Diablo

aka: Diablo (Game of the Year)
Moby ID: 339
Windows Specs
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Long ago a secret war raged between Heaven and Hell, each using humanity as its pawns. While the Prime Evils of Hell were engaged in war their lesser lieutenants conspired to overthrow them. They mutinied suddenly with the combined forces of Hell, overwhelming the three Primes. Stripped of their power, they were banished to the mortal realm. Human agents of Heaven, upon discovering this, found the three Primes and sealed them within gemstone prisons, each of them sent to a different corner of the earth and kept under guard to prevent them from escaping.

As years turns to centuries, however, the power of Heaven's agents waned, until eventually not even the people of the town of Tristram knew that buried deep under their chapel was the soul of the Lord of Terror, Diablo. As the strength of his prison waned Diablo reached out into the world, corrupting the dreams of the land's good king, driving him to attack his neighbors. The nation of Khanduras fought wars with no intention of winning, desiring only slaughter and suffering. Now the lands lay scorched, home only to monsters and the dead. Rumors spread of a way to stop the demons, as well as rumors of great wealth, and both draw adventurers from far to the small town of Tristram.

Players start by choosing their avatar's class: either Warrior, Rogue, or Sorcerer. Warriors have the highest maximum strength and can repair weapons and armor inside the dungeon, but this will lower the item's maximum durability. The Rogue has the highest maximum dexterity and can both see and disarm traps on treasure chests. The Sorcerer has the highest maximum magic attribute and can recharge the charges on a spellcasting staff at the cost of his own mana.

Characters can equip armor, weapons, and accessories found in the chapel's shifting dungeons, but strong equipment will have minimum attribute requirements to be worn. Most equipment will have randomized stats, but some strong monsters will drop Unique weapons with set stats. Magic can be learned by finding magic tomes, and leveled up by finding multiples of the same spell tome, but advanced spell levels can not be learned if the character's magic stat is too low. Upon destroying enough monsters to level up the player is rewarded with additional attribute points to distribute to whichever attributes they wish. Occasionally the few people left in town will inform the player of a job they would like done, either an exceptionally strong monster that must be slain or a unique item found deep in the dungeon, and will reward the player in kind upon completion of the quest.

Diablo can be played cooperatively with 1 to 3 other players over LAN or BattleNet with the PC versions, or with 1 player locally on the PlayStation. Players can team up to survive the depths of the dungeons, or turn on each other to steal one another's items from their corpse. The quest unique zones are removed from the online version of a dungeon, and instead quest monsters will be found wandering the level that would normally lead to their unique area.

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Credits (Windows version)

243 People (117 developers, 126 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 67 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 381 ratings with 21 reviews)

Really Addictive... and SAVE OFTEN!

The Good
Diablo is the closest I've seen to a graphical Rogue/NetHack. Ultimatelly much better than SSI's Dungeon Hack, Diablo combines Isometric 3D action with some cool effects.

Graphics (for 1996) are astounding. Spells, weapons, gold, and items are produced very well. I can't tell if any of the action was motion captured, but it looks like it. Either that or the animators study humans walking for hours. The sprites used in fighting and walking are very realistic.

The sound is great. The clash of steel against steel, the creaking of doors, the phhhooooomp of the arrows, and especially the creepy "Bad guy" voice. Ambient sounds make or break a game, and this one does nicely. The voice-acting suprised me. Blizzard was smart to make the people you interact with in the village staionary sprites. Syncing Graphics and voice-overs is probably one of the biggest pitfalls of games. Blizzard's use of scrolling text/voice overs give you a chance to either listen to or read conversations. No japanese dubbed actors here. :)

The gameplay is addictive. Period. I played NetHack and Rogue for hours on end just because it was different EVERY time you played. The same goes for Diablo. The game is never the same twice. The goals will be the same (find Odgen Sign, defeat King Olrec, etc.) but the actual dungeon gameplay will be different. The replay value alone is worth it.

