Diablo (video game)
Diablo is a point and click action computer role-playing game released by Blizzard Entertainment and developed by Blizzard North, released on December 30, 1996. In this hack and slash game, players fight against evil demons attempting to conquer the world. The central goal in Diablo is to slay the many demons summoned by Diablo, the Lord of Terror, in a sixteen-level "labyrinth" underneath the small town of Tristram, and ultimately confront Diablo himself. Diablo contains an amazing amount of replayability because of its randomly generated levels. These levels are in turn randomly populated with monsters that drop random items imbued with random magical properties.
Diablo in many ways resembles roguelike games, the main differences being the vastly more realistic graphics (utilizing DirectX) and the fact the game is in real time, rather than turn based.
Its popular sequel and its subsequent expansion pack extend the gameplay through additions such as new character classes, monsters, items, quests, areas, and plot. The latest installment, the expansion pack for Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction has a huge online gaming community, complete with a primitive gameworld economy due to the rarity of most of the popular items.
Classes
The three character classes of Diablo are the warrior, rogue, and sorcerer. Each character, following typical role-playing conventions, has his or her own particular traits. The warrior possesses physical strength, the rogue is very agile, and the sorcerer is oriented towards magic. However, unlike modern class-based games, character's abilities are not unique; a warrior can use spells and a sorcerer can use a bow.
- Warrior: The warrior is a powerful melee fighter, master of weapons of war and capable of enduring more damage than any of the other classes. Seeking fortune and glory, warriors come to Tristram every day to challenge the dark unknown in the subterranean labyrinth. They are not necessarily of any particular clan or group and range from barbarians from the northern highlands to noble paladins. Warriors are able to repair their equipment at the cost of diminishing maximum durability. The amount of maximum durability lost with use decreases as character level increases. Given this lost durability, most players opt instead to pay for non-destructive repairs in town for equipment they will be using in the long-term.
- Rogue: The Sisters of the Sightless Eye are the best archers in the world of Sanctuary and the Rogue therefore is master of killing enemies from a distance. They are more intelligent than warriors and thus able to make good use of magic in their battles, although not nearly as well as sorcerors. Willing to test their skills against the evil in the labyrinth, where untold riches are rumored to be stashed, Rogues have come from the Far East to Tristram. Rogues have the ability to spot doors, chests and sarcophagi that have traps are able to disarm them. The chance to successfully disarm a trap increases with the character's dexterity attribute.
- Sorcerer: A powerful master of the arcane arts, the sorcerer is the hero that is able to achieve the greatest heights of magic, so that he may never use weapons - he can kill his enemies solely with magic, whether it would be balls and walls of fire or powerful bolts of lightning. Eager to gather knowledge about demons and see them slain, Sorcerer Acolytes of the Vizjerei mage clan have come to Tristram - seeking to discover long lost tomes of magic knowledge under the cathedral. The sorcerer is able to recharge magic staves at the cost of the maximum number of charges. The amount of maximum charges lost with use decreases as character level increases. As per the warrior class's skill, this is less-used in late-game and with equipment used in the long-term.
Character Attributes
The four numerical character attributes in Diablo affect the characters' combat statistics which in turn determine how powerful the character is. With each level up, five points may be distributed among the "Base" attributes to permanently increase them at the player's choice. They may also be modified by elixirs and magical shrines encountered in the game. Various magical items acquired in game increase the effective character attributes "Now" (while these items are being used).
- Strength affects the amount of damage the character may deal in melee combat. Advanced armor and weapons have minimum Strength requirements.
- Magic affects the amount of mana the character has (see Character Statistics). Also, many spells are affected in some way (such as damage dealt) by the Magic attribute. Spellbooks, staves, and many scrolls have minimum Magic requirements.
- Dexterity affects the chance of hitting enemies in combat and the chance of being hit by enemies. It also increases the amount of damage dealt by ranged attacks. Advanced bows have minimum Dexterity requirements.
- Vitality affects the Life statistic of the character (see Character Statistics).
Character Statistics
- Life represents how much damage the character can take before dying, also informally called "hit points". The amount of Life remaining is constantly displayed as a red orb on the left.
- Mana represents the character's spiritual life force. Casting spells requires mana. Therefore the more mana is available, the more spells can be cast. The amount of Mana remaining is constantly displayed as a blue orb on the right.
