Diablo

The point of most games is to give you a generally fun diversion for a few hours in between jacking off and other things in life. The point of most RPG's is to immerse you in a fictional world and make it and your reactions to that world feel as real as possible. The point of most ARPGs is to do that with a minimalistic story and an emphasis on the gameplay aspects of the RPG setting. The point of Diablo 1 is to make you feel paranoid, scared of the real consequences of your actions in the game's world, and feel generally unnerved. Also to kill Diablo and his friends, all in between jacking off of course. The point of this review is to explain how and why I think Diablo 1 succeeded in its aims and why it ended up being one of my favorite video game experiences. My review is basically all spoilers, so keep that in mind before reading.


Take heed for these are the words of a hard-headed asshole. You might say if you're nice and want to be factually correct that the story in Diablo is more about quality than quantity and if I was to gamble the quality of my review on another cliche you might also say it's more about the atmosphere and an experience, rather than a straightforward story being told. Some magi/angels in a world called Sanctuary imprisoned Diablo and his evil friends long before the events of these games. Diablo is resurrected in a town called Tristram where a soul stone he was trapped in was secretly buried under a monastery. The game also contains some more flavor details and side stories like the people of Tristram being killed by a particularly vicious demon known as "The Butcher" and a local feudal lord, King Leoric slowly turning into Satan's right-hand man. None of this is particularly complex but the harrowing way the story is told and the way these quests and "bosses" are presented is better developed than most games with hundreds of quests filled with boring content and a lack of atmosphere and tension enough for you to give a shit. See Blizzard's current output for the last ten years for an example of those kinds of games. The story well establishes the history of the world and the general atmosphere and tone it wants to set. The game makes you genuinely scared of accidentally running into the Butcher and when you do see him if you're anything like me you panicked the first time and tried to run away. King Leoric's story is both sad for the king who was well-intentioned and albeit reluctant in his rule and the story of his slow corruption and psychotic break due to Diablo's whispers is a genuinely well put together psychological story for a game that is mostly centered around action rather than self-reflection. Connected to the Butcher's story and Leoric's is the corruption of the in-game church and in particular, the Archibishop Lazarus who as his biblical namesake implies is the person who resurrects Diablo. Before showing his corruption fully outwardly he orchestrated the deaths of many townsfolk at the hands of the Butcher and helped in the corruption of Leoric. In some ways he is the most reprehensible villain in the game as unlike Diablo his nature is not inherently evil and malefic. So due to that he feels like the real "villain" in the story if what you quantify by that is who do you have the most reason to justifiably hate. There are more quests, characters, stories, lore shit, and bosses than this but on a whole, the game is more about the gameplay than the story and its focus in that regard should be noted, but the quests and story are still remarkably good. Diablo himself is less represented and built up, he is more like an inverse Everest peak that is staring you in the face the whole game. Your goal is clear the minute you see the games package on a store shelf, slay shit to get to the big bad guy, but the real accomplishment is getting there and knowing you traversed endless halls to find this bastard. I think Blizzard rightly calculated at the time that players weren't going to need a strong reason or motive to kill Diablo, why he is bad is pretty apparent by his mere existence and reason for being. Though they do give some added motives as in the already stated corrupting of people like Leoric and the local church, the threat his living embodies to the world and of course your own survival. The story is minimalist but impressive and it gets across the atmosphere and tone Blizzard wanted you to have.


