The Evolution of Diablo

[Laughter] when it comes to genre defining games seldom is the attention put on its creation or the first iteration focusing instead on what they became rather than what they were for most with every new patch dlc and sequel more and more of what made that game so special in the first place is lost ips created and published by activision blizzard are certainly no exception with what was once warcraft the real-time strategy is now known as warcraft the mmorpg or warcraft refunded or starcraft now colloquially referred to by its expansion brood war while both of those series have stories of their own this video will focus on another what the series that defined the action rpg genre was and all the way up to what it became this is the evolution of diablo [Music] diablo's launch at the end of 1996 was an idea from the 80s finally come to fruition an idea from a young high school aged david brevik in a 2016 gama sutra postmortem interview with brevik himself he explains that not only was the game named after the local peak in california's bay area mount diablo but it was also supposed to be a traditional party-based rpg with turn-based combat due to the influence of brevik's early love of games like rogue and nethack having always wanted to be a game developer breivik being right out of college would instead find himself working for a digital clip art company this is where he would meet a few people that would join him in founding a development studio after the company they currently worked for went under they would name their new studio after a secret project their prior place of employment had been working on project condor it was in the infant stages of condor's existence that breivik would put together a design document for his old idea describing it as a turn-based single-player dos game that would have expansion packs like the booster packs for magic the gathering cards which were very popular at the time the game would also feature permadeath something brevik thought was a big feature for roguelike games the art style included claymation but was also inspired by the look of contemporary arcade fighting game primal rage citing that though he wanted to use a stop-motion art style for diablo once learning how expensive it was and time-consuming it would be the idea was shelved being an upstart studio and needing to be able to keep the lights on condor would have to plan out diablo's development while simultaneously working on other sports and licensed games including the sega genesis game justice league task force during the production of task force though never told to condor studio the publisher had enlisted a second usb studio silicon and synapse to create the same game for the super nintendo entertainment system brevik recalls finding out about their unexpected comrade in arms during the consumer electronics show in las vegas saying that they showed up had their game on display looked over and saw their product but with a different developer and for a different platform condor wound up talking with silicon and synapse developers and found that they also had dreams of striking out on their own and making their own original pc game just like condor had been unsuccessfully trying to do with diablo this wouldn't be the last time brevik and condor would run into this other studio suffice to say that by the end of justice league task force's production silicon and synapse would rename their studio to blizzard entertainment [Applause] while condor was searching far and wide for a publisher to accept their pitch for their game blizzard entertainment had finished and released warcraft blizzard having created their own ip decided to hear out brevik and condor's idea liking what they heard they offered to publish the game and condor signed the contract a contract they didn't read very well and would eventually come back to bite them while they had created a design document for diablo they had no clue what the game was actually supposed to look like bremik admits that he took a screenshot of xcom and would use it to design diablo's graphical presentation entirely even the tiles shape and sizes were copied exactly from the screenshot during production condor would be renamed to blizzard north and the publisher studio would become blizzard south but a new name wouldn't be the only thing the publisher would want changed eventually while work on the game had begun in earnest blizzard south approached breivik and the team with a demand that would fundamentally change the game they wanted diablo to feature real-time gameplay instead of its current turn-based style brevik was adamantly against this believing his influential dungeon crawler game's turn-based styles made gamers agonize over their decisions between turns creating a desired sense of drama this was such a controversial point for brevik that blizzard north would have to hold a vote for whether or not they would make the change to real-time game play breivik was the only one that voted no getting back to blizzard south brevik would argue that they would need a lot more time to completely overhaul the game for this new style and that they would require another milestone payment they agreed and breivik spent a saturday afternoon throwing together a real-time system he recalled the first time he saw his formerly turn-based warrior walk across a room and attack a skeleton in real time exclaiming out loud how awesome it was you know going around talking to other people in the studio and and other people in the studio yeah we should make this thing real time and so i kind of held out there about two or three of us that like held out to the bitter end and uh finally one day we decided to have a talk uh and bring it to a vote so we all met in the kitchen and we voted and i voted no and everybody else voted yes so i remember taking the mouse and i clicked on the mouse and the warrior walked over and smacked the skeleton down and i was like oh my god [Laughter] that was awesome though the game was beginning to take shape that contract the studio signed was beginning to show its severely miscalculated issue the 15-person studio had agreed to develop diablo for only 300 000 dollars that would come out to everyone being paid twenty thousand dollars for one year and doesn't include any extra expenses like the very office space they occupied having to search for ways to make money just to keep the lights on they found another publisher 3do and signed a contract with them to develop a football game for consoles for a cool million dollars [Music] if you're not playing on a 3do system what are you playing with presenting 3do the most advanced home gaming system in the universe it's time to put away your toys get a free john madden football and crash and burn when you buy a 3do system [Music] of course that money was not all received up front and the studio was still struggling and operating on a day-to-day basis doing all they could to pay staff and maintain operations eventually blizzard south approached the studio again this time with a new offer one to buy them out and fully acquire the studio this was the perfect news for the struggling team and would mean that they wouldn't have to worry about making payroll by constantly finding new work their newest publisher 3do caught wind of the deal and submitted their own offering mostly the same terms but for twice the money the studio would turn down this greater offer feeling as though blizzard was a much better fit for them in terms of culture and beliefs now truly being a part of blizzard entertainment breivik and the team worked full force on diablo in that same time blizzard north's battlenet was building up as well and its integration into diablo was one of the slated features at that point in diablo's development the game didn't have any multiplayer modes or even the code for them multiplayer we're gonna come up and we're gonna take a look at your multiplayer code and they came up and they're like you don't have any multiplayer code oh [ __ ] all right well uh in order for this to work with battlenet we're gonna have to have multiplayer codes so a few of the guys from down south actually moved up north during the last six months of development and started making diablo into multiplayer and integrating battlenet into the entire thing and so the integration of the online system was so rushed that there wasn't any time to set countermeasures in place for cheating something they didn't realize would become so massively prevalent or that people would create and share the cheats online allowing for anyone and everyone to readily download and abuse them concerning battlenet brevik would also reveal that the entire system ran on only a single computer since players connected to each other rather than a server they only needed a system that would allow those connections rather than actually support the sessions themselves during the creation of the playable classes in the game the team agreed that one of the worst aspects of rpgs is that they all had lengthy character creation times before you could actually play the game joining this disfavor of navigating menus to build a character with blizzard north's love for the menus in doom they decided to base the ui on id software's work to meet what they called the mom test a way of judging whether someone with very little knowledge of the game would be able to readily pick it up and play this theory would be evoked for all other ui elements in the game except for the minimap which was inspired by the minimalistic auto map of dark forces and the hotbar which was designed and implemented only three months before the game shipped what they had before the hot bar was a single slot in the lower left corner of the screen where players could place potions blizzard had also contemplated getting rid of the right-click to use skill mechanic to instead require the player to bring up the skill book and click on the skill they wanted to use each time they wanted to use it and had also wanted to