How One Gameplay Decision Changed Diablo Forever | War Stories | Ars Technica

hello my friend stay awhile and listen i never really envisioned that deckard kane would become as popular as he became i mean he was always a really big father figure or whatever for your character and so i wanted him to be your guide and your mentor giving you help along the way if you come across challenges and questions to which you seek knowledge seek me out and i will tell you what i can my name is david brevik lead programmer on diablo and this is how a show of hands turned diablo from a turn-based game into real time i feel i have come to know this hero i got into video games at a very early age my dad brought home an apple ii plus in maybe 1979 started learning the program at that time before that we had had the original pong machine and the atari 2600 but program really became a passion once uh the apple ii uh came around and i learned how to program taught myself to program on the apple 2 plus that was kind of the start of my career and it was a passion that never really left me i wanted to do nothing but make video games my entire life ever since that i sat down and started programming so work began on diablo probably in earnest in late 1993 we created a company my friends and i who had met at a previous company we started pitching diablo to a bunch of different places the game was always titled diablo the name diablo comes from a mountain here in the san francisco bay area that i lived at the base of that mountain called mount diablo i didn't speak any spanish so once i found out what the name meant for the mountain then i said yeah that's going to make a great video game name someday so we pitched it as diablo and the name never really left blizzard first became involved when we got together for a trade show it was consumer electronics show and we were showing off justice league task force we were doing the sega genesis version and then another development company was working on the super nintendo version we didn't realize that there was a super nintendo version of it and they didn't realize that there was a genesis version of it so we didn't share any kind of design or anything like that or any kind of assets or whatever but strangely the games were very similar they looked like they could have been developed in tandem and so the two companies instantly kind of merged over our design sensibilities and our graphic style and everything like that they changed their name from silicon and synapse to blizzard entertainment they said okay well we're working on this title come take a look and i went to their little meeting room that they had rented and they showed off warcraft completed and they said yeah we're also looking for other titles so we're looking to work with people that we think are good developers and i said well we've got a great game idea but nobody wants to you know do this so are you guys interested and they said well after we finish warcraft 1 we'll uh come out and you can pitch us and they then agreed to do diablo so at the time pc rpgs in general were kind of in a very strange state sales had really declined on any kind of rpg at the time and uh even though that was a huge genre earlier when we went to go pitch diablo to a bunch of different places we got rejected 20 plus times but we knew that this was an unusual kind of style of rpg in a lot of ways we wanted to kind of make the antithesis of what rpgs were at the time we went out of our way to do that to make sure that the graphics weren't elves and dragons we wanted to make it uh you know very different than that we wanted to make sure that the style of game it was was much more like the way that i used to play dungeons than dragons as a kid i didn't really care so much about the story and things like that in dungeons and dragons for me it was much more about the loot it was much more about getting the awesome vorpal swords and stuff like that and so i wanted a game that that was ringing true with a game that was more about you know killing monsters and getting cool loot rather than having a long story with a deep character customization and stuff like that i wanted to focus more on to the on the action side and more on the on the loot side and so we felt like we had a great idea that separated us from the crowd but i think that a lot of people especially a lot of people in publishing at that time weren't necessarily gamers a lot of them were just businessmen who had learned that this genre isn't selling anymore i don't care what kind of game you're pitching me and so getting to pitch the game to people that were actually gamers that were publishers in blizzard was a kind of breath of fresh air and they understood the vision and ultimately led to us doing a deal with them i had many influences growing up things like ultima to might magic to wizardry and so i started designing diablo when i was in high school and then in college i started playing a lot on unix machines that were you know in the computer lab at the time they didn't have really any kind of graphics associated with them and that was really where i got introduced to things like muds and roguelike games even though the term roguelike comes from games that are like the game rogue which is one of the games that i was playing at the time and then there was others like ned hack and moria eumoria and angband and those were huge influences and really uh in a lot of ways it was angband i think that was kind of the model of what we wanted the the point of the game was just you know killed a boss and there was random levels and random items but you were the at symbol attacking the letter k there was a game nhl 94. one of the things that we loved about that game is that with just a few quick buttons we were in and skating around and could check each other and things like that and that was the kind of philosophy that we wanted to bring to diablo we wanted to be everything that rpgs weren't and one of those things was we want to just press a few buttons and get right into the game character creation was this big deal in rpgs you would end up answering a bunch of questions about your history and giving yourself a backstory and putting numbers into all sorts of stats before you even knew what the stats would do so we wanted to bypass all of that and get directly in and that philosophy permeated every decision that we made time from boot up to kill was like it's got to be under a minute kind of thing for diablo there were a lot of technical things that we had to overcome that were different than the way that games had been at the time so the loot lottery is kind of a system by which random items are generated and the best analogy is it's a slot machine every time you kill a monster you put a quarter into the slot machine and you pull the lever and out can come nothing your quarterback you know you could do pretty well or you could hit a jackpot and so if you can think of pulling the lever as every time you kill a monster it's got kind of this addictive quality just as as slot machines are addictive so is the i am going to maybe win something big here it was kind of loosely based on the system that came from kind of moria aing band eumoria those kind of style games they had random random item generation but not to the same extent that we were going to be doing it in diablo luckily uh this was a really fun part of the game for a lot of us and so we didn't mind working on this part uh it meant that we got to play the game and get cool stuff random level generation in diablo was extremely complicated there were like four