I've heard the creators of Doom say they wanted the main appeal of Doom to be it's balls to the wall approach to fun and shooting mechanics an improvement on their previous game Wolfenstein 3D, but at the same time seeming less complicated and more straight forward in it's approach to gameplay and lack of a general/important plot. They wanted everything to be faster, more action-oriented, and streamlined in a way that put the core of what made the game that it was immediately easy to jump into and play. It's hard to get into the minds of Blizzard's staff in the early to mid-'90s but it's easy to see this approach to the gameplay and story of Diablo in the same light as Doom when you compare it to other more complicated RPG's of the same time period. The core of Diablo's gameplay is simple you attack things as various different fantasy classes as you make your way through a massive labyrinth towards Diablo and several other minor quests and "bosses." As you kill things you get gold, armor, and various other pieces of loot that you can sell, as well as experience and other stuff. That is a lot less hard to follow and explain than Goldbox RPGs, RPG's in general, or even computer "adventure" games in the '90s. That is not to say those games are bad or that a lack of complexity is a standard all games should follow. I merely bring this up to set up a framework of Diablo's initial appeal at the time and its enduring appeal to me even now. I like RPGs and the more archaic, stat-centered, and text-heavy they are the better in my opinion. If I can't imagine shag green 70's carpet, pizza, Pepsi and 20 sided dice, you just might have failed at creating a dragon-slaying simulator that gets approval from me. Sometimes though I just want that RPG experience without all the barriers to entry and I think Diablo was made to scratch that itch. Sometimes you just want to play, sometimes the experience trumps the story they want you to see, sometimes... You just want to click a mouse button while seeing your gold and stats stack. I should also state that a lack of barriers to entry does not mean this game was easy in fact far from it. Diablo 1 is fucking hard, you will die and die a lot on a first playthrough. This is not like modern-day Blizzard games where even a baby could slay shit like a hero. This is compounded by the fact that Diablo's gameplay is deceptively simple. You walk up to an enemy and start clicking away. You might even get overconfident at first "this isn't as hard as that asshole on Glitchwave said" you'll say to yourself. One skeleton or minor demon will fool you into carelessness, then you see a pack of five and you run at'em and you see your health dwindle to zero faster than the prospects of you getting laid in the next three years. It's tough but it's that good kind of tough and difficult where it's fair and your death is generally due to your poor skills and choices or lack of preparation. Let me ask a question, is it generally a good idea to run into five large dudes in real life and start a fight? Unless you're extremely strong or otherwise prepared for such an event I'm sure the majority of people will say "no" to that question and that generally rings true for Diablo. It's a bad idea to run into large packs of enemies in-game or immediately to engage a larger enemy you have never seen before. That is what I mean by its difficulty is hard but it rewards players who think smart and realistically about its world despite its fantasy setting. It's not a good idea to go exploring unknown places in real life without the proper equipment and supplies you'll need to do so this is also true in Diablo and this is what I mean by preparation. Exploring further into the labyrinth is best done when you can be confident enough that you have gathered all the health items and armor upgrades you need before exploring further.

The combat is basic in execution but complex in its formula. You have a lot of armor and weapon choices in the game and your class choices also add a lot of depth and skill choices in combat. The majority of your time spent in this game is yes clicking on the demons but also managing your health and mana. It might sound like your basic RPG setup and it is but the Diablo games "feel" different in their gameplay. If you don't master simultaneously doing all of those things a lot of quick deaths are about to come your way. There is a tenseness to it and it's a rhythmic style of gameplay that requires a lot of attentiveness and preparation. When you do finally get into the hang of it though, the miniature swordman on your screen starts to look and feel heroic and there are few greater feelings than successfully clearing out a room you previously felt was impossible. The risk/reward gameplay is very strong in this title and gives people the "addictive" feeling people describe when they talk about the Diablo games.
The enemies don't just take sword strikes to the face lightly. They deal damage back and a lot of it. The game does a good job of gradually upscaling the difficulty and the first areas despite my somewhat exaggerated descriptions before are fair to newcomers in that if you make smart decisions you should generally be able to get through at least the first two floors quickly enough. I say floors because as I alluded to a few times already the terrain in this game is mostly vertical, you're slowly making your way down through floors and floors of the same building/cave system to reach Diablo and his friends. The difficulty of enemies and their groupings whether it be large or small is generally considered. Certain floors have special events and bosses as stated above.