include cooking and hunger mechanics into the game towards the end of development but ran out of time before it could be implemented the entire last eight or nine months of the game's development had the studio working in a state of crunch as claimed by breivik himself so uh here's a little bit of a personal story one of the the end was really really rough we crunched probably for the last eight or nine months something like that i mean it was all day every day i would get up usually about four in the morning and i would drive to work i'd pick up my brother and we'd go to go to work and then i would work until i don't know midnight or so and go home and get up and do it again and i did this for every day for about eight months my wife was pregnant at the time the baby was due in late december you can see where this is going around december 10th my wife calls i'm at the office and she says i'm having contractions it's go time uh wait what but i'm in the middle of this oh my god uh and so we are already burning things you know left and right we really tried to make christmas we desperately wanted to make christmas but it just wasn't ready and here was you know kind of my worst case scenario fortunately in some ways it turned out to be a false alarm and the baby didn't wasn't born then actually was born on january third she waited actually for me to finish diablo and that was very nice of her that's what he rushed or not diablo was a massive success having expected to only move around a hundred thousand copies the pre-orders alone were 450 000 strong and within just a few years would hit more than two and a half million sales worldwide while diablo wasn't the true first action rpg it was without a doubt the game that defined the genre and certainly set the bar for all future games an action rpg is simply defined as a game with leveling up choosing character classes and managing a variety of spells and or equipment like a typical rpg except it's all done in real time like an action game everything in diablo is executed with only a mouse those spells could be assigned hotkeys for quick use upon beginning the game players would have the choice of three classes the warrior a powerful melee fighter master of weapons of war and capable of enduring more damage than the other classes the rogue the greatest archers in the world of sanctuary they could have a higher level of magic than warriors although not nearly as high as sorcerers the sorcerers are powerful masters of the arcane arts the sorcerer is able to achieve the greatest heights of magic to the extent that he doesn't have need for physical weapons one thing diablo did differently from every other game in this series was that it didn't strictly differentiate between these classes they could use all of the weapons and learn all of the spells the only thing selecting a class would dictate is how your stats would increase each time the character leveled up the warrior having the highest strength and vitality stats the sorcerer having the highest mana and magic stats and the rogue having the highest dexterity stat while being a balance between the other two classes since some equipment can require a high enough value in a certain stat the class that gains the most points in that stat with each level up will be able to use it much sooner than the others barring the use of any gear that may increase that same stat this means that even though there are no hard restrictions on gear and spells a warrior will never be as proficient in spell casting as a sorcerer there were also hidden benefits for each of the classes something that would remain in diablo 2 as well but in a different way the warrior has a naturally better chance to hit an enemy in melee combat a chance to cause a critical hit which would cause twice the usual damage something the other two characters lack entirely he also had the best chance to block an attack with a shield and had fewer frames per swing with melee weapons meaning he can attack with weapons faster the rogue calculates both her strength and dexterity when determining the damage she can deal with a bow she has a higher hit chance while using bows and fewer frames when firing them just like the warrior with melee weapons the sorcerer has the highest chance to hit with spells and also has fewer frames when casting them each class also possesses a unique ability warriors could repair their equipment rogues can disarm traps and sorcerers can recharge staves the repair and recharge abilities did come with drawbacks though as each time this skill is used on a piece of corresponding gear that item will have a lower max durability or charge respectively diminishing its usefulness over time while battling the forces of hell players will gain various amounts of experience points for each foe vanquished reaching a certain amount the character will level up increasing their attributes by an amount which would in turn increase some of their statistics there were four different attributes strength which affects the amount of damage the character may deal in melee combat advanced armors and weapons have minimum strength requirements magic which affects the amount of mana the character has and increases the chance of a spell hitting its target magic can also affect how spells perform increasing their damage or duration spell books staves and many scrolls have minimum magic requirements dexterity affects the chance of hitting or being hit by enemies in combat and the chance of blocking a hit if wearing a shield it also increases the amount of damage dealt by ranged attacks for the rogue coupled with strength advanced bows have minimum dexterity requirements vitality affects the life statistic of the character it also determines how much damage a monster needs to deal in order to stun the character characters can be stunned by a monster taking a certain percentage of your health in a single blow meaning a higher amount of health can keep them from being stunned as the monster would have to deal more damage to meet the stun threshold stun simply means a momentary recoil and delay in character action this is another mechanic in the game that reinforces the intended roles for each class while still allowing for total freedom since the warrior has and receives the most health it's much harder for them to be stunned in combat unlike the mage who should avoid direct combat altogether lest they risk the chance of being stun locked by powerful enemies these attributes as well as gear and other game mechanics like shrines affect a character's statistics which are the raw numbers that are used in calculations for the game such as life mana chance to hit and damage which we've already talked about there's also armor class which represents the amount and quality of the armor worn as a whole this is used in the game's calculations for the chance to be hit with more and better armor giving better chances to avoid damage for the wearer though this value does not decrease your chances to be hit by magical attacks there were elemental resistances for fire lightning and magic none of the classes start with any resistances and they can only be gained through the use of magical items but even though you can find monsters with one or more total immunities to these elements the player characters themselves have their maximum possible resistances capped at 75 percent as far as gameplay goes diablo was a true dungeon crawler with the entirety of combat taking place in 16 levels of dungeon under the town's cathedral split into four different sections each section would have its own exit back to the town of tristrum but could only be accessed if the player had found it in the dungeon each section's appearance architecture light level monsters and soundtrack would be different and would resemble how close the player was in reaching hell and the final level diablo's lair though each monster belonged to a specific lord of hell such as mephisto the lord of hatred baal the lord of destruction or diablo himself the lord of terror they were still one of three classes animals such as scavengers and bats take 50 percent less damage from blunt weapons but 50 percent more damage from blades demons such as diablo himself have no resistances or weaknesses to specific weapon types undead such as skeletons and zombies are the inverse of animals taking 50 percent more damage from blunt weapons but 50 percent less damage from blades while supplies and equipment can be bought in tristram from vendors during your crusade through the cathedral's dungeon slaying everything along the way breaking barrels and opening chests they'll also have a chance of dropping items with monsters dropping items similar to their level while vendors in town base their stock off of the players level diablo also featured randomly selected quests to complement its roguelike gameplay and random dungeon layouts rather than the quest itself being random like bethesda's radiant quest system so what do you plan on doing about the jet problem in our community how about the settlement problem another settlement needs our help i'll mark it on your map these were fully worked out missions that would give the players some background lore along with valuable rewards the game featured 16 quests but each playthrough could only include 8 plus the 3 end game quests that are always available in every playthrough except in multiplayer multiplayer would only feature 4 quests with 2 of them being the final quests in the game one of the others being integrated into the dungeon levels rather than having a special area but the other having a specially designed large room for the encounter regardless of whether you were playing single or multiplayer none of the quests are mandatory for progression except for the penultimate mission which will open up the way to diablo's lair and then of course ending the lord of terror's reign diablo would get ported to sony's playstation in 1998 by electronic arts which featured a narrator so that players wouldn't have to look