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That's an interesting thought, but I'd assume 20 year old 3D models wouldn't be much use today, would they?

I know they were thinking about making D2 a 3D game at first, like Runescape, but then went with 2D, because 3D technology wasn't at a point that allowed them to carry over the gritty and dark theme they wanted for Diablo. And then went on to make D3 look as cartoony as it does... They used photos of clay figurines for Diablo 1, would be fun if they remade that with 3D scanning techniques. Do check out David Brevik's post mortem on D1 from GDC by the way, it's fantastic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

Diablo was far from the first ARPG, but given how influential it has been for the genre, I was floored to learn that it was actually designed and implemented as a turn-based game, and only turned into an Action RPG by request of folks at the main Blizzard office.

The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.

Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.

He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

⬐ RobRivera

This post portem is gold. I recall seeing it before and realizing how sometimes gold really is just a few brushes of dust and dirt away, but you need to be diligent in testing out new ideas for the sake of seeing a product in different versions. Its an exciting process

⬐ setgree

The part of the video discussing real-time vs turn-based begins around 22:50

⬐ None

None

⬐ jlawson

It must have been the original "time only moves when you do".

⬐ musicale

Does anyone recall how Ultima 1 works?

Can you be attacked while you are standing still or do you have to make a move to clock the game?

(I think the early Ultima games I've tried are 2 and 3, and I think enemies could attack you while you were standing still but I'm not entirely sure.)

⬐ pvg

I think 1 is strictly turn based and in 2 and 3 a turn happens automatically if you do nothing for a few seconds.

⬐ 082349872349872

Crypt of the NecroDancer has a "you move only when time does" mechanic.

⬐ jonny_eh

That’s a super hot idea.

⬐ Shish2k

I’m pretty sure NetHack works that way (Perhaps the whole genre all the way back to the original Rogue, but nethack is the one that I’ve personally played)

⬐ smabie

Yes, of course, that's how they all work. A real time game wouldn't work over a tty.

⬐ JoshTriplett

It could on a reasonably good glass tty over a low-latency connection, just not on an old one over a high-latency connection.

⬐ davedx

Muds work over tty don’t they? I played a MUD for many years that was just as fast paced as Diablo

⬐ m463

I swear there was a real-time game I played over a tty long ago. An ascii shooter, maybe star trek or similar?

At first I thought snake did it, but now I think that might have been move-countermove.

⬐ bitcurious

That was great, thanks for sharing!

⬐ iphone_elegance

It's a shame that when ever I hear of Blizzard all I can think about is their anti-democracy shenanigans

they did have some pretty cool days in the past though

⬐ tych0

Thanks for the link!

I spent thousands of hours playing Diablo 2 through middle school-graduate school, developing bots, etc.; it's where I really got interested in computers and reverse engineering. My dad locked the disk in our family's safe at one point to prevent me from playing, and I've had hundreds of cd-keys banned from Battle.net. I'm sure many people out there are the same, but it's hard to overstate how much that one game influenced my life. Awesome to see that it was made by such a great guy.

⬐ nathias

sojs = lol

⬐ chungus

It's so nice for me to read this and be able to relate. I probably wouldn't be working as a software developer today if I hadn't spent those countless hours as a kid hacking the game, setting up (d2jsp) bots, fiddling to run multiple instances on the same computer, scripting together bot detection evasion patterns etc etc.

Recently installed it again during lockdown after not playing for a good 10 years. Still has some 20k+ people online at times. Really solid game.

I don't think any of this was mentioned in Brevik's postmortem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

⬐ _iyig

It blew my mind a little when he said the name “Diablo” came from Mt. Diablo, which sits practically on top of Silicon Valley.

⬐ swivelmaster

It's really not that close (and not very big, either).

You picked the wrong time to use that example, considering that Nintendo will soon release Super Mario Maker 2, a new game which includes a mode with virtually unchanged mechanics from Super Mario Bros 3. https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/super-mario-maker-2-sw...