One thing that is different about Diablo and its sequels than most RPG's is the environments are procedurally generated (PG). Meaning that they are randomly created maps aside from a few areas like the city of Tristram and some boss areas (I think). Most games that aren't simulation games of some type usually have a hard time making the contents of a game compelling in a PG world, so one of Diablo 1 and 2's major accomplishments is their ability to randomly generate maps that seem as detailed and balanced as those of preprogrammed RPG worlds. It also adds an immense amount of replayability and never-ending cow level rumors. The layered atmosphere and art style of the game which is mostly dark and brooding create an overall feeling of despair and apprehension as you explore the near-endless floors of Diablo's crypt. The protoform of the iconic Blizzard art style present in this game and the first two Warcraft's wasn't quite what it is today and If I can give modern Blizzard any compliments in this review it's the near-perfection of their art style and it's distinctness from that of other game companies. Let me wax a little nostalgic here though and say that not only do I still find that Diablo 1's graphics and overall art direction still feel fresh enough for a game that came out in 1996 but near the time of its release I was also enamored with Chris Metzen's artwork in Diablo, StarCraft and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness instruction manuals. Instruction manuals are kind of a lost vestigial organ of gaming's past now, but about half the story in early Blizzard games was contained in the manuals and the accompanying artwork often left long-lasting impressions on me. The pained look on King Leoric's face as he succumbs to madness in the manual is simple but excellent in execution. The level design to the extent that it was intentionally designed is excellent. PG didn't detract from the game it made its endless halls and mazes seem all the more impossible and treacherous to navigate and it was yet another knock from your own glib assurance that eventually you will master the game and all its details. Diablo's design is anti-mastery and anti-confidence you can endure through it but at your own peril.

Diablo 1 had online play and I'll say probably my most controversial statement of this review I think Diablo 1 had better online play than Diablo 2 in terms of the quality of gameplay and what it added to the game. Now if you read any of my other reviews when it comes to compare and contrast sections this is where I would usually shit on one game heavily in comparison to the game I'm actually reviewing, but that won't be the case here. Diablo 2 is a rare sequel in that managed to be almost just as great in my opinion to its predecessor and managed to improve a lot of technical details/oversights and be different enough that my aim is not to shit on it. I think the differences between the two games in terms of quality are actually relatively small and I just happen to slightly prefer 1 over 2. It deserves its praise and I have probably played it almost as much as the original and according to most people 2 is better than 1 so you should take my opinion with a slight grain of salt here but I'll say that the online dimension in 1 where a player could join your game and you didn't know whether they were there to be a friend or foe was much more tense and interesting than Diablo 2's more cosmopolitan proto MMORPG approach to online play. Diablo 2's online play served to make the world less frightening and more friend oriented. Whereas Diablo 1's approach added more fear and risk. Similar to the way the From Soft's Souls series online play works. It's not there to be functional or fair it's there to further help establish the harsh nature of the world. If fun is the main way you judge a game and as I see it it's a perfectly valid way to judge a game among other things, you probably will prefer 2 over 1 and I find that a perfectly reasonable stance to take here. If like me though fun is only one way to gauge a game's quality along with many other factors I think you have to give some accolades to how Diablo 1's multiplayer managed to build on the games atmosphere and tone, further managing to make the game more tense and scary as this particular game world should be. I talk more extensively about the similarities between Dark Souls and Diablo 1 in my Dark Souls review. If you're wondering why I'm not talking about Diablo 3, well here is my review: It's shit. I mean it keeps the gameplay mostly the same but the atmosphere and tone are just way off and the story is redundant as hell.

Blizzard is usually great with its soundtracks and Diablo is no exception. The soundtrack on this used a lot of string instruments and ambient noises, which is a little unusual from the typical Blizzard fare, but it still manages to have their distinct sound. It complements a lot of the other atmospheric aspects of the game and even though there are only about six tracks I never get tired of hearing them. Stay awhile and listen, as I tell you about the sound effects. They work well and the noises the various creature make and your weapon clashing against the enemy sounds great.

Atmosphere and tone, atmosphere and tone, atmosphere and tone, aposphere and toe... You probably got sick of hearing that throughout this review but Diablo is an exemplar of ATMOSPHERE AND TONE. There I said it for the last time, in this review at least. Everything about its design was calculated to psychologically torture you and make you feel like a real-life King Leoric going insane as you traverse the halls of Diablo's domain. This is probably why heavy spoiler here, your character and some of the people who helped them, go insane in the next game. Diablo 1 is not for people who want to fuck around, it's an action RPG/dungeon crawler that takes both of those genre descriptors very seriously and you better damn well be serious about it if you want to survive. That is the main appeal of Diablo 1 above most RPGs and I'd say above its own sequels. It is uncompromising, brutal, and torturous in every single one of its design choices and I wouldn't have it any other way. If that sounds good to you, give it a damn try already. What are you waiting for? God-fucking-damnit! I'm amped after this review, time to slay some demons while listening to extreme metal. Or maybe I'll just jack off.