for books during their trek through hell's minions to learn of the story however the port lacked multiplayer but did include two-player local co-op diablo also received an expansion for pc in 1997 called diablo hellfire and was developed by sierra entertainment rather than blizzard's in-house team it included two new dungeon segments and a new side storyline more unique items and magical properties that could be found on items new spells and a fourth class the monk data miners soon found that there were two other unfinished classes in hellfire's files a bard and a barbarian nothing that takes place in the expansion is a part of diablo's main storyline and has been completely retconned as well as the expansion not officially having a multiplayer mode even though the base game did the general consensus for the expansion is that it was merely made up of test classes and unfinished content from the original game while it is unfinished it wasn't from diablo the studio that worked on it synergistic were only given a couple months to complete it for what it was being made in such a short amount of time is impressive in its own right while diablo received massive praise and exceedingly high reviews with what it offered there were an incredible amount of things that had to be cut to make the release date some of the more interesting ones we've already gone over but here's a list from diabloevolution.com that sums up most of what was cut it would take way too long to go through every single one of those so for the curious after this video head over to diablo-evolution.com and read up on them but for now it's time for us to move into diablo 2. diablo 2's development was the exact opposite of its predecessors a full team of 24 now more experienced developers eventually growing to more than 40 who didn't have to worry about stopping what they were doing to work on a completely different game just to make sure their company stays afloat able to take their time and playtest the hell out of the game to make sure everything they did was true to their vision and most importantly fun at first i didn't know what to think maybe they just celebrated halloween early in this town maybe every day i began looking for answers but soon i couldn't get the images i'd seen out of my head and it was clear that their world was becoming my bad dream diablo 2 play it now on pc and macintosh ready to m mature in a 2000 gama sutra postmortem for diablo 2 written by eric shafer one of condor games original founders he would recall that the studio sat down after diablo's release and started tossing out ideas for their next video game a few months would go by with nothing sparking an interest until finally diablo 2 began to creep into the suggestions they quickly realized that they weren't burnt out on diablo anymore and after a time for recuperation they started dusting off the reams for wishlist concepts that they never got to include in the original game and compiled criticisms for both reviews and customers looking for every possible way they could improve the game and make it bigger and better than ever blizzard north had adopted a rather unorthodox work culture and environment that is to say they never actually made a complete design document for the game they would just throw out ideas and concepts some wouldn't it be cool if and maybe we could try this to help keep them laser focused on developing the game and nothing else blizzard's headquarters would manage things like quality assurance marketing public relations technical and customer support and the operation of the battlenet servers their parent company harvest interactive deals with the business aspects such as sales manufacturing and accounting the diablo 2 team was essentially only that the developers given free reign and nothing else to worry about except the game one drawback that may have been unintentionally caused by this set of proverbial blinders was one of short-sightedness while the game's models were made in 3d studio max they would be fed into an in-house tool that would render them from different angles then export them into the file formats used in the game this in-house tool like some others was horribly inefficient and eric schaefer himself admits that it would have only taken a couple of weeks to improve them and thus improve the development pipeline but they would constantly shrug it off as something they'll only need to use for a couple weeks longer and then never have to bother using again this was a motion they would repeatedly invoke for well over a year never once bothering to put extra effort into their tools what these tools did allow for however was an extremely similar art style as that of the first game characters in the game are only 75 pixels tall and move on a 2d plane but that was after being rendered from their fully 3d high definition models in fact the characters you see during the class selection campfire scene are those exact same models just rendered in a higher resolution diablo 2's original graphical design included things such as a full 3d engine and even voxel systems remembering that this was all taking place in 1997 computers didn't have the power required to render these graphics while having many characters and missiles on screen at the same time this was another big reason for blizzard to return to their old design of 2d graphics at 640 by 480 resolution with only 8-bit color depth to make sure everything they created would work well in the world their first goal was to make the game playable as early in development as possible this not only complemented their adopted design philosophy but also made it to where everything they added could be immediately tested honed and balanced to the exact feeling they wanted without having to worry about anything else and basing each consecutive idea and design off their already perfected work and if something turned out to be boring or too repetitive it could be removed without worrying about a hole in the gameplay thing which is nothing is sacred or done so because of the iteration because of this process because of having it running at all times we're able to kind of iterate on it over and over and make small changes here and there come up with new ideas on how to do things uh to make it better uh over a long period of time time and so the time and part of the game that we worked on the most was the most important part of the game and uh so that because that was up and running early because we constantly played it because we were able to kind of constantly iterate on it and nothing was sacred any idea could be uh killed or reworked or whatever then you know that part of the game was ultra polished by the time that the game came out schaefer would provide an example of this stating it became obvious very early that players would be killing large amounts of the same monsters and those monsters would predominantly be attacking the players this gave us the opportunity to plan for multiple death sound effects and additional attacking animations for each monster if we hadn't experienced the core gameplay as early as we did combat would have ended up feeling much more repetitive in early development the class system was based off of diablos but with very distinct differences instead of each class being able to learn the same 28 spells as all the others they wanted each class to have its own set of 16. the issue they ran into is that players would end up finding spell books for other classes much more often than their own leading to frustration and worthless loot this is when they made one of their most revolutionary ideas taken directly from the research trees of contemporary strategy games the character skill tree instead of finding spell books to learn your classes skills each level up would give you a skill point that you would put into the skill of your choosing so long as you were high enough level and had already learned the subsequent skills this also brought on an entirely new meta to the gameplay where any handful of players in the same class could have entirely different skill sets thus expanding the game's replayability and diminishing the repetition found in same class characters one of the focal points the team had for diablo 2's world was creating a story that would be factored into the game from the very beginning creating quests that actually fulfilled the role of lore rather than expecting the player to seek out scrolls while also retaining the valuable rewards giving the player even more incentive to complete them the decision was made to create a separate but parallel story in the form of cinematics for each act in the game this allowed for more context on why the player was having to go through these certain places following the trail left by the dark wanderer so marius at last i find you tyrio yes there's no how i recognize you you i should have known you travelled in the skies there there always watching i've been searching for you for a long time malice i was rather beginning to think you didn't want to be found oh forgive me tyrion please it wasn't my fault not your fault tell me marius how was it not your fault the wanderer yes it was was the wonder [Music] my days at the rogue citadel seemed so long ago i sought refuge from my memories in the company of other outcasts i'm the mountains past the eastern gate do you want something [Music] oh i fought asleep for days at a time for when i dreamt the memories would return memories of the monastery and the evil which it claimed dreams memories i couldn't tell the difference anymore and the evil from my dreams followed me at my heels how had he found me here how could this broken shell of a man barely able to carry the weight of his home sword be the burning terror which drove me to hide here [Music] they seem seemed to have demons of his own that he struggled to contain he was losing [Music] as i watched how else could i explain them were these the demons from my grebel were they born within the wonder [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] why