The Bad
The Control is mainly mouse based. This is great if you have the new IntelliEye mouses with no moving parts. But for those stuck with "old reliable" the controls can get frustrating. Left click to move, left-click to attack (when stationary), right-click to cast spells, and right click to use items off the main screen. So needless to say when you are in the middle of a HUGE group of skeletal warriors (as I was a few nights ago), if you twitch at the wrong time, you can kiss your armor goodbye.

A minor complaint are the dungeon walls. It's very difficult to maneuver around with the "partial" walls that allow you to see in corners. You almost ALWAYS have to play with the automap feature on, and even that becomes distracting in a melee round.

The Bottom Line
Overall, Diablo is a fun, addictive dungeon hack. If you liked Rogue or NetHack, this '90s version is right down your alley.

Windows · by Chris Martin (1155) · 2000

Rogue-like Game

The Good
Back in the early 80's, an ASCII-graphic game called Rogue was introduced to the world. It started on mainframes and by the mid-80's found its way to the PC. The concept was to take an adventurer on a simple quest down into randomly-drawn dungeon levels. This meant that every time you played a new game, it was different.

Now fast-forward to 1997. Diablo took the basic concept of Rogue and expounded upon it using nice graphics, sound, and an interesting storyline. I loved the fact that I could create my character, take him into the dungeon for a while, and if the dungeon level I was on was to tough, I could start over with the same character (keeping all his/her experience and equipment). Not only that, but the dungeons were all redrawn from scratch making the game "new" and different and used different monsters (from a set of monsters based upon the dungeon level).

I loved the fact that I could play this game forever if I liked (and I played it all the way until Diablo II had been out for 6 months).

The Bad
I didn't like the fact that you had no place to store gold and equipment. So you had to leave piles of gold, potions, and equipment lying around the town square.

The Bottom Line
Bottom line, this is a simple yet addictive game that is designed to give plenty of repeat play (and in this day of games that can go for nearly $60, who doesn't want to get the max out of their buck). Kill everything that moves, collect magical items (for selling or for keeping) and gold is the name of the game.

Windows · by AstroNerdBoy (35) · 2001

Pure Hack and Slash

The Good
At first Diablo seems like an excellent and addictive game, the music is very cool, the graphics are great, and the sound effects are great.

The game's intro is excellent, if not confusing, but manages to give a creepy environment about the surroundings of Tristram. You create a character from 3 classes each with their own advantages and disadvantages, the interface is easy to use and very clean, people new to the RPG gaming scene will find it very easy to create their own character.

You begin the game in Tristram with very little equipment and barely enough gold to buy anything. You wander around for a while then begin pick up on quests from talking to the NPCs, soon enough you enter the cathedral and start bashing down level after level of skeletons, demons, and other evil monsters.

The Bad
I didn't like many things about Diablo, instead of going into a large amount of detail about each of them, I will just list them off.

  • Lack of a feature to make your character run (you have to walk away from monsters, and walking around Tristram gets annoying)

  • Battle.net is full of PKs, cheaters and liars (this does not make multiplayer very fun)

  • The game is pure hack and slash and is considered an RPG by almost everyone

  • Besides getting quests for new things to kill, and purchasing from, the NPCs have very little importance.

  • The hack and slash gets redundant and tedious after you reach level 4 of the dungeon.

    The Bottom Line
    For it's time Diablo was pretty good, a lot of other gaming companies tried to clone Blizzard's success with a hack and slash adventure game, but failed. Today Diablo can't compete with real RPGs that offer everything it didn't.

If you've never played an RPG before, and want to start with something easy with simple RPG elements try Diablo. If you want something with a great plot line, memorable characters, and more.... try something else.

