Article by Travis Meacham

With Diablo III on the minds of PC gamers everywhere we take a look back at the original Diablo and how it revived PC RPGs and continues to influence games generations later.

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/07/01/diablo_legacy/

I've never been a big fan of Diablo. I won the first one and I'm still putting off finishing the second one. One thing that always turns me off with an RPG is when it's just a dungeon crawl with little character interaction, especially when there are no cities to explore. Diablo 2 was a slight improvement over the first game, but still not enough to get me hooked. One thing the games did have going for them though was story and presentation. Blizzard definitely knows how to craft a good story. Just wandering through dungeons, finding a bunch of junk and trying to prioritize my inventory aren't fun. And I especially hate the combat and customization options. It's cool that there is a huge variety of weapons and armor that change your appearance, but stupid that you couldn't change your sex in the first two games or basic appearance options, and I'm disappointed that it sounds like you still can't do any basic face or body customization in Diablo 3. It's fun playing multiplayer with friends, but too tedious and boring otherwise. I was much more interested in Baldur's Gate back then and that's still the style of game I prefer.

^-- You should get The Witcher, however there is diddly squat for customization in it.

It and Mass Effect are likely the best RPGs on the PC currently

Diablo3 is more an action game than an RPG

LOL at Maxor. Go ahead and buy Hellgate London, if appearance options are the most important thing for you. It lets you customize your character as much as you please: male/female. blond/brunette. short/tall, thin/fat, etc.
Too bad Hellgate crashes all the time and it's all happening in the same sewer and supports no mods and all quests are like "kill 17 monsters" - but I guess that's less important to you.

As far as I'm concerned, Diablo 2 is the best game ever made. So what if my barbarians are all men and my sorcs all women. My only complaint is that the male classes are all useless weaklings. Sorcs and amazons can totally kick the behind of any barbarian, necro, druid, paladin in PvP. I got to level 99 with a sorceress 11 times faster than with a barbarian, for crying out loud.

Wow aevm, unnecessary aggression much?

Maxor brought up completely valid points and described games he liked instead. He made a very valid list of some of the shortcomings of the Diablo series thus far. Do I still think it is one of the best games ever made?

Absolutely, but that is because it is has very deep statistical complexities. For me personally, I think it has no place being called an RPG. It is a simple dungeon crawl with a very complex and robust loot and statistics system.

If you aren't what the table top gaming crowd would call a minmaxer, then you'd really have no reason to play the Diablo games. 90% of the story happens in a handful of cut scenes and nothing you do affects it. It is a linear dungeon crawl based on getting loot, so that you could effectively kill things faster and get more loot. That doesn't appeal to everyone, but for my money Diablo is hard to beat.

Yeah, OK, sorry. I'm just mad at that Hellgate thing, $70 wasted and a major disappointment.

Tell you what: I'd be happy to see Diablo 3 take lots of good ideas from other games and add them, sure, but not if it means waiting until 2011 and not if it makes it totally different from Diablo 2. I just want Diablo 2 again but with better graphics, I guess...

To change the topic a bit - is anybody else worried that potions are gone in D3? I just can't imagine how things will work without them. Maybe I'm just a bad player, I don't know, but unless I'm playing as a sorc and teleport I tend to get stuck in melees and I'd be dead without potions. How is this going to work?

For a time, I always assumed WoW was Diablo 3.

Ofcourse the story was from the Warcraft series, but the gameplaying was taken from Diablo... the ideas of quests, killing monsters, looting, inventory, etc.

Wonder how Diablo 3 will be any different from WoW, other than the storyline.

Can't really blame people wanting more, but you ain't gonna get much, just because we grew up (to be more or less mature) doesn't mean our old games will too.

For ppl looking for more than point n click, this aint the game for you.. maybe keep an eye on Dragon Age by Bioware..

Look at the gameplay video drops. One of the items was a minor health potion. Potions still appear to be a part of the game, but I imagine that the life orbs or whatever were added to reduce the constant need to carry so many potions and drop so much useless crap on the ground.

Me too. It seemed like Warcraft was going from RTS to RPG with less satisfying gameplay based on warcraft 3. I thought they had merged the Diablo play and Warcraft world and would cut their product line down to one RTS(Starcraft) and one role-playing loot-hording game(WoW). I honestly figured that they would keep those two games and create a new IP instead of revamp Diablo. It is a great universe, but I don't think they have anywhere to go after Diablo 2 without seriously changing what made the game so much fun or simply updating the graphics and reselling a product.

I can't say I'm unhappy though. It looks to have very solid Diablo 2 style gameplay and the only complaints I'm seeing/agreeing with so far seem to be graphics/style based. I get the feeling we are going to see a lot of WoWized shoulder pads and weapons in Diablo 3.

I can't leave home without my Great Bastard Sword of the Stars and Huge Damned Shoulders of Awesomeness.

you should give HG:L another try
they have version 2 up on the test server, it has in game mail, a consignment house (soon to be an auction house, new areas, new skills, tons of skills that have been rebalanced, shared stash, new aspects to guilds, lots of changes, lots of new stuff


patch notes

http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/s [...] p?t=100789

For one, I am very happy to see this great game coming back in a new iteration. I have been a hardcore fan of this game for many years and it's probably the only game I really got addicted to for such a long period of time.

Obviously, D3 won't have the impact that D1 & D2 had on the genre back when it was released but I don't mind too much. If they can improve on what's been there as the core and key ingredients of the game and built on that, I think we'll get a great game in the end. For me, it'll be a welcome addition to the games portfolio that seems to be primarily focused on shooters these days. From what I have seen so far the game seems to have a good game play but even if it's a bit hard to determine, I'd like a more detailed environment. With the GPU horse power we got at our disposal today, I don't see why it's shouldn't be taken advantage of.

There is one thing I hope Blizzard will be able to control or ultimately void completely in this new edition and it's the cheating/dupping aspect. This phenomenon plagued D1 and mostly D2 and completely destroyed the economy of the game. No matter how someone try to justify it, it doesn't belong in this game or any other game for that matter. I'll go a step further and even give carte a blanche to Blizzard as to use any means at their disposal to crack down mercilessly on unscrupulous individuals that feel they can set their own set of rules.

@jamesl:
Thank you very much! I was planning to give it another try in 2009, after getting the latest patch at that time. Maybe I'll do it sooner, using single player patch 1.2. I didn't have that one yet. I see it fixes the bug where my weapons disappear. That one was particularly unpleasant

I read in the Inquirer that D3 will be available in 2010, by the way. Does that sound plausible to you guys, or not really? Based on the quality of the demo video, I'd say it could happen earlier. The Inq is not exactly reliable, but some times they do get things right and before any other sites, so I don't know what to believe.

Like wise, I always carry around my Vengeful Great Bow of the Tow Rivers

I don't think it's too far fetched but I wonder how this will fit in Blizzard's releasing scheme since Starcraft is due in the few upcoming months. Not sure if having 2 games released too close to one another is good thing even though they are completely different genres. Even if they appeal to different crowds, many people like Blizzard title and play most of them.