- Chance to Hit represents the likelihood that physical attacks will inflict damage on their targets. The caveat is that players must carefully control ranged attacks to actually enter the game tiles that their targets occupy; failing this, there is zero chance to hit.
- Armor Class represents the amount and quality of armor worn as a whole, modeling this as a reduction in chance of being hit. The body location, type of armor (fabric, chain, plate), and type of attack (bow, sword, etc.) are not considered by the game in combat. Armor does not protect a character against magical attacks.
- Damage represents the reduction in Life a physical attack will cause if it hits.
- Resist Fire, Resist Lightning, and Resist Magic represent the character's ability to resist damage from the respective categories of magical attacks. "Magic" attacks are all those that are not fire or lightning, which include magical acid. These statistics can only be non-zero as a result of the use of magical items, as characters can never innately possess resistance. None of the resistances can exceed 75% under any conditions for any character, though some creatures in the Labyrinth have immunities to Fire, Lightning, or Magic.
Monsters
The monsters of Diablo are undead monstrosities, vicious creatures of the night, and demons spawned from Hell. As the player progresses, he passes through four discrete areas: the church, the catacombs, the caves, and Hell, which starts to seep into the mortal plane due to Diablo's presence. Each of the sixteen levels contains monsters that are tougher and stronger than ones from the level before it. When the player kills a monster, the monster may randomly drop an item or gold.
In the world of Diablo, monsters are divided according to their masters.
The followers of Mephisto, the Lord of Hatred, are the undead (skeletons and zombies), demonically corrupted creatures whose unshapely forms and twisted limbs leave them in eternal agony and rage (overlords), and lava demons spawned by the spilling of Mephisto's blood in Hell.
The followers of Baal, the Lord of Destruction, are creatures that seek the undoing of the physical Universe and the manifestation of chaos. Some of them include the Fallen Ones, Goat Men and Poison Spitters.
The minions of Diablo, the Lord of Terror, are the fears of man in a corporeal form, figuratively-speaking. They prefer to attack their victims from the shadows, especially after their prey demonstrates weakness. Some of those demons are The Hidden and Scavengers.
In Diablo, enemies are also divided in 3 groups:
- Animals: take greater damage from swords/blades and less damage from blunt/clubbing weapons.
- Demons: Take equal damage from all kinds of weapons.
- Undead: Take greater damage from blunt/clubbing weapons and less damage from swords/blades. Only type (aside from Diablo himself) vulnerable to Holy Bolt spell.
Items
Items are dropped from monsters or sold by the vendors. Items can be:
- Normal: Common mundane items without any special attributes. Most abundant in the game.
- Magic: Enchanted items that have one or two beneficial effects to the wearer.
- Cursed: Similar to Magic items, except that at least one of the effects is actually harmful. These become very rare past early game.
- Unique: Very powerful and hard to come across items that may have up to 6 magic bonuses (including a unique outer appearance). They grant great bonuses but might also possess some negative qualities.
Story
The story of Diablo is based on the premise of a war between Heaven and Hell. The town of Tristram is under attack by demons, and the player must save the town. As the player delves into the underworld, he discovers more about the demon Diablo, through large tomes that are read aloud by a narrator. Eventually, the player reaches the lair of Diablo and must kill him. Here is a more detailed summary of Diablo's background story:
Diablo, an incredible powerful demon, is the Lord of Terror and one of the Three Prime Evils of Hell, who had been imprisoned in a Soulstone and buried in caverns deep beneath the town of Tristram. Though his imprisonment was meant to be eternal, the power of the Soulstone weakened over the centuries, eventually allowing Diablo to awaken from his forced slumber. He telepathically turns a nearby human, the archbishop Lazarus, into his loyal puppet. In order for Diablo to actually leave the Soulstone, Diablo needs a human body to possess. At first he tries to gain control of King Leoric, the local ruler, through his puppet, Lazarus. But, since Diablo is in too weak of a state to possess the king, he fails and merely drives the unfortunate monarch insane. He then gets Lazarus to kidnap King Leoric's son, Prince Albrecht, so that Diablo can possess and warp his body, thereby attaining physical form and freedom from the stone. At the moment of the boy's possession, his terror is so great that the boundaries between the realms are broken and parts of Hell itself seep into the mortal world and take root in the subterranean labyrinth. beneath Tristram. Diablo may have a body now, but he is nowhere near his full power, so he bides his time and summons countless hordes of demons and infests the whole underground complex, claiming the new region of Hell as his own personal lair.
