Diablo II, sequel to the popular Diablo, is a dark fantasy-themed Action role-playing game in a hack and slash or "Dungeon Roaming" style. It was released for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS in 2000 by Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo II was developed by Blizzard North.
By April 2001, Diablo II had become one of the most popular online games ever. Major factors that contributed to Diablo II's success include what fans found to be addictive hack and slash gameplay and free access to Battle.net. Diablo II may be played as a single player game, multi-player via a LAN, or multi-player via Battle.net, with the latter being the most popular. It has also become the second best selling computer game after The Sims, and number one best selling RPG for the PC, selling over fifteen million copies.
The game was conceptualized and designed by Stieg Hedlund, with Blizzard North founders David Brevik, Max and Eric Shaefer acting as Project Leads for the other disciplines (Engineering, Character Art and Environment Art, respectively). The main Production roles were handled by Matthew Householder and Bill Roper.
An expansion to Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, was released in 2001, and is now at version 1.11b.
Game Play
The player assumes the role of a hero, fighting monsters while traversing overland and dungeons. The storyline of Diablo II is played through four acts. Each act follows a predetermined path with preselected quests, although some quests are optional. Each act culminates with the destruction of a boss monster, upon which the player proceeds to the next act. Battle is conducted in real-time, using an isometric oblique top-down viewpoint (basically, this just means that the game has a set, hovering camera angle, a viewpoint often called "2.5D" because it is between 2D and 3D). Players fight monsters to level their character up and gain better items.
Diablo II emphasises combat, and randomly generates many monster properties, level lay-outs and item drops. Most of the maps themselves are randomly generated. In single player mode, the map is randomly generated but locks the setting thereafter; in multiplayer mode, it resets every time the dungeon is restarted.
Diablo II allows the player to choose between five different character classes: Necromancer, Amazon, Barbarian, Sorceress and Paladin. Each character has different strengths and weaknesses and sets of skills to choose from.
In addition to the four acts there are also three difficulty levels: Normal, Nightmare and Hell. A character must complete these difficulty levels in order; only once a character completes normal difficulty can that character play at nightmare difficulty, and similarly for hell difficulty. Each difficulty is a greater challenge than the last, with such features as increased creature difficulty, experience penalties upon death, and other challenges. A character retains all abilities, equipment, etc, between difficulties, and may return to earlier difficulties at any time. Upon completion of the game in normal difficulty, a player may create a hardcore character. While for normal players the game doesn't end when they die (as they can simply resurrect in that act's base of operations), the game ends when a hardcore character is killed.
Diablo II also has a number of other features that enhance gameplay. The player has the option of hiring one of several computer-controlled mercenaries, that follow the player and attack nearby enemies. On occasion, the player might find a rare, valuable item, or one that is part of a set that becomes more powerful when the entire set is collected. Items can be customized using sockets and gems, or transmuted into different items using the Horadric Cube.
Character classes
Amazon
The Amazon is an "active skill"-oriented fighter. Her skills are oriented around personal (generally passive) protective abilities, the use of a bow and arrow (whose abilities are linked with the element of fire and ice), as well as the spear and javelin (whose abilities are linked with the elements of lightning and poison).
The Amazon is most similar to the Rogue of Diablo: both are primarily associated with bows (and crossbows, in the case of the Amazon), and both are middle points between pure strength and pure magic. The Amazon is different in that she can also use javelins and spears adeptly. The class is loosely based on the Amazons of mythology.
Barbarian
The Barbarian is a powerful melee-oriented character in Diablo 2, and the only character capable of dual-wielding. His skills are divided into various weapon masteries, warcries, and combat skills. The masteries are purely passive and allow the Barbarian to specialize in different types of weapons and to gain natural speed and resistances. His warcries can enhance his and his party's abilities in combat, reduce the enemy's abilities, frighten the enemy into fleeing and even cause considerable damage to them. The Barbarian's combat skills are attacks that maximize brute force, his greatest asset.
The Barbarians, in Diablo 2, originated from the Northern Highlands, which is where Act 5 of the Expansion takes place, and can also be hired as mercenaries in that Act.
The Barbarian was originally conceptualized for Hellfire, the original Diablo "expansion" made by Sierra. The character was not implemented in the final version but was included as a hidden class in the 1.01 patch for Hellfire. The character had the same appearance and speech as the Warrior but had altered statistics and a different ability.