kind of sub sections of the original game they were like kind of four different tile sets but also it was having to write basically four times the code that you normally would write for one of these things also made it kind of a big challenge one of our pillars was your guy that you've made your character that you've made is unique your experience is going to be different than anybody else's forever just because of the way the trillions of combinations that exist out there nobody will have the same experience twice a lot of rpgs were like oh we've got a hundred hours and things like that of content and we were saying basically you have unlimited content here one of the things that we wanted to do with diablo was multi-classing this was kind of a philosophy that was the again kind of anti-typical rpg rpgs at the time were things like oh you're playing as a cleric and as a cleric i can't hold a sword it didn't make any sense at all uh that you know a person who claims to be this cleric can't just actually pick up a dagger or pick up a sword they could only use maces and so in a lot of ways we wanted to make the anti system for that which was this kind of like multi-classing or everybody can do everything kind of system so as a warrior you could cast spells you may be a lot worse at it it may take you extra money your spell casting animations are longer but you could do it it was this system where you could make any class you wanted there were no restrictions like so many of the other things that we thought were just barriers to fun fresh meat and so making it so that was kind of this free form was uh really important to us and again it was more of the anti-rpg at the time the spirits of the dead are now avenged the relationship between blizzard north and blizzard south was sometimes contentious as any two groups can be or whatever in any relationship largely we got along really well uh we were very reasonable with each other we helped each other out obviously there were some fights some things that they felt passionately about some things that we felt passionately about they were involved but they weren't involved in a day-to-day basis you know we would talk often but it wasn't like they were sitting in our office like with a producer talking uh you know talking about what we're doing every day kind of thing originally diablo was going to be a turn-based game which is based on the rogue and angband et cetera all those games were turn based at some point during the process which was pretty early i would say within maybe three or four months of the start of the project they came to us after their success with converting strategy games to real time in the same way that they did with warcraft and they felt hey with all of these kind of turn-based old-school versions of rpgs we should do a real-time version of it and i was really against this idea this was the the line in the sand for me i was not gonna there was no way that i was changing this game to real time his reckless overconfidence has proven costly to us all i was deathly afraid of losing what i thought was kind of the essence of this game oftentimes when you're playing these turn-based rpgs like this you get to a point where your character is about to die you were important decisions you had to make there was just so much strategy and depth and the games were permadeath so if you you know if you died that was it and there was on these unix servers so you you couldn't like restore your characters or anything like that it was gone so it was this really tense moment and i really did not want to lose that tension i want that i thought that was essential to the way that the game was going to play and our turn base wasn't really like our turn their turn our turn their turn it was a little bit more complicated it was if a single turn was broken into 10 sub turns or something like that pulling out your sword may take like you know one tenth of a turn and then walking one square horizontally takes a whole turn but diagonally took 1.4 turns so we kind of had the scaling list so it was kind of a complicated turn-based thing and there was a lot of conflict a lot of times that we would talk about the game and how things were going and we would have phone calls and for weeks at the end they would say hey so what about changing it to real time they would kind of keep nudging on this i brought it up with some of the people at the office it started to gain some momentum people like yeah no i think that it might be kind of cool my knowledge of the ancient ways might be of some help we all got together the entire blizzard north got together in the kitchen and had a vote the development team was probably maybe 15 people at the time we all voted and i was heavily outweighed there were you know a few three or four of us kind of didn't didn't want to change it but it was it was you know 15 of them didn't want to change it or whatever so reluctantly i said okay yeah we can do this we can give it a try i think this is dumb i think it's gonna be a waste of like it's gonna take us a month to do this we've done this game for too cheap we're gonna go back we're gonna get try and get some more money as well at the same time i went back i said yeah it's gonna take us longer to develop the game now because it's going to be this real time thing so we not only need an extra milestone payment but also you know it we're not going to have anything to show or talk about for like a month because it's just going to take so long to do this and so i said okay i'm gonna start this process everybody go home this is on a friday everybody cleared out and friday afternoon i started working on it and by friday evening i had it done [Music] i remember it just like it was yesterday you know i was working on it and i was kind of the warrior i had this club in my hand there was a skeleton on the screen and i kind of clicked on the skeleton my character walked over and swung and smacked the skeleton apart and i was like oh my god this is amazing that felt so good that was that was really this is way better the sun shone through the window the clouds parted you know the angels you know went oh kind of it was a it was definitely a moment that i knew that this was definitely the way to go this was way better and i just sat there for like an hour like clicking the mouse button over and over again as i just swing the sword and we never really looked back so when people came in on monday morning it was done it was working it was obvious that that this was the way to go and we never looked back one of the great things about this change was that we had so many assets to work with the game itself was already deep in production we already had a bunch of different assets so we didn't need to start from scratch we kept the same perspective we kept a lot of the assets that we had so there wasn't really any kind of fundamental technology changes in terms of the graphics pipeline or art assets or anything like that that we needed to take care of it was mainly focused on on our ability to change the game play and make sure that that was a smooth transition once the real time change happened and kind of settled in it was pretty obvious that it was the right decision throughout the office it was kind of an electric atmosphere everybody was really jazzed everybody's really psyched even the people that were kind of steadfast against us including myself came to me and said yes this feels amazing this is really cool we kind of changed some of the design of the game and the way that you're going to interact with the monsters and the way that