Regarding Roguelikes, the biggest change was Diablo in 1996. Diablo was arguably a Roguelike with fancy graphics and a real-time mode hacked onto a turn-based core. https://youtu.be/VscdPA6sUkc?t=1643

⬐ Cthulhu_

Good reference; Diablo however was different enough (mostly having to do with the randomly generated weapons, repetitive gameplay / grinding, online functionality) to become its own genre though (ARPG iirc?). In turn there's a lot of games now with e.g. random weapons (like Borderlands) who reference that system as Diablo or ARPG-like, instead of Roguelike.

there's a bit of discussion about isometric tile rendering nonsense, although not specific to vsync, in David Brevik's diablo postmortem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

along with a whole lot of other fascinating stuff

⬐ ddingus

That was a great video. Enjoyable talk.

At one point, they were drawing tiles, the walls associated with them, objects, etc...

Moving objects would end up between tiles and the sprite would be cut off by a different tile draw. Worse, there was no sort order that worked for all cases. They ended up creating, what the speaker called "an ai" to move the object away from the draw conflict, get it all drawn, then move the player back, just ahead of the actual motion...

In hindsight, they could have just decoupled the walls from the tiles and it all could have been a lot simpler!

For anyone interested in the history of Diablo, the GDC post mortem is well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

Quite a bit of detail regarding the origin of the game, going turn-based to real-time, the studio becoming Blizzard North, etc.

Also here's the original design doc: https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf

I was never a huge Diablo fan, but I could always appreciate the things people liked about it. I gained new respect for it from watching Brevik's GDC postmortem [0] from a couple of years ago.

I love the idea that it was originally a dungeon crawl inspired by X-COM and would love to play one of the early builds before they changed to real-time combat.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

Allow me to quote Diablo developer David Brevik describing when he finally yielded to demands and hacked together a "real time" version of his turn-based Diablo, by making turns elapse the rate of 20 turns a second.

'I remember taking the mouse, and I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and and smacked the skeleton down, and I was like "Oh my god! That was awesome!".'

'And the sun shone through the window, and God passed by, and the angels sung, and sure enough that was when the ARPG was kind of born at that moment, and I was lucky enough to be there.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc?t=27m

If you're in this part of this comment thread, you'll probably enjoy the whole video.

⬐ amsilprotag

If you're interested in Blizzard history, there's a 4-hour interview with Rob Pardo hosted by Civ 4 lead and Offworld Trading Company creator Soren Johnson. Pardo also recounts the beginnings of Diablo in part one around ~1:27:00, although he wasn't involved in the project at that time.

Starcraft, WoW, and Hearthstone are also discussed. Warning: audio quality is not great.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-...

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-...

⬐ hsljekskfh

on that note, i read a book on blizzard's history "stay awhile and listen" that was not worth it. maybe it was because i read it right after masters of doom, but it felt like they were afraid to say anything negative, and as a result it's boring and also very hard to learn from whatever failures and successes they had.

⬐ AdmiralAsshat

Mm, yep, thanks for that. Primary sources always better than secondary.

I kinda take issue with saying "the ARPG was born at that moment", though. We had JRPGs for almost a decade before that included realtime combat.

⬐ netzone

ARPG is not the same as a realtime RPG...

⬐ e12e

This is really significant ; I remember playing a real-time (multilayer) Angband variant for like a minute: the gameplay didn’t translate at all to "realtime".

It's one of my strongest experiences of ux ever. The actual realisation of going from turn based balanced fun to tick based balanced fun is far from obvious!

⬐ frenchie4111

Timed link is wrong, use this for that exact moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc&t=27m

⬐ djur

Ultima Underworld (1993), Ultima Underworld II (1994), Ultima VII (1994), and The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) all come to mind quickly as computer-based action RPGs that preceded Diablo (1996). And the Japanese were making top-down action RPGs as early as the '80s, especially those made by Nihon Falcom (Ys) and Quintet (Soul Blazer). I would particularly cite Brandish (1991, Nihon Falcom) as a similar type of realtime action dungeon crawler (although it wasn't released in the West until 1995).