The Barbarian, despite being a strictly melee character, can be very effective. In hell mode the natural resistance for all characters drop and the Barbarian is the only class that can passively increase his resistance through a skill. Barbarians also can deal massive damage from their Whirlwind and Frenzy skills.
Sorceress
The Sorceress focuses on ranged elemental spells in three areas: Ice, Lightning and Fire. Her Ice-based spells have the benefit of chilling or even completely freezing affected enemies, but do less damage, the Lightning spells do more damage but have a very wide range of damage, whilst the Fire spells deal more consistent damage.
The spell Teleport essentially defines the sorceress, allowing much faster mobility than any other character. The strong point of the Sorceress is powerful damaging spells and casting speed; her weakness is her relatively low hit points and defense, demanding that the player pay close attention to keep her out of the fray.
Sorceresses are, according to the storyline, rebellious women who have wrested the secrets of magic use from the male-dominated Mage-clans of the East.
Necromancer
The Necromancer is also a spell-caster who relies on summoning spirits of the dead to aid him in his work. His skills are split into Summoning, Poison & Bone spells, and Curses. The Summoning skills allow him to revive various skeletons, golems and any normal monster killed; the Poison & Bone skills allow him to deal direct damage or trap enemies whilst the Curse skills inflict various penalties upon his enemies. He benefits most from wand or dagger class weapons.
The Necromancer's skill trees are Bone, Poison, and Summoning. The bone tree involves "direct damage" and "crowd control" skills that use bones spears and bone spirits to trap and hurt enemies or protect the Necromancer. The Necromancer's poison skills involve using spells like Poison Dagger that allows the Necromancer to deal enormous amounts of damage with a dagger. Another skill is the Poison Nova which can also deal high amounts of damage, albeit not as much as Poison Dagger (but to more opponents). The Necromancer's final skill tree is that of summoning undead spirits and golems. While not particularly powerful alone; augmented by the synergy "Skeleton Mastery" and various offensive auras granted by new Runewords, they can be formidable.
Paladin
The Paladin is a religious warrior fighting for all that is good. To reflect this, the zealous Paladin's combat skills range from fanatical attacks to heavenly thunderbolts. His skills are split into combat skills, defensive auras, and offensive auras, the latter two of which can enhance personal abilities, lower the amount of damage dealt by enemies or recover health. These auras are helpful in a multiplayer game as many of them can be used to upgrade all of the party's stats. Paladins are highly proficient in the use of a shield. They may even use their shield as a weapon. He is the best with defensive skills and is also the best if the player wishes to weaken enemies without hitting them or casting any spells.
The Paladin is a more complicated character to get into out of all the other characters. Commonly called "Auradins" in online slang to describe characters that buff up offensive auras, these characters are largely ineffective in any other difficulty besides the normal one. Use of Concentration and Blessed Hammer to form a so-called "hammerdin" is one of the most effective ways to build this character[citation needed].
Multiplayer
Unlike the original Diablo, Diablo II was made specifically with online gaming in mind. Several spells (such as auras or battle cries) multiply their effectiveness if they are cast within a party, and dungeons, although they still exist, were largely replaced by open spaces.
Multiplayer is achieved through Blizzard's Battle.net free online service, or via a LAN. Battle.net is divided into "Open" and "Closed" realms. Players may play their single-player characters on open realms; characters in closed realms are stored on Blizzard's servers, as a measure against cheating, where they must be played every 90 days to avoid expiration. Online play is otherwise nearly identical to single-player play. The most notable difference is that online maps are generated randomly, with a new map for every game a player enters -- but offline, single player maps are retained in computer memory.
As the game can be played cooperatively (Players vs. Monsters, PvM), groups of players with specific sets of complementary skills can finish some of the game's climactic battles in a matter of seconds, providing strong incentives for party-oriented character builds. Up to eight players can be in one game; they can either unite as a single party, play as individuals, or form multiple opposing parties. Experience; monsters' hitpoints (both the damage required to kill a given monster, and the amount of damage the monster can inflict); and quality of item drops and the amount of items dropped, are increased as more players join a game.