you're going to do combat and stuff like that and these things kind of evolved and changed over a period of the next few weeks and months as we kind of grasp what the real time really meant and how that affected the actual moment-to-moment gameplay so on that day that i had that incredible encoding session we didn't let blizzard know quite right away but i couldn't hold it back that much i couldn't withhold that information for too long because it was just so damn exciting and they had already agreed to pay us more money so that that that part was taken care of and the fact that it took such a short time and was such an improvement and they kind of got their way it ended up not really being an issue at all and everybody was very excited about the the new direction and the way that it turned out we have learned strength is making the right choice looking back i feel like diablo one turned out way better than i ever imagined it would uh i'm obviously very proud of working on it you know it's just such a highlight and a pillar of my career but it wasn't just me it was a lot of people there are a lot of people very talented people that i worked with that made that a reality from music to graphics to other programmers etc there was just so many super talented people that worked together as a team to make that a just really special time in terms of my overall vision it it exceeded what my vision of what the final product could be so uh it's i feel very very lucky to have worked on it we had a very different vision for diablo 2. we had a lot more experience about what we were doing we understood the market a lot better we understood that we were building upon this fantastic game with diablo 2 it was definitely more in lines with my expectations even it still exceeded my expectations and still does today i mean the fact of the matter is that there are so many people playing uh the game today that you know 20 years after we released it says a lot about the product you can go on to twitch and find people streaming the product at any time it continued to sell you know a box copy of this game on target for 15 years after the product was released it was always in the top 10 sellers of the year at the time diablo 2 was the fastest selling pc game of all time you know it reached a million copies faster than any other game in history and i think that diablo one you know sold a million very quickly as well right at the exact same time the sims came out it was almost the exact same time as diablo 2. those two games were on the best-selling list and still are on the best-selling list of all time if you look up pc sales people are so passionate about the game and they figure out every little aspect and it's funny they'll collect every single unique item in the game or something like that and they play literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to collect these things they do it in unique ways so i'm just going to i'm not going to use any kind of weapons i'm just going to punch my way to the end or whatever there's like all sorts of different ways that people come up with they make videos on youtube and all these kind of things and it's really great to see people so passionate about the game after all these years both diablo and diablo 2 had such a huge impact on my career and still do to today it's strange having such success with your first uh pc game you've ever made the expectations for everything that you do after that are just sky high ridiculously high that was a tough thing to deal with when we left blizzard and made things like hell gate london and the hype for that game was outrageously high uh and didn't meet expectations it was a really unique game it was really cool i think it was a game that was way ahead of its time basically it was the very first looter shooter that i don't know some people call it shooter looter some people call it looter shooter there are other names for whatever but whatever way that you want to say it was the first of that style of game and i get a lot of people that come back and compliment me on that all the time despite the flaws which were mainly bug related there are a lot of gameplay loops that i'm fond of these days i think that for me a lot of kind of like survival-esque games are really kind of my jam lately i was really into mmos for a while and uh and i think that any kind of survival building crafting those kind of things i really enjoy that a lot but still i hearken back to arpg's like i i still really enjoy the the loop of kill monsters get loot i still really love that uh the most much more than almost any other genre the best general advice that i can give are things like uh from a ui perspective can somebody play this without reading a manual or getting any kind of instructions like back in the early days when i was playing when we were making diablo we had this thing which is now kind of unfair but it was nicknamed the mom test which was like my mom was not computer savvy at the time and so like if my mom can pick this up and play this uh then then anybody can we wanted to approach the thing so it was kind of a wide audience kind of way to play the game and it made simplified things it forced us to simplify any ui and so kind of distilling the essence of what you're trying to do whatever it is and making the ui kind of uh enhance that is the best kind of experience that i can give making sure that something is really simple and straightforward especially in your core game loop is is critical a few years ago i went completely independent i made a company called grey beer games was originally just me still largely just me made a product called it lurks below i did everything i did the the pixel art the programming the design music later in the game a couple other people help my wife is doing a little bit of programming and and design and my third eldest kid but my eldest kid here still at the house uh she's doing some of the art we've done some of the pixel art and i've got some other friends helping me and stuff like that so it's more than just me but originally a great majority of the project has been just me i wanted to try and do a project all by myself and it looks below it's out it's been out for about a year and it's coming to xbox soon and hopefully other platforms other consoles after that and then recently i also just started a publisher called sky stone games and looking to publish other kind of indie products and take my experience from being an indie developer and trying to boost other indies and making sure that they can survive in today's harsh climate give them not only game feedback uh but also make sure that they can get uh get good uh coverage on their game and get uh seen by press outlets and things like that there were a bunch of times during development that i felt like this could be a hit but the thing that really drove it home for me while we were making the game uh we would work and people would roll in and you know work all day and then when was time to go home they weren't going home they were playing the game that they had just spent all day working on so uh i knew when that was happening that it was it you know it could be something that was kind of addictive the dream was never that it would do as well as it did our dream was maybe someday we can sell 25 000 copies if we did that maybe we could make a sequel that was kind of the original dream i did no real intent in making it uh you know that it was going to be so addictive or that wasn't really what we had set out to be it was just the hopes of us being able to make the pc games that we love