did i follow him i don't know why do things happen as they do in dreams all i know is that when he beckoned i had to follow him and from that moment we traveled together east always into the east [Music] oddly enough even though eric schaefer himself wrote that diablo 2's story was factored in from the very beginning in his post-mortem article released in 2000 he's also on record in a 2015 usgamer.net article where he claims the exact opposite and that the story and cinematics were essentially after thoughts and far behind schedule stranger still this article appears to have been edited and the section in which schaefer expresses this contrasting view on diablo 2's story has been removed whether this is some elaborate prank or an accidental admission by schaefer is unclear but it certainly adds a bit of drama and contention to the facts of the story another aspect taken from its predecessor and massively expanded on was the randomization while they only added four new towns the world outside of those towns gates were huge and everything from the surface level to the dungeons they held were mostly randomly generated there were far more items and monsters as well as magical properties that could be found on both among the monsters scattered throughout each area there would be sets of powerful monsters called elites randomly tossed in or maybe not it's safe to say that the amount of randomization found in diablo 2 is just as compounded as the game's world itself navigating this new world wouldn't be as simple as it was in diablo where pathways to the surface wouldn't do much for players having to travel long distances across the world blizzard found a way to remedy this by placing waypoints throughout strategic locations to help cut down the daunting travel times each town would have its own waypoint and every waypoint the player found would allow them to travel to and from all others aside from the things blizzard expanded on they also added several new features for one equipment that could potentially be socketable items could appear with up to six sockets which the player could insert different gems into giving the weapon new abilities based on the type of gym there were also several types of mercenaries that could be hired by the player to assist them in their fighting against the forces of hell these mercenaries had different abilities based on their type and class they could also be outfitted by the player with specific weapons and armor and could even level up and increase their own stats just like the player but without gaining any new skill points and abilities while play testing was an essential part of every aspect in diablo 2's design it was a monolithic undertaking because of every playthrough being different with random mobs equipment and generated maps it was impossible for them to test the later stages of the game without playing through the entirety up to that point for example testing to make sure a source risk that shows fire spells as their focus could beat the final level in the game's hell difficulty there was no way to tell what equipment they would have found along the way so they would have to replay the same build throughout the entire game over and over again to help catalog the large number of issues that can be found in a game that gives so much of itself to randomizers blizzard's qa team created a web-based bug reporting database to track all bugs balance issues and gameplay suggestions throughout its extensive use it would accumulate more than 8 300 issues and suggestions blizzard north would tackle this mountain of data by dividing teams into organized groups where each would address only specific issues like certain skills item functionality monster types and spawn rates and even constantly replaying areas to check what items may randomly spawn there this level of quality assurance not only served to improve the game in obvious ways but also led to these testers becoming very good at the game giving them unique insight for what late game high hour players would experience as well as being able to retroactively apply that experience to give the game a smoother transition up to that point one aspect of the game designed in parallel and geared towards was the new battlenet just months after the original diablo launched battlenet had become the largest online gaming service in the world and at diablo 2's launch would have more than 6 million unique active users despite the original diablo's online success they wanted to expand battlenet to handle game servers where the realm games would actually be played secure character data servers and game tracking systems while they had attempted to retrofit battlenet's existing environment to support this melding technologies is no simple task and they decided it would be easier to just recode blizzard would team up with the biggest internet service providers in the world to conduct months of internal and external beta testing for this new iteration of battlenet while the largest number of testers on their servers was around 100 000 the true test was after launch when the player count was in the millions they had underestimated not only their sales but also the amount of players that would make use of the battlenet systems diablo 2's launch on june 29th in 2000 was another massive success with excellent ratings and even gaining a spot in the guinness book of world records for being the fastest selling computer game with more than one million copies sold in the first two weeks of availability and by january 2001 it had sold 2.75 million copies worldwide towards the east assuring me that my salvation lies within the ruins of ancient kingdoms though i know the way i know not what perils will arise to hinder my journey and as i pass through the first gate i know that the better part of my soul will remain behind forever [Music] diablo ii had expanded on the original in almost every way but the gameplay itself had remained very similar there were still specific classes but now with their own skill trees there were still random magical properties on items but now they also had item sets these were different pieces of equipment that when worn together would activate bonus magical effects the roster of enemies included many new monsters and variants of those monsters as well as new attacks and very improved ai the elemental resistances remained but poison was added and the magic damage type had been removed from the resistances and instead added as its own damage type the quests were far more interesting and engaging and the places they would take you were anywhere from the original game's town of tristrum to another dimension reminiscent of outer space the emotional tone of the game remained dark and mature with the environments mostly retaining the original's gothic appeal most of the areas were specifically designed with large open battlefields in mind allowing for players to maneuver and make full use of their new abilities the ui and inventory management remained simple while still being overhauled with many quality of life improvements blizzard had also added a stamina system like most other modern games this would determine how long a character could run before they would get tired and slow to a walk as for classes there were some new additions as well as the original three there was the amazon a continuation of the original game's rogue with a skill set geared towards the use of javelins spears bows and crossbows the barbarian a sort of deviation from the previous game's warrior class he was the only base game class capable of dual wielding weapons and a skill tree made up of melee attacks shouts and passive buffs the paladin was also a sort of deviation from the previous game's warrior class being a holy warrior his skill set was made up of prayers which somewhat resembled the barbarian's shouts either being able to damage the enemy or buff himself as well as his party most of his skill set was made up of very aggressive and fast attacks along with some aoe and ranged attacks sprinkled in this sorceress was the successor to the original game's sorcerer able to bend the elements to her will her skill tree consisted of ice lightning and fire based attacks able to cloak herself in elemental based armors and capable of dealing some of the highest damage possible and finally the most unique class the necromancer holding the most diverse skill set of offensive support and summoning abilities with his cursed tree allowing for many different afflictions his summon tree allowing him to raise an army to fight for him and finally his offensive skill set which mostly consists of aoe crowd control spells the attributes and stats were also brought into diablo 2 as well with mostly the same concept strength affecting how much damage a player could do with melee weapons as well as being a requirement for stronger weapons and armor dexterity affects your chance to hit as well as a chance to dodge or block it was also used to determine the damage of all ranged weapons plus javelins and daggers it was also a requirement for some equipment vitality which simply increased a character's health and stamina and energy which determined how much mana a character has this was different from diablo's mana system in that increasing this attribute would not increase a spell's chance to hit because in diablo 2 spells always hit what they touch nor would it affect the spell's performance diablo 2's expansion lord of destruction brought another two classes an entirely new act with new monsters and a boss a plethora of new items including class-specific gear and one of the most sought-after aspects of the game in update 1.10 runes starting with the classes we have the assassin featuring augmented fist-like weapons such as claws guitars and hatchet hands she possessed an oddly diverse yet complementary skill set her martial arts skill tree was all about melee combat and charge up attacks her shadow discipline tree included things like passive and active buffs and even the ability