Soon afterwards the maddened Leoric is slain by his own lieutenants. Demonic creatures appear in the countryside as the Lord of Terror regains his strength in the heart of the labyrinth and prepares for the time when he would once again emerge in the world and seek out his brothers - Baal and Mephisto - and free them as well. It seemed to be a matter of time until the Prime Evils gained dominion over the entire mortal realm.
Then, one day, a lone traveller approaches the town of Tristram...
Online play
Diablo can be played with others over the Internet via Battle.net.
Unfortunately, the game lacked the rigorous anti-cheating methods of Blizzard's later games and as a result, many characters online are hacked in various ways and many players utilize third-party hacking programs. It is difficult to play a fair online game of Diablo in public games, as hacks and duplicated items are common. The use of trainers (which modify memory locations while the game is running in order to cheat) is fairly common and character editors are often used to give incredible statistics to even newly-created characters. Additionally, buggy game code allows any player who knows how to infinitely duplicate items and avoid stunning in combat using the Mana Shield spell. A typical duped/hacked item seen online is the "Godly Plate of the Whale", a combination of enchantments which actually can never appear on a legitimate item due to the way the game generates items. However, a number of legitimate players still exist and may be found primarily on forums related to Diablo if necessary.
Expansion Packs
The only official expansion pack made for Diablo was the Hellfire and was produced by Sierra Entertainment rather than an in-house development team in 1997. The game featured two additional dungeon segments located within a new side storyline, several new unique items and magical item properties, new spells, and a fourth class, the Monk. There were also two possibly-unfinished "test" classes (the Bard and Barbarian) and two quests which could be accessed though a configuration file.
The expansion pack never achieved the fame of the original, and is hard to obtain today. Some complaints included the fact that much of its content seemed less "polished" than that of the original game, nor did the new content mesh with the atmosphere of the original perfectly. Hellfire was also relatively buggy, and since a version of Diablo with Hellfire installed could not be patched using Blizzard's Diablo patches, and Sierra themselves only released one patch for Hellfire, Hellfire retained some bugs that the original Diablo did not. Hellfire also had design problems wherein many of the new unique items could simply never be found.
Secrets and hidden files
Like a great majority of games, Diablo has many files hidden on its CD that were never used. Some of these "loose ends" are:
- Some spells never made it into the final game. The original game was supposed to have six spellbook pages (this can be checked in Diablo's manual, page 18, in a screenshot where the spellbook has six pages), unlike the four in the final, and the spells left on the CD are: Invisibility (whose icon graphic was reused for the Teleport spell in Diablo 2), Blood Boil, Blood Ritual, Doom Serpents, Etherealize, and Sentinel. Most of these spells are disabled, but some, like Etherealize, can be enabled with the help of hacks, and Doom Serpents' graphics can still be extracted from the game's main data file.
- Some enemies don't appear in the final game, such as the Unraveler (which is now a monster found in Act 2 of Diablo 2), Goat Lord, Incinerator, Bone Demon, Invisible Lord, The Arch Lich Malignus, and Devil Kin Brute. Their images can still be viewed in sprite form (.cl2) in the game's main data file. Several of these monsters later appeared in Hellfire.
- A towner named Tremain the Priest does not appear in the final game, but there are sound files of his speech in the game's main data file. He was supposed to travel in and out of Tristram. He was also supposed to be the trigger of the "Fleshdoom, Wielder of Shadowfang" quest, which also never made it into the game's final stage. In that quest, when you return the ancient demonblade named Shadowfang to Tremain he becomes consumed with hellfire, disappears, and does not seem to return for the rest of the game. He was also said to have been supposed to guide you through the "Archbishop Lazarus" quest, instead of Cain; your reward in that quest is a mace called Lightforge.
- Many hints for quests that never made it into the final game can still be viewed on the game's main data file. These include "Izual, the Fallen Angel," in which the player talks to Gillian the Barmaid and receives a quest to find and destroy Izual to release his tormented soul. The reward of this quest was likely Azurewrath, a unique sword. Both the quest and the sword were used separately in Diablo 2.
- Two cutscenes appear on the CD but not in the game. One of them is a video you are supposed to see when you enter Archbishop Lazarus' lair, and the other one is a different video of Diablo dying.