Channel: Ars Technica

Views: 737,165

Keywords: diablo game, diablo blizzard, ars technica diablo, ars technica war stories, war stories ars technica, diablo war stories, war stories diablo, ars technica blizzard, blizzard entertainment diablo, david brevik, david brevik interview, diablo david brevik, david brevik diablo, blizzard david brevik, diablo story, diablo oral history, diablo pc, diablo 4, diablo 3, diablo 2, diablo hellfire, diablo ars technica, david brevik war stories, ars, ars technica, technology

Id: huPF3Gid7DE

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Frostyfuelz]

Hellgate London had so much potential... The game was fun but was plagued with bugs like he said. Also the servers were complete dogshit and the monthly subscription was also a big turn off.

[u/Fhaarkas]

Pretty amazing to hear that one of their philosophy with UX/UI is to make it as fool-proof as possible, and Blizzard South has been carrying on with that exact philosophy in D3 and possibly D4, and actually got derided for it I'm one of them. I don't know but something about that is just damn funny.

To be fair though like a lot of other things they do get that part wrong. Blizz North's Diablos do have simple UI, but the games themselves are not lacking in depth. Blizz South's problem is its penchant to dumb down everything and ultimately that's what a lot of people have a problem with.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Path of Exile that also had the wrong-tinted glass on when they decided to be "the spiritual successor to Diablo", with its absurd complexity and feature bloat. Yeah, man... Diablo never needed its players to have 10 spreadsheets open on three monitors.

Ironically the game closest to Diablo in spirit these days is probably Grim Dawn - a game that has its root in Titan Quest which was once looked at as "Diablo-wannabe" (man I sure talked shit about it a lot back in the days). And they sure did a good job being a Diablo-wannabe.

[u/RedDinoTF]

You should get in touch with Jirard Khalil(aka the completionist) for a collab for indieland 4

[u/devcal1]

Thanks for sharing, this was a really good watch.

[u/dsnvwlmnt]

It didn't just change Diablo forever. It changed the RPG genre forever. Gaming forever. ARPGs would not exist.