to conjure a shadow of herself then would fight alongside her her trapped skill tree consisted of several different sentries that would fire autonomously at nearby enemies with fire or lightning and could even explode corpses like the necromancer the other class the druid is similar to the necromancer in that he can conjure minions to fight with him but these familiars are animal based rather than pulled from the bodies of the dead aside from his summoning abilities his shape-shifting skill tree could transform the druid into a werewolf or a were bear along with accompanying skills for each his elemental skill tree was somewhat like an amalgamation of the sorceress and the necromancer with many crowd control spells but also devastatingly powerful ones like fissure an ability that damages any enemies walking over it for an absurd amount runes were an ingenious addition of the lord of destruction brought to the game with each of the 33 different runes possessing a different magical effect they could be placed in socketed weapons just like a regular gym but if you were to put the correct runes in the correct order into a piece of equipment that contained the proper amount of sockets those singular effects would transform into what's called a rune word a vastly more powerful set of magical properties that would be applied to the piece of equipment each rune would be progressively more rare from the first to the last with the final rune being almost legendary not necessarily because of its effect but because of how difficult they were to acquire though the gameplay was so similar to the original diablo just a lot more fluid that's not to say there weren't many new things to work toward one of the differences between diablo 2 and the original was that the game would reset after quitting and coming back so with tons of new gear and items players would often find it beneficial to do just that and thus be able to constantly re-clear a dungeon or boss that may have a higher chance of dropping a certain item they wanted this is often referred to as farming this may sound like a simple gameplay loop and it was but for those that indulged in becoming the best and having the strongest gear they could play and farm certain areas for each piece of equipment for many days weeks or even months and that's just for a single character with a single build having several different ways to build each class would mean that many pieces of equipment while incredibly strong may be geared for someone else and due to that rarity and their desirability would be used to trade other players for items you may need this began an entire in-game trade economy based on the rarity of items and would even grow into online real money auction houses this level of hardcore players coupled with the simplistic gameplay would mean anyone with any level of determination could enjoy the game even after the game released the tweaking and balancing continued and the lord of destruction expansion brought the game to an entirely new level for one thing vendors didn't used to sell mana potions so mana bound classes required a lot of scavenging and the sorceress depended much more on the warmth spell a passive ability that increases her mana regeneration rate in fact vendors selling mana potions wouldn't become a thing until patch 1.10 in october of 2003 well after diablo ii's expansion lord of destruction's release a major in-game event that was also added in 1.10 was uber diablo this event would only trigger while playing on the hell difficulty in realm after a certain number of unique rings called the stone of jordan have been sold across all players on that server the screen would shake and a message would appear saying a substantially more powerful version of diablo would take the place of whatever next super unique monster would spawn meaning he could essentially appear anywhere the very next patch version 1.11 would bring another in-game scenario called the pandemonium event this was a multi-stage bonus quest that like uber diablo could only trigger while in realm and would require players to gather three keys that were only possible to acquire as a random drop from three separate bosses while playing on the hell difficulty once acquired players would travel to the lord of destructions act 5 and transmute all three keys in their horadric cube opening a portal to one of three separate locations of which all held a separate vastly more powerful version of three of the game's bosses defeating them each will drop a specific item and when the player collects all three of them they could put those in their horadric cube and transmute them as well opening a fourth portal to uber tristrum here the players will encounter the game's three final bosses mephisto diablo and bale all together but of course they were not only infinitely more powerful than their regular forms they also have new abilities and summon minions at regular intervals achieving victory and what an achievement it is will reward the players with a potentially highest value loot and a hellfire torch blizzard's final patch would add skill synergies making it so putting points and abilities you don't use can buff the ones you do use giving players the ability to further optimize particular builds with all of these in-game events random drops and things to constantly work toward the game's replayability reached well off into years in fact at the time of writing in 2021 the game is still alive while it only has a fraction of the players it had in its heyday it still retains players without the use of any modern game marketing tactics so they improved the game from the original that's the evolution and we can move on no not quite while the definition of evolution can be applied in this way this video would be no better than a review if left as such so let's take a recursive look and see how diablo had truly gotten to where it was at the time of diablo 2 and lord of destruction diablo's evolution is ironic to say the least when it comes to the core gameplay loop diablo 2 is the exact same as diablo 1. the change is only in extra content and features while playing diablo you're doing the exact same thing over and over again go to this area slay these demons get better gear repeat it's as simple as that what blizzard has to achieve is a reward system that can last and has lasted for years in this case decades new players come to this sequel and find it very similar to the first but these new characters have a new skill tree neither of which are overwhelming but at the same time as the player progresses their choice in class and skill set will lead to experimentation on their own eventually leading to a much deeper understanding of this very simple concept discovering runes and eventually rune words becomes this all devouring scavenger hunt where you would actually want to farm certain areas doing the same thing over and over again just for that chance to finally get that rune you need to finish a piece of equipment and once you get to the next area you start finding more that will make even more powerful equipment so you start doing the same thing over and over again not because you had to but because you wanted to runs that go wrong and you end up getting equipment for other classes or builds were still potentially worth trading with other players even if you've torn your way through every difficulty and have been doing bail runs for the past week you still have ubers to go after and after all of this there's still several different builds you can try with your class or many others you can do with all of the other classes everything you do is working towards something no player actions are wasted and yet what you've been doing this entire time is go to this area slay these demons get better gear and repeat the evolution from diablo to diablo 2 and its expansion is ironic because it didn't evolve into something new it evolved into a perfected form the realization that their original core gameplay loop was the main attraction and rather than try to reinvent it or shove in a bunch of disrupting features they simply added more ways to enjoy it regardless of the specific fondness people had whether it be the people that want to max out every character finish as many builds as possible or get the strongest and rarest gear in the game all of it was achieved through the simple but excellent core gameplay loop but there was one central thing that brought the genre to the next level loot the scarcity of those powerful items coupled with a refined gameplay enhance the loop to epic proportions as i said the loop never changed they just added more ways to enjoy it go to this area slay these demons get better gear repeat go to this area waypoints like the dungeon exits from the first game allowed you to quickly get to the area you needed to be in slay these demons the monsters you fight were vastly expanded and improved upon but the biggest part was the addition of elite monster groups which directly affected the next part of the loop get better gear not only had the amount of gear been massively increased but socketable items gems skulls jewels runes and rune words created an entirely new meta around this aspect alone and repeat regardless of what you were doing finishing the game for the first time or on harder difficulties doing magic fight runs or farming certain areas the repetition of doing the same thing over and over again was not only required but desired you could point to any feature and contend that it is the reason for diablo success but the fact of the matter is all features are subservient to the core gameplay loop the loop that defined the genre unfortunately this would be the original team's final game before their unceremonious departure from the company and what would come next was something very different this chapter will be a lot different than the others a lot of the development for diablo 3 was kept quiet and a lot of pretending like everything was fine like they were just continuing on from where they left