- Many item graphics were never used in the final game, including the Map of the Stars, which was hacked many times into the game and spread over Battle.net. When the stars become aligned, Diablo will become "all but invincible," so you had to complete this quest on time or you "may never have a chance to rid the world of his evil ever again." This is the only quest of the whole lot which was ever officially recognized by Blizzard. They said that it was turned off because it "changed the way you played Diablo."
- A sound file of the game's namesake, apparently speaking in tongues, is played when entering level 16. It can be extracted from the game's main data file and, when played backwards, produces "Eat your vegetables and brush after every meal." The file is named lvl16int.wav; it is in the directory sfx/misc in the MPQ file named DIABDAT located on the Diablo CD.
The Legendary Cow Level
One of the more infamous aspects of Diablo was something that didn't actually exist. It was a rumour started on the internet about a secret level, which (according to many posts) supposedly contained ridiculously powerful items, incredibly powerful enemies, and was headed up by a boss more powerful than Diablo himself. The manner of accessing this level varied from report to report, but the most popular involved clicking on one of the cows in Tristram more than fifty times in a row. As such, it eventually became known as the "Cow Level". Of course, it did not really exist; no matter how many times you clicked on the cow, it would only ever cause the cow to moo at you. Internet forums were awash with increasingly grandiose stories by players who claimed to have been to the cow level, along with the various items they found and monsters they fought. Later in the rumour's life, players new to the idea became confused by the 'cow level' name, and described the level as being full of cow monsters: one popular version of the rumour stated that the cow level contained 'cow' varients on every type monster in the game, for example, an acid spitter with a bell round its neck, a white and black skin pattern, and a milk spraying attack. The boss in this version of the cow level rumour was a monstrous creature called the Cow King, who was indeed supposedly stronger than Diablo.
Although the cow level was nothing but a fantasy and a lie, badly edited screenshots and detailed stories kept it alive for years, to the point where Blizzard, who'd been receiving 'how do I get to the cow level' emails for a long time, put a cheat code in Starcraft: 'there is no cow level.' Typing this caused instant victory.
As a personal bit of fan service, Blizzard actually did put a cow level in Diablo II, although it was merely a very large area full of monsters called 'Hell Bovines' who were cows walking upright and carrying spears. All of their sound files were different ways of saying 'moo'. Netlore has it that the ridiculously bad voices of the cows were created by recording various Blizzard employees saying "moo." The Cow King did make an appearance, but only as a unique Hell Bovine, nowhere near as strong as Diablo.
In recent years, since the real cow level was discovered, the cow level is rarely brought up other than as a joke, for example, World of Warcraft players who tell each other about a cow level that can be accessed from Mulgore, the homeland of the Tauren, who are a race of anthropomorphic bulls and cows.
Trivia
- References to Diablo are scattered throughout the various Blizzard products that followed. For example:
- In Starcraft, the Protoss Arbiter unit is heard to repeat Adria's greeting line, 'I sense a soul in search of answers.'.
- Also in Starcraft, the Protoss Observer, if repeatedly clicked on, will actually play the exact file in Adria's voice, albeit slightly obscured by static. The Observer will also play a line of Griswold's, namely the line he speaks as he gets overenthusiastic about the large mushroom.
- In the last Human level of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, one of the hostile units is the Butcher. As he attacks the player's units, he even greets them the same way he greets the player in Diablo: "Ahhh, fresh meat!"
- Close to the Butcher in the same level is an item called 'Wirt's Other Leg', referencing the club called 'Wirt's Leg' from Diablo II. Also, one of the items that can be found in Blizzard's MMORPG, World of Warcraft, is called 'Wirt's Third Leg'.
PC system requirements
- 60MHz Pentium
- 8MB RAM
- Windows 95/98/NT
- SVGA video card
- Microsoft compatible mouse
- 2x CD-ROM
Macintosh system requirements
- PowerPC processor
- 16MB RAM (32MB recommended)
- System 7.5 or better (up to Mac OS 9.2.2)
- 256 color display or better
- Mouse
- 2x CD-ROM
Other versions
A version of the game was released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, published by Electronic Arts.
See also
External links
- Blizzard's official Diablo site
- Diablo at MobyGames
- Diablo Wiki - The Diablo Wiki (still under construction).
- Freshman Diablo - a series of introductory and advanced strategy guides written by expert players.
- Jarulf's Guide to Diablo and Hellfire - an extremely in-depth technical guide to the game and its expansion.
- The Lurker Lounge - An information and forum site devoted to Blizzard games, especially the Diablo series.
- Planet Diablo - official Diablo site at Gamespy.