Intermission: Diablo II

I am going to continue on with the Elder Scrolls series, but recently after reminiscing with some friends about Diablo II, I felt the impulse to install it and play a bit. So, a couple of remarks while it's fresh

I played the original Diablo when it came out, and loved it. Diablo was the first graphical computer game to use the formula of the so-called "roguelike" ascii-graphics games: the dungeons and critters and treasure were randomly generated, so the game played differently every time. Daggerfall of course did this too, in a vast, sprawling full-3D game; Diablo was a less ambitious but more polished little isometric 2D game. Movement and combat were the simplest possible point-and-click. It could be played either alone or in coop multiplayer mode; I played these games before I discovered the joys of multiplayer gaming, so can only comment on the single-player game. There was one town and one dungeon, a 16-level affair that started in the old cathedral that had been occupied by demons; there were four levels each of four different tilesets, cathedral, catacombs, caves, and hell. Besides the random dungeons Diablo had random items; and it was the itemization system that propelled the series past the other hack-n-slash games of its time and of many years afterwards. Both found and bought items were generated and named randomly using a "prefix and suffix" system where particular enchantments were associated with particular modifiers. Unlike other graphical CRPGs of its era, you never knew when or where or even whether you might find the Breathless Sword of Kickassedness, and this motivated players and kept the game fresh months and years after it had been beaten the first time.

I loved Diablo I, which in addition to its ever-changing maps and treasure also had a haunting atmosphere and a story which was not epic, but was nonetheless well-told via a series of conversations with townsfolk and small quests that sent you deeper and deeper under the town. When I heard of a sequel I began to follow its development closely on diabloii.net, an excellent fansite that flourishes with much of the same personnel to this day. I followed every screenshot and snippet of story as they were released. I was disappointed not to get into the closed beta but I did make it into the stress test, a large-scale beta designed to test server capacity; this was my first experience in full-on pre-release fan mode, and I was hooked.

When I got the game home — within minutes of its arrival in my local EBX — and started to play, my expectations were more than fulfilled. It retained the basic features of the original — random maps and items — and realized them on a much larger scale. While Diablo I was almost entirely underground, much of Diablo II plays out on the surface, with only occasional relatively shallow caves, dungeons and tunnels. There are four "acts" in the original game, and a fifth was added in the Lord of Destruction expansion pack; each act however comprises a large number of different tilesets, so the territory you play in seems vast and varied. Each area has a town and a number of wilderness regions; pastures, desert, jungle, the depths of hell, and in the expansion, a snowy mountain peak, plus several interior and cave tilesets in each region. And of course mention must be made of the "secret cow level" full of halberd-wielding bipedal bovines, originally an easter egg and developer joke, but ultimately a critical source of items and experience.

These enormous areas are packed full of gameplay. Enemies, of course. Large packs of ordinary monsters, which generate in random combinations so that different skills are required on different playthroughs and exhibit varying group and individual AI. Randomly generated and named mini-bosses with random special abilities which they share with their guards. Fixed bosses related to quests, and a challenging end boss in each Act, whose defeat is necessary to progress to the next Act. There is also treasure galore, not just from the enemies, but also from chests and urns and boxes and barrels and in beds and under rocks… in short, all over. And there are other features, such as shrines and wells that give temporary buffs.

Like Diablo, Diablo II has a number of different character classes to choose from (eight with the expack), which provide radically different gameplay possibilities, from the skeleton-summoning Necromancer to the brutish Barbarian. Diablo II however departs from the original in adding a complex skill progression system, or Skill Tree. Every level up yields a point, and the player must choose where to spend it among skills divided into three areas per class. For instance, an amazon can spend points in bow, javelin, and passive skills; a mage can choose frost, fire, or lightning. (The talent system in World of Warcraft is clearly derived in most respects from Diablo's skills.) You can put points in multiple areas, but there is also a prerequisite system; advanced skills may require more basic skills from the same tree before they can be used, which encourages specialization. And finally, there are skill synergies, whereby points spent in one skill may improve another skill as well. For instance, an amazon that spends points in any lighting-based skill will have damage added to their Lightning Fury attack. The net result of all this complexity is that one character class has several different viable builds. A bow Amazon plays significantly differently from a javelin Amazon or a spear Amazon.

As in Diablo, the story is fairly simple, and progresses mostly linearly, through a series of quests with expository dialogue from NPCs and through brilliantly executed CG cutscenes between acts. This is not a game with a rich detailed fantasy world behind it, like the Elder Scrolls series; but the story is compelling and drives the player forward. It essentially involves a race between the player and a demonic figure, who turns out to be a corrupted avatar of the player/hero from Diablo. The player is always just too late to prevent the demon from accomplishing its goals, and even the finale of the expack leaves one with the unsettling feeling that one didn't quite win. If the goal is to keep the player playing, this approach is fiendishly effective. This effect is magnified by the fact that there are three difficulty levels with significant differences between them; enemies don't simply become stronger, areas also get larger, boss fights get more complex, and new encounters are added. Each level is only unlocked when the game is over at the previous level. So the game is not "beaten" until one has played to the end three times.

The item system in Diablo II is even richer than Diablo's. Items come in various qualities, from cracked to unique; the quality affects the number and level of modifiers the item can have. Some items are socketed and can be enhanced, through gems (which add modest buffs), jewels (which add multiple enchantments), and runes (which add buffs individually, and additionally can be combined to form "runewords" to add increasingly rare and powerful features). There are also item sets, which are good items in themselves but when worn together add extra enchantments. Moreover there is an object called the "Horadric Cube", obtained as part of the Act II questline, which can combine items to improve their properties: upgrade gems and potions, add sockets to an item, or randomly change an item's stats, for example. Many of these features were added post-release; besides the expansion pack, ten patches kept the game growing for years after release, with each one providing not just bug and balance fixes but significant new toys to play with.

Multiplayer was an afterthought in Diablo, but it was incorporated from the start in Diablo II, and a number of game features reflect this. There is no true single-player style save/restore system; all areas are rerandomized and repopulated each time you start the game, which means that if you quit with a zone half-cleared, you have to reclear a differently-shaped zone full of different enemies the next time you start up. The only progress that is saved is your quests and your waypoints, a system of teleporters that take you back and forth from town; a waypoint is activated only after you have visited it, so you can fast-forward to the last region you were in using the waypoint. Another artifact of the multiplayer design is the "corpse ghost run" feature familiar from many multiplayer games, where if you die, rather than just restoring your last save, you have to travel in non-corporeal form to your body and recover it, at some risk since whatever killed you may still be around (and with a penalty in gold and experience). As someone who primarily plays in single player mode, I found these conventions irrational and annoying; it would surely have been easy enough to add a save-and-restore feature for that mode only. But it is a small price to pay for the compelling features of the gameplay.

I played Diablo II heavily for years, and as I confessed above, I still pick it up from time to time. The graphics, at 800×600 resolution, are horribly blocky on my 1600×1200 monitor, and there are no more surprises, but the gameplay has just enough variation from random terrain and just enough interestingly different playstyles from the character classes and all their variants to be simple and stimulating simultaneously. And more than that, the next fabulous item find is always just around the corner.

Advertisement