him talk about the issues he used to have to both solve and create (game design is often about creating problems - for players as well as solving technical problems).

Would like to have seen more of the nitty gritty about the game. This is a very project-manager-ish view of its development and as such sadly misses a lot of the work involved.

That said - it's also invaluable. Very interesting read.

listic2• 11 years ago

Great game designers are not necessarily great game historians and/or have good memory.

It's amazing how many new standard things came out of Diablo and Diablo II. [...] The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense.

While Diablo certainly helped popularize quite a few such features and even arguably gave birth to a genre (I heard people calling various other games a Diablo), it would be overconfident for them to claim inventing it: Magic the Gathering [1] had it years prior. There, rarity was implemented with printed pages: you print all your common cards on a Common sheet, uncommon cards on an Uncommon sheet and rare on Rare sheet; then put 1 card from Rare, 3 from Uncommon and 9 from Common into each booster pack. (not actual numbers! there are also Mythic Rares and each card has a tiny chance to be a Foil version, which complicates the situation, but the basic idea is something like that; from memory)

Same goes for the idea of a quest log: I don't have a specific example in mind, but I have a hard time believing no game had it before Diablo II.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering

legohead• 11 years ago

MUDs have had stuff like this since the early 90s. I haven't seen a graphical RPG come close to the complexity of some of the MUDs I've played (and are still around today).

listic2• 11 years ago

nods They very well might be, though I never encountered explicit item rarity in my MUDs. Also, they mention being inspired by Ultima Online. Creators of Ultima Online were inspired by MUDs.

btw, Magic: the Gathering debuted in 1993.

aidenn02• 11 years ago

You took that quote out-of-context:

The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense. In some roguelikes, they would have your common item and your magic item, so they were different colors of text or whatever. If it was a magic item it was blue, if it was a normal item it was white, that kind of thing. And, so, we took a step further and went with the rarity levels. The rarer something is then it has a different color.

M:tG did not have a visual distinction for rares versus uncommon versus common when I played it in the mid 90s, and that is what they are talking about here, a visual indication of the rarity of an item.

enneff• 11 years ago

MTG cards have had rarity indicators on cards since 1998.

http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Rarity

lmkg• 11 years ago

That's not the same thing, though. They're not just talking about the fact that some items are more common than others, or even the correlation between power and rarity.

What Diablo did (that M:tG didn't) was that the same weapon could have multiple rarities, with the rarer versions being more powerful. Each card in M:tG has only a single rarity, and the foil version is just a cosmetic difference with no gameplay effect. An Uncommon (or equivalent) in Diablo is not a sui generis item, it is a common with upgraded stats. A Rare is the same thing with magic effects added.

PhasmaFelis2• 11 years ago

I'm not clear how that's different from e.g. the random loot tables in D&D, except that Diablo's version called some different items by the same name for added confusion.

panic• 11 years ago

It's interesting that the cinematics were made by an entirely separate team that barely communicated with the game developers. Somehow it produced a better story than Diablo 3's more traditional mixing of story with gameplay.

danharaj• 11 years ago

In some ways advancing the story was a reward for playing, which can feel more compelling than trying to craft the illusion that the player's actions effect the advancement.

stormbrew• 11 years ago

Well, I don't think this is why. Diablo 3's problem is just that the story writing, and particularly the dialog writing, is extremely trite.

Diablo and Diablo 2 had fairly simple but compelling stories that were dropped in at key moments. Diablo 3 is largely progressively more annoying demons telling you how unlikely you are to beat them. It just gets tiresome. That'd be true if they were separated cut scenes as in Diablo 2 or integrated dialog as in 3.

jonhohle• 11 years ago

I was a fan of the "Death" diplomacy in D3 /sarc. At least for the barbarian role, the solution to all problems was to murder the current antagonist, even when it seemed like the antagonizer's goal was effectively the same as the hero's; they just weren't the hero.

The hero him/herself was responsible for as much or more death than any of the enemies.

fenomas2• 11 years ago

I think the difference is that D1/2 took a reasonably simple story and told it as sparsely as possible, in widely-spaced vignettes, leaving the player to fill in everything else. D3 took a similarly simple story, and told all of it in detail.

doikor• 11 years ago

Just the fact that the lords of hell were actually talking to the hero makes it very weird/stupid to me. In D2 Mephisto throws one single one-liner at the hero and other demons just laugh/scream and thats it. The story in the cinematics is narrated by Marius not any of the prime evils.

(I think Baal actually talks the most due to his conversation with Marius in one of the cinematics).

derptacos• 11 years ago

Also recommend reading Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - David L. Craddock http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G8UL474

Really interesting read, covers Diablo/Warcraft development from its humble beginnings.

Legion• 11 years ago

I can't stand articles with pagination that lack a "single page" view, defeating convenient read-it-later offline saving.

lobo_tuerto• 11 years ago

I hope all those working on it like this got a great compensation back for the extra hours/days:

"...to the point where everyone was having to work seven days a week, all waking hours, for almost a year."

lamontcg• 11 years ago

Diablo didn't invent cheating in internet games. I was writing bots for nettrek back in 1992, and it had been going on for a lot longer than that.

Nettrek probably invented anti-cheat practices including RSA signing the binaries and moving most of the logic to server-side. You could program info borgs to give you better display of information than other humans, and you could program combat borgs that simply reacted faster than humans could (particularly with automatic tractor/pressors, auto phasers at close distance, and auto aiming torps), but cloaked ships had their positions randomized server side so you couldn't get magic accuracy to lock on them, and torp wobble and hits were all computed server side so there was no way for client hacking to change the basic physics.

An Oral History of Diablo II

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