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

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• the loot lottery is kind of a system by which random items are generated

• I had many influences growing up, things like "Ultima" to "Might and Magic" to "Wizardry.

• And then there were others like "NetHack" and "Moria," "Umoria" and "Angband."

• in a lot of ways it was "Angband," I think, that was kind of the model of what we wanted.

• 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."

• 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.

• Time from boot up to kill was like, it's gotta be under a minute kind of thing.

• It was kind of loosely based on the system that came from "Moria," "Angband," "Umoria," those kind of style games. They had random item generation, but not to the same extent that we were gonna be doing it in "Diablo.

• Originally, "Diablo" was gonna be a turn-based game, which is based on "Rogue" and "Angband," et cetera

• " 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.

• 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's about to die. You were important decisions you had to make. There was just so much strategy and depth and the games were permadeath. 11:28 So if you, you know, if you died, that was it. And there was on these Unix servers, so you couldn't, like, restore your characters or anything like that, it was gone. So it's this really tense moment. And I really did not want to lose that tension. I thought that was essential to the way that the game was gonna play.

• 11:45 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, 1/10 of a turn, and then walking one square horizontally took a whole turn, but diagonally took 1.4 turns.

• "Hellgate: London

• " and the hype for that game was outrageously high and didn't meet expectations.

• It was a really unique game

• it was the very first looter shooter

• despite the flaws, which were mainly bug-related

• The best general advice that I can give are things like from a UI perspective. Can somebody play this without reading a manual or getting any kind of instructions?

• the mom test, which was like, my mom was not computer-savvy at the time. 20:34 And so like, if my mom can pick this up and play this, then anybody can