All that isn't to diminish the substantial achievements of Diablo, which was quite innovative. The fast, smooth gameplay was novel, as was the setting. It was compulsively playable and accessible while a lot of earlier action RPGs were kind of clunky. The art design was superb -- everything from the dreary, gothic environs to the satisfying animation and sound of a pile of gold bursting forth from a slain enemy. It's fair to say that Diablo was a milestone in ARPG history and highly influential.

⬐ Will_Parker

I'll add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faery_Tale_Adventure (1987) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_of_Lore (1988)

⬐ animal531

I'll disagree on all those (and the Ultima's etc in the grandparent comment). They were all focused on RPG and story first, then adding some action on top of that (via isometric, fps etc. modes).

Diablo changed things in that it focused on action first, whereas the RPG element is just an add-on. Its gameplay cycles between essentially going deeper in a dungeon that's becoming more difficult, obtaining/selling etc. of items/potions in town so that you can descend further. Its story isn't really of (heavy) importance.

⬐ AdmiralAsshat

So what about Zelda II: Adventure of Link? The RPG elements were clearly secondary, given that they were absent from the original LoZ.

David Brevik released that just after the Diablo postmortem from GDC a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

Worth watching for any fans of the original and if you want more context around that pitch. Lots of interesting tidbits about the origins of Diablo and Blizzard North.

And an amusing moment during the Q&A: Someone in the audience went up and gave David some money to make up for pirating the game when he was a kid.

⬐ Tokiin

Related vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D_bVgplit0

IGN Unfiltered episode with David about his origins and the creation of Diablo/Blizzard North.

⬐ corysama

FYI: We collect material like this over in https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

I loved his Diablo postmortem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

Brevik was one of the founders Condor (Brevik was the president while the Schaefer brothers were vice-presidents) which later became Blizzard North when Blizzard bought them. The work on Diablo started before Blizzard bought them. He really was one of the "creators". IIRC they made the first Diablo game with a team of 15-20 people. In a team that small pretty much everyone is a "game designer" as in everyone wears many hats (especially the president of the company)

If you are interested you really should check the postmortem from the GDC a few years back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

In this case he really did invent the "Realtime-RPG" that made Diablo what it is.

In his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

⬐ cortesoft

They did not invent the 'realtime-rpg'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian...

⬐ zaphos

Yes, you're right -- Diablo did a lot for the ARPG genre, but if you enjoy digging through the history of games there is a ton of interesting ARPG stuff from at least the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game

* To Serve The People: Public Interest Technologists. Matt Mitchell is a hacker, security researcher, operational security trainer, and data journalist who founded & leads CryptoHarlem, impromptu workshops teaching basic cryptography tools to the predominately African American community in upper Manhattan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cm3N4Yi3b0

* Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right. Jon Moore is the Chief Software Architect at Comcast Cable, where he focuses on delivering a core set of scalable, performant, robust software components for the company's varied software product development groups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64SWl9bfvk

* Keeping Time in Real Systems. This talk will tour the fascinating timekeeping mechanisms used in real systems. We will explore atomic clocks, NTP and GPS through systems that use them, and logical clocks in the context of systems built on logical time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvj8PykSc4

* Level Up Your Concurrency Skills With Rust. This talk will show you how Rust will catch many concurrency errors at compile time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIikwmeGVYY

* Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem. Diablo developer David Brevik returns to the GDC stage to give a classic post-mortem on Blizzard's action RPG hit Diablo in this 2016 talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

* The Flash Games Postmortem. In this 2017 GDC talk, Kongregate's John Cooney attempts to encapsulate the immense history of Flash games and how it has shaped the current game industry by giving game developers their first chance to build and publish their games quickly to the web.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E

* Siege Battle AI in Total War: Warhammer. In this 2017 GDC session, Creative Assembly's Andre Arsenault shows the approach used in Total War: Warhammer to create the very specialized high-level AI to guide these massive armies in a way that provides a convincing, epic-scale battle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHolirTf9CI