off reading through the former game director of diablo 3 jay wilson's postmortem interview with diablo2.net it became apparent very quickly that he was being overly diplomatic and not saying how things really happened whether this is from his relationships with his previous employer and its staff or maybe something like a non-disparagement or non-disclosure agreement whatever it may be it's not the full story i'll be taking pieces from his interview as well as several others and some other from verifiable sources to try and piece together what i can but as i said there is very little of the actual development that's public knowledge aside from things like art if you're fine with that or at least curious then let's begin diablo 3's development began all the way back in 2001 but not the diablo 3 we got the original diablo 3 was started by blizzard north the same studio and the same people that made the other two games in the series in fact blizzard north by june of 2003 had two games in production diablo 3 and a similar diablo game of sorts that would take place in space this was incredibly short-lived as by the end of june 17 key employees left blizzard north to form two new companies these employees included none other than david breivik and eric and max schaefer the founding members of condor if you recall the studio that would become blizzard north during the first diablo games development not long after another 13 would leave as well while some of these resignations were dominoes falling and others were people genuinely wanting to start something new the final straw came down to money specifically their future income their parent company vivindi renamed from harvest interactive had recently gone through a catastrophic financial decline reporting a corporate loss of 23.3 billion euros the company was scrambling selling off shares of spin-off companies began reorganizing to stave off bankruptcy and force their ceo to resign the same ceo that would eventually be found guilty in france during 2011 of misappropriation of company funds and divulging misleading information during the time he headed vivinti to his credit he appealed the decision and in 2014 they overturned his charge of misleading investors but upheld the conviction on charges of misuse of corporate funds the story isn't about him but i found it incredibly interesting that after vivendi he began working as a business consultant in new york how appropriate after losing so many employees let alone key staff members blizzard would cancel the second game to continue working on diablo 3 but it wouldn't matter because on august 1st 2005 blizzard entertainment would announce that they were closing blizzard north and canceling the game altogether it was admitted that the reason for blizzard north's closure was due to vivendi's displeasure with the quality of work that had been done on diablo 3. in their defense it's probably pretty difficult to make a game when the lead designers as well as more than half of the staff walk out the story of diablo 3's development after the closure of blizzard north is severely fractured most points are anecdotal or recreated based off of what's in the game or the specific tools used such as their new in-house rendering and physics engine which of course have no documentation available to the public with such a dearth of information or transparency one is left to wonder it could be that they just wanted to wait until they had a solid release date before they revealed it but having gone through many pages in my research and several candid social media posts from current and ex-employees i'm of the opinion that they weren't fully confident in diablo 3 ever being released they just thought it was too valuable to not at least try this may be an abrupt transition but with as little information as there is of the development stage i think it would be best to finally move on to the gameplay and j wilson's postmortem interview [Music] before we get to the details and the very extreme deviation in the evolution of the series i'd like to make one thing perfectly clear there absolutely are people that enjoy diablo 3. it still has a sizeable player base to this day diablo 3 outsold diablo 2 by more than a 5 to 1 margin however in argue window blizzard canceled the second expansion that was supposed to be released sometime after reaper of souls that they were already working on because they couldn't keep enough people playing to make it financially viable this is a conjecture they said this diablo 3 while certainly the most deviant of the series was also the most transformative multiple times throughout its relatively short history would patches add or remove not only features but the entire system around them even though it would sell more than five times the amount of copies of diablo 2 it had begun hemorrhaging players almost immediately though there are several arguable factors the two main culprits in the nephilim exodus that were acknowledged by blizzard themselves were the drop rates for rare items and the oh so convenient solution to this manufactured problem built right into the game the real money auction house the real money auction house for those that either haven't played the game or played after its removal was exactly what the name says you could pay real money along with being able to use in-game gold for some items to buy almost whatever you wanted without needing anything but a credit card and some money on your blizzard account it's been a little bit since we last mentioned it so let's bring up that core gameplay loop again huh go to this area slay these demons get better gear repeat the auction house effectively remove the need to go anywhere or the need to slay demons or the need to get better gear and even the need to repeat even if you would choose to play the game to find the items you wanted rather than just fork over cash their intentionally low drop rates at launch would try their best to make sure you had a hell of a time trying to get even one good item this was no longer a blizzard north game this was a blizzard entertainment game and look no further than their cash cow mmorpg world of warcraft to see exactly where they got the idea for the auction house jay wilson himself would claim that they created the auction house because trading on diablo 2 with third-party sites would result in some people getting scammed so they wanted to heavily regulate how players were allowed to trade items that might be more believable if it weren't for the fact that they completely removed the ability for players to trade items with each other you were forced to go through the auction house the place where blizzard gets a cut from the sales normally this is where i'd write a full argument with examples to back up either the facts or my position but blizzard did the work for me nine years ago in an escapistmagazine.com article where community manager micah whipple said we recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable endgame there needs to be something else that keeps people engaged and we know it's not there right now we have some ideas for progression systems but honestly it's a huge feature if we want to try to do it right and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself is still a ways out we believed pre-release that the item hunt would be far more sustainable and would work to be a proper end game for quite a while that didn't turn out to be true and we recognized that now it's at this point in the video i think i need to apologize with these long-form videos i try to be as neutral as possible and just tell the story not craft the position people have commented that they find these videos professional and while i'm certainly far from that i do try to maintain that demeanor but when it comes to blatant [ __ ] like this i can't help but regress from documentarian to that same massively disappointed diablo 3 player i was back when this was all happening the fact that they actually said the words we have some ideas for progression systems like they weren't aware that progression systems were one of the main features of not only arpg's but rpgs as a whole there is no man alive that could make me believe they were not fully aware that the auction house would be used to buy all of people's gear especially considering the fact that they intentionally set drop rates to such abysmal levels that they were genuinely trying to annoy people into spending money diablo 3's initial evolution of the series had tossed the core gameplay loop into the trash and replaced it with play don't progress oh there is no progression [ __ ] it i guess i'll just buy it they didn't even have the foresight to throw a repeat in there of course there were many other complaints you weren't allowed to change your skills while in combat because i guess maybe that would make it too easy to see what works best or something the game is also always online so single players can also enjoy the wonders of being disconnected [Music] the use of potions were cool down based healed for most of your health and enemies would periodically drop life orbs on death that would heal you when you picked them up progression in the game was directly tied to the story actual barriers blocked a lot of regions that wouldn't be destroyed until you finish certain quests the story itself was every enemy is a james bond villain now they monologue at you constantly complete with mwahaha you'll never stop me and my evil plans i'm too powerful for you and then they would go on to explain the entirety of their plans along with exactly how you could stop them as if giant arrows telling you where to go on your mini-map weren't helpful enough and even things like damage numbers flying everywhere with ridiculously high numbers in the multiple millions i guess they really really liked how mobile games looked wait a second did you guys not have phones yeah you guys yeah yep okay that makes more sense now look if you're one of the people that did enjoy diablo 3 especially in the beginning