Windows · by ZombieDepot (40) · 2001

[ View all 21 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Diablo appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Bosses

The game treats the Dark Lord (Diablo), the final boss, as a regular enemy rather than a boss monster. He has no catchphrase (e.g. the Butcher's 'Fresh Meat'), his name appears in white instead of gold, and if the player kills him enough times (by starting a new game with the same character) the game will even show the player his stats.

Cheats

At one time, cheat programs for Diablo were sold in stores that allowed the player to obtain special objects, increase levels, and such.

Development

  • Blizzard North was originally going to make Diablo a turn-based game;
  • Outlined in the game's original pitch document were plans for releasing cheap expansion pack discs, containing, as an example, a handful of weapons, items, and/or room types, which would be sold like Magic: The Gathering card packs to appeal to collectors. While expansions were eventually made for Diablo, none were developed by any Blizzard studio.
  • There were persistent rumors about a special quest that had to do with the cows (the player had to click on it X time in a special way at certain time of the day after doing so and so and things like that). It's false of course, but it didn't stop the newbies from asking. Blizzard was so amused, that Cow Quest was officially added to Diablo II.

Gags

In most (if not all) Blizzard games, the player can get a quick laugh from repeatedly clicking on certain objects. In Diablo, try the cow outside the city.

Messages

The Diablo art team were fans of Natalie Portman. Embedded in the menu image are messages that are only visible if you capture the image and reduce the image to 16 colors.

Novels

Numerous published novels have been inspired by the Diablo campaign setting, among them: * Moon of the Spider (2005) by Richard A. Knaak. * Kingdom of Shadow, The (2002), by Richard A. Knaak. * Black Road, The (2001), by Mel Odom. * Legacy of Blood (2001), by Richard A. Knaak. * Demonsbane (2000), a Robert B. Marks' e-book.

Online Multiplayer

As of 2016 Diablo's online peer-to-peer matching remains officially supported by Battle.net.

References

Cain's real name is Deckard Cain the Elder. It may be a reference to Rick Deckard played by Harrison Ford in the movie Blade Runner.

Shareware Version

There was also a shareware version available on CD which featured a fair amount of gameplay including all three classes and even multiplayer. The player could buy it for a small amount of money in many stores around the time of the release of the full game.

System Compatibility

This is one of the few games that will run natively on Windows NT. Diablo requires DirectX 3, but the installation CD comes with DirectX 5.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Game of the Year.
    • October 2001 - #7 in the "Top 50 Games of All Time" list.
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Role-Playing Game of the Year (Readers' Choice).
    • December 1999 (Issue #185) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame.
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #8 Best Game of All Time (Readers' Vote).
    • April 2005 - #6 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list.
    • Hall of Fame member.
  • GameSpy

    • 2001 – #6 Top Game of All Time.
    • GameStar (Germany)

    • Issue 12/1999 - #11 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking.

    • PC Gamer

    • April 2000 - #3 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll.

    • PC Player (Germany)

    • Issue 01/1998 - Best RPG in 1997.

    • Power Play

    • Issue 02/1998 – Best Game in 1997.

French SELL Rating

Diablo first SELL rating was 12, which was later changed to 16

French Version

The Windows version of Diablo was never localized in French. Though the box included a coupon which was meant to be mailed in order to receive the localized version as soon as it would have been completed, it was actually never released. The 2nd edition of the game (which claimed to be the "definitive" one) only included a booklet with the translated dialogues written inside. Oddly enough, a fully localized French version of the game (even including a full professional cast for the voice acting) does exist but was released only for the PlayStation.

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Alan Chan, Isak, Entorphane, Kalirion, Kasey Chang, kbmb, Patrick Bregger, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, Scott Monster, Sicarius.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

PlayStation added by Kartanym. Macintosh added by Xoleras.

Additional contributors: Indra was here, Jeanne, Sciere, jean-louis, Vaelor, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Lain Crowley, FatherJack, MalenkiyPoslannik, RetroArchives.fr.

Game added October 31, 1999. Last modified March 18, 2024.