xpresstuning
Member
It took me an entire week, but i finally beat the game.
Technically it's about as outdated as you would expect, the Quality of Life features that polished future installments, addressing the original's shortcomings, do not exist here. Character progression is accomplished with a level up system, a loot finding system and a spell system. The level up system is done through distributing 5 points to your base stats each time you reach a certain number of experience points, that you accumulate by killing enemies. Loot variation/modifiers is narrow with a small pool of unique items to pick. Spell system is done through collecting various spells that you may use. Overall, character progression is rudimentary, it's all quite simplistic.
But what struck me unbelievably hard is how different this video game is compared to the entire genre it sparked into creation.
Diablo's progression is slow and methodical, thanks in part to the fact that there's no run feature and because it's a very difficult video game; not paying close attention to the position of your character and the enemies you encounter can easily lead to death in the blink of an eye. This slow progression creates a strong sense of tension throughout the entire game, and that permeating tension is further enhanced by Diablo's fantastic sound design (enemies, weapons, etc.), brilliant soundtrack (i'll link my favorite below) and gothic-architecture inspired artstyle strongly imbued with macabre and grotesque imaginary. The scarce plot, experienced through quests and voiced text serves to aid in even further amplifying the above mentioned; The writing is on-point with the theme conveyed by the nature of its design. And that theme is pure, aggressive horror with a good measure of hopelessness thrown in; The original Diablo is a very, very dark video game with an incredibly good atmosphere.
The rudimentary character progression was enough of an incentive to progress through and explore. I think the original Diablo is my favorite of the series, purely from a single-player perspective. Diablo II, III and Path of Exile (currently playing ever since 2.6) are undoubtedly in another stratosphere of quality as far as character progression is concerned, but the original Diablo is something else entirely.
Where the above mentioned are fast-action loot collectathon experiences, the original Diablo is a methodical horror-gothic rogue-like experience. Funnily enough, the only other video game i can compare the original Diablo to is Dark Souls. And i'm not a fan of the Souls series and their spiritual offsprings, at all.
Here's a great insight into how the original Diablo came to be, regards to Helios for posting the video in the thread (i'm currently watching it).
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