Stay a While and Listen, Remembering the Original Diablo
With the exception of their 1 unique ability (Warrior’s repair, Rogue’s disarm, and the Sorcerer’s recharge) each class could learn every ability. Warriors could cast fireballs if you so wished and Sorcerers could level strength in order to wear the same heavy armor the Warrior did. The customization was a cool feature, but besides their statistics (strength, magic, dexterity, and vitality) all three classes were basically the same. No skills, no special animations, just click, kill, loot, repeat.
The potion system was also laughable as instead of granting health over time they took effect instantly. This mean that with enough potions you were essentially immortal, even if a mob chunked half of your health per hit, chugging a health pot would reverse it. The downside was that they didn’t stack, and there was no special hotbar for them, so if you wanted 8 potions at the ready you needed to use all 8 hotbar slots.
Ah yes, bards will sing tales of the hero who could hold 8 potions.
If you read the reviews though you wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with the game at all, in fact Diablo still retains a score of 94 on Metacritic. Most of this can get chalked-up to nostalgia or simply a general lack of fair and balanced game reviewing in those days. I mean just look at a few of these, nothing but 100s across the board for each and every game. Psh and people think that game reporting is bad now; I don’t remember a game receiving anything less than a 95 as a kid. Buying a game was a gamble as very few game reviewers took their job seriously.
So yeah, you might not be too psyched about all the problems plaguing the release of Diablo III, you paid for the game, it was released, and you want to play it. I get it. But remember, every game in every generation has its own set of unique problems, some small, and others not so much. Having been there for the release of the original I must say that I’d take these problems over the ones I dealt with as a teenager any day. Reviews still generally suck, but they’re better than they were. I’m not disconnected every time the phone rings. But most importantly, there is a place for players to report problems to Blizzard. If it doesn’t work at least you can tell them what the problem is; maybe you’ll even get some feedback as to when the problem will be fixed. We didn’t have that when I was a kid, if the game didn’t work or the servers had problems the only recourse we had was to turn the game off and try again later. We might have even had to go outside. Yikes.
I fondly remember my days in the original Diablo. Like you, I bought it on a whim after seeing it mentioned in my other Blizzard games. And I was not disappointed. I spent hours playing on my own, and when I discovered the wonders of the multiplayer, all was lost.
The worst part for me (or the people I played with I suppose) was that as a young kid playing, my character seemed to have split personality disorder. On some days, I’d create games doing nothing but running noobs all the way through to Hell, giving them duped items for free just cause I felt that awesome. On other days, I was a menace who would snatch loot from people, player kill, and just generally be a dick. Ah, those were the days.
D3 just like DukeForever cannot and will not live up to the expectations (just to be clear – D3 seem to good game while DukeF was crap from a-z).
Still Diablo with Hell patch is very very playable and offers many new challenges and fixes.
I only started playing Diablo II for about a year before LOD came out, then I jumped on that. Ah I remember those days, they were fun. I too am waiting to buy and play part III and like you am waiting until all the bugs and glitches get corrected. Cant wait!
Anyways good read, kudos to the author.
One slight factual correction: although you could develop your characters to learn the skills of the other classes (ie. strength for a mage, magic for a warrior), the caps on those abilities varied with classes – eg. warriors maxed out magic at 50, rogues a bit higher, and wizards the highest (about 250 I think?). So really, while developing other skills could be useful, especially for things like teaching your warrior to cast Town Portal, by the end of the game you could only be powerful enough in your main abilities to survive.
I remember playing Diabolo, it was pretty awesome, but I didn’t have internet back then.
The other thing is, you used to buy a game and then you were able to play it, whenever you liked. Now I cannot play whenever I like to. I didn’t buy Diablo III and only have MW3, but it has the same problem. The same problem as all new games I guess. The internet is down or something in the universe isn’t right and you cannot play due to some stupid reasen/error. Why should I bother paying for something that I then do not really own. That’s why I don’t play so many games anymore. Don’t have the time either.
Wow, this article seriously took me back. Especially the shout outs to JNCOs and the 50 free hours AOL cds. Holy hell, I’m old.
Still in play these days…3 characters all around 25+ lvl right now =) D2 too boring for me after normal difficulty…D3 “server w8/problems” just annoying…i see this problem in beta so i cancel my pre-order few days before release–good call i guess =)
I loved the spawn install idea. Glad they bought a similar thing back with the 2 free guest passes.
Diablo I… I still remember fondly my silly adventures. I was a warrior and as all normal sane persons, I clicked on every shrine I could find. Unfortunately one of them took some of your magic points (maybe it gave you strenght?) permanently.
After a while I opened a door *lag spike* and I was dead on the floor, 10 acid spitting dogs still shooting at my perished corpse. I ventured back to my corpse only to realize that I had a total of 3 maximum mana as naked person. And that precious telekinesis skill cost a lot more. And I couldn’t just walk to my corpse and take the items since the acid dogs disagreed with that strategy.
So.. I went back to level one and started killing lowly skeletons with my bare fists in hope to get random +magic item to get my maximum mana up. After an hour or so I finally did it and was able to telekinesize my items from a safe spot.
I first found out about Diablo when a co-worker showed it to me at work. It looked interesting, but clunky. I finally picked up a copy when it went on sale, and that was it. I killed Diablo with all 3 character classes. It was truly amazing that the game had the replay value to do that, especially for me, when I wasn’t a big fan of RPG games. But it was good, and the random dungeons were really cool.