it's fine if you did alright you're allowed to like things even if someone else didn't but if you are and you didn't understand some of the hate for the game it's stuff like this this whole part may seem like venting or just hating on the game but i assure you this is me being as thorough as i've been on all other gameplay points i've made in this video but getting back to the gameplay itself diablo 3's removal of the manually assignable stat system was added to loot instead no longer would you build a character to use specific equipment for specific builds now all of those stats would come from the equipment itself thus also removing all attribute requirements for equipment characters were now only as strong as their equipment since almost all abilities are based off of weapon damage a naked max level character can't beat a single digit level character not that it was too big of an issue since they completely changed pvp to only be allowed in arenas where players could only fight 1v1 or 2v2 no more massive brawls outside of town those were too much fun and we're not having that around these parts a cool addition to the game was artisans there was one for crafting and repairing weapons and armor as well as breaking them down for materials one for crafting rings amulets and gems as well as removing gems from equipment and a third for customizing the look of your gear and re-rolling magical properties on equipment however they had gotten rid of runes kind of another big change to the series was the removal of the skill tree rather than each class being able to make separate skill based builds players were now all given the same abilities for their class of which you were only allowed to use four of at a time that's a that was a decision everyone also unlocks the same runes they got rid of runes for equipment and instead put them in your abilities because reasons everyone also unlocks the same runes and some are inarguably superior to others limiting the choice to a select few for each of the four possible abilities skills that deal damage are also based on weapons damage so most of the time you'll only care about the weapon's damage rather than any magical properties it may have unless it's a really good piece of equipment this streamlining and simplification of abilities and building characters in general was an evolution of the series by itself keep in mind at this time call of duty had seen a meteoric rise and many studios express jealousy of its ability to consistently and successfully target the largest growing audience by far kids that's not to say that all people that like call of duty are kids and not all kids like call of duty i like call of duty just that the simplicity and flashy gameplay is a big draw for kids and directly correlates with their marketing and target demographic of course all of these skills are nothing without their classes and diablo 3 did come with some new ish heroes with two more eventually being added most of these new classes each came with a new resource in place of mana though it serves the same purpose but usually regenerates or accumulates absurdly fast matching the game's combat of randomly touching any skill on your keyboard which will cause the entire screen to explode and everything dies immediately and sorry bias got away from me there for a minute first we have the witch doctor unfortunately the witch doctor's entire class can be summed up with a simple he's diablo 2's necromancer just without the bone skills specializing in raising the undead poisoning his enemies and putting curses on those that stand in his way sounds familiar next is this mountain of a nephilim the barbarian he's very similar to the original barbarian except now he can only use four scales instead of 30 and can now also summon you heard that right next is the wizard if you're curious as to why she isn't called a sorceress the official story straight from jay wilson is that they wanted to rename her to force themselves out of their comfort zone i would expand on that but i have no idea what that's supposed to mean like the barbarian she's very similar to her diablo 2 predecessor but now can also only use four skills at a time and her teleport has an 11 second cooldown next the monk he's the amalgamation of the diablo 2's paladin and assassin able to dish out assassin-like martial arts and use defensive abilities like the paladin and the last of the original diablo 3 classes is the demon hunter the demon hunter is the amalgamation of diablo 2's amazon and assassin specializing in ranged and some close quarter weapons but also with a set of traps and a sentry turret if you are worried about the lack of actual new classes the reaper of souls expansion and the later added new character download has got you covered first we have the crusader this entirely new hero is the paladin from diablo 2. one of his four skills is the hammers and everything and later we would get the most exotic and new class in the game the necromancer which is seriously which is seriously just a necromancer from diablo 2 but they can only use four skills writing this entire section of the script is slowly killing me instead of mercenaries you'll now find three separate followers and the first two acts of the game an enchantress which is newspeak for wizard which is apparently an out of comfort zone sorceress the scoundrel a light version of the demon hunter and the crusader a sort of paladin style follower and also the only one you'll ever use you can outfit these followers with weapons armor rings amulets and special trinkets they have several sets of two skills with which you can activate one or the other whenever you want so long as they're high enough level to have it unlocked here's the thing while a lot of the changes were controversial for some people after the removal of the horrible idea that was the auction house a lot of this was just new takes on an old game whether people such as myself liked them or not the game was slowly but surely evolving into a new version of the old gameplay loop one of the stumbles or falling off of a cliff they had along the way was when they removed the auction house they boosted the drop rates for items to an extreme degree aside from enemies sometimes dropping multiple legendary items simply breaking barrels could yield them as well while this was a return to the original loop it left the rarest items in the game feeling as common as everything else and if you'll remember loot is a very important aspect of this gameplay loop as i said earlier diablo 3 proved to be the most transformative game in the series and with the expansion reaper of souls as well as their new loot 2.0 system the game was moving in some people's opinion in the right direction this video is certainly not a review but i do think it's worth mentioning the huge amount of work done on this game after launch to completely change it into something most diablo puritan fans could at least recognize with the addition of the paragon leveling system a way to level your character past the max of level 70 which would also apply to the new characters you created and then of course the total overhaul of that system as well as the almost infinite nephilim and challenge portals infernal machine adventure mode and new legendary gems reminiscent of diablo 2's torch charms the end game's potential replay ability far exceeded that of all other games in the series diablo 3 went from a terrible cash cow grift fest to an actual evolution of the original core gameplay loop whether you enjoy this new brand of gameplay or not is irrelevant for this purpose and whether the game will ever get those millions of players back especially with diablo 4 and diablo 2 resurrected on the way it's pretty unlikely but at this point in diablo 3's journey and the series as a whole the evolution continued to revolve around the core gameplay loop of go to this area slay these demons get better gear repeat as usual this video took a while to make this one especially because it wasn't just talking about the game but rather analyzing the evolution of a series fingers crossed that the algorithm picks this video up because the sense of a solar empire won ouch sorry that the diablo 3 section was so short i genuinely am look there just isn't much to that game in my opinion it just feels like way too much of a watered-down simplified mobile game to me especially after playing them all in a row to get this video put together if you thought there was anything i should have included absolutely feel free to speak your mind but also remember that this is all my analysis it's my view on it on the series and we probably view things pretty differently that's not to say either of us is wrong it's just that we have a difference of opinion there were also several things i ended up having to cut too like the part where diablo 2 started using invasive anti-cheat software that ended up banning a massive amount of completely innocent people that was a whole depockle i just i couldn't find any footage at all for it and it was a lengthy segment so instead of a black screen or just irrelevant footage i cut it of course part of the decision on that was it wasn't really relevant to the evolution of the series it was more just anecdotal and i had enough of those already like the vivindi guy anyways hope you enjoy the video and if you did helping me out by leaving a comment or something would be much appreciated that way this video doesn't turn into sins of a solar empire 2.0 what else needs to be in the outro uh oh yeah uh someone asked if i had a patreon i don't and i think it would be better to wait a while before i bother with anything like that but who knows maybe that's a bad decision on my part i do have a nexus page that you can check out if you want that'd be cool but i think that wraps it up for this one if you made it this far in the video please remember to leave a like and if you want to see content like this and more subscribe to the channel this is mitchell godsend have a good one you

Channel: Mitchell Godsend

Views: 249,422

Keywords: Diablo, Diablo Evolution, diablo 2, diablo 2 remastered, diablo 3, diablo 4, diablo documentary, Diablo 1, diablo hellfire, diablo development, diablo 2 development, diablo 3 development, diablo 3 reaper of souls, diablo 2 lord of destruction, diablo 2 2021, evolution of diablo, the history of diablo, new diablo, diablo 3 gameplay, diablo 2 resurrected, diablo evolution, diablo 2 gameplay, d2 resurrected, Diablo history, diablo 4 gameplay

Id: pdPOrwf1f94

Length: 84min 6sec (5046 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/kingsofkong]

Oh thank god, A video with context.

There some videos popping up every month or so title "Evolution of X" but its just a low effort video that combines clips of the games in the franchies.

[u/Endeffect1983]

Great work. Really nothing else can be said about this, and I hope you get a lot of recognition for it.

[u/TablePublic2913]

Stellar video. Thank you for sharing

[u/x-man01]

Quick question. I found out theres a lot of available content on YouTube like this video [https://youtu.be/NVTVMqtmxPU]() and It would be interesting to have you comment on this in relation to some of the d4 development blogs

[u/TYsir]

Really enjoying the video! It sounds like you’re the one that made it, great information and production quality!

[u/onijoker4637]

This is really well done, thanks for the share!

[u/AtomicN]

You accidently call the templar follower a crusader, just FYI. Very good video. A lot I didn't know and found it really interesting.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/BillDoughTreeV]

This is an amazing video! There’s so much information about these games I’ve spent countless hours playing. I thought I’ve read/ heard/watched everything there is to know about Diablo, but there was so much new stuff I learned in this. Great job!