As an added dimension, Diablo II allows players to engage in competitive player vs. player (PvP) combat, rewarding victors with piles of gold and the severed ear of their enemy. PvP play outside the framework of duels (i.e. random assaults of other players) led to a community of certain PvPers finding ways to interfere with other high-level parties, or repetitively wipe out low-level players[citation needed]. These players are commonly called PKers (Player Killers) by the Battle.net community.
Players are allowed to duel each other with all damage being reduced in player vs player (PvP). The bounty for a successful kill in PvP is a portion of the gold and the "ear" of the defeated player (with the previous owner name and level at the time of the kill).
Patch 1.10 included the option of playing with a ladder character. The ladder system can be reset at various intervals to allow for all players to start fresh with new characters on an equal footing. Ladder seasons have lasted from as short as nine months to over a year. When a ladder season ends the ladder population is transfered to the non-ladder population with all iteams that player is holding. Certain rare items and rune words are available only within ladder games, although they can be traded for and exchanged on non-ladder after the season has ended.
Up to twenty-two patches have been released for Diablo II. Through the patch history, several exploits and issues have been addressed (such as illegal item duplication), as well as major revamps to the game's balance. Not all patches have affected Diablo II directly, as several were designed to address issues in the expansion to the game and had minimal effects on Diablo II. The game is currently in version 1.11b. The exact number of patches is impossible to determine as Battle.net has the capability of making minor server-side patches to address immediate issues.
Story
The story of Diablo II takes place soon after the end of the original Diablo. At the end of the game, Diablo, Lord of Terror and one of the three demon lords known as the Prime Evils, was defeated by a mortal hero. The hero who slew him (the Warrior character of the first game) drives the soulstone of Diablo (a magical stone containing the soul of a demon or angel) into his own head in an attempt to contain Diablo in his own body. After this event, the hero is rapidly corrupted by Diablo and loses control of Diablo's soul slowly. In the opening cinematic of Diablo II, Marius, the narrator of the story, witnesses the fallen hero (known only as the Dark Wanderer) totally lose control, unleashing the demons of Hell upon a tavern. Marius is the only survivor (it is implied that rather than just being blind luck, the demons were ignoring him), and he feels compelled to follow the Wanderer for reasons he himself does not understand. The new player character is a different hero following in the wake of the destruction, chasing the Dark Wanderer, hoping to put an end to the demon lord within him. The new hero ultimately catches up to the Wanderer outside the city of Kurast but is unable to stop him. The rest of the story is revealed through the four acts, as the player faces not just the demon lord Diablo, but two new major villains, his equally malevolent brothers, fellow Prime Evils Mephisto, Lord of Hatred and Baal, Lord of Destruction. Diablo is determined to free them from their soulstone incarceration, which was forced upon all three long ago, and from which Diablo managed to break free in the first game. The hero travels through different lands to thwart the forces of Hell from conquering the world known as Sanctuary.
Easter eggs
Many of the characters, items and places in Diablo II are named after Blizzard employees and their loved ones.
Diablo II also uses the concept of undecidable figures to represent the "Arcane Sanctuary" level, since it is an extradimensional, magical construct of the wizard Horazon. Players are able to walk on a flat surface and find their characters below their starting point, similar to M. C. Escher's woodblock print Waterfall. The algorithm for impossible geometry was not difficult to achieve; instead, the program sees the level as a plane and the visual representations do the work of creating this effect. The level plays with and takes advantage of the limits of isometric projection.
Secret Cow Level
The "Secret Cow Level" is the result of a running joke from the original Diablo that spawned from an Internet rumor about a cow which appears in the game, seemingly without purpose. Supposedly, if the cow was clicked on a certain number of times, a portal to a secret level would open. The rumor was a hoax, but the legend was born, and player after player asked Blizzard about how to access the level.
In Diablo: Hellfire, the only expansion to the original Diablo (This "expansion" is actually considered an "add-on", since it was not an official release, but instead released by Sierra Entertainment), it was possible to change a parameter in a specific text file (Command.txt), so that the farmer who gives out the "rune bomb" quest was dressed in a cow suit, with appropriate new dialogue ("Moo." "I said Moo!"). This added fuel to the fire. To kill the rumor, Blizzard included a cheat (that automatically won the game) in StarCraft that read "There is no cow level", this being Blizzard's way of officially confirming that there was, in fact, no Cow Level. Among online game enthusiasts, this phrase has become an Internet joke similar to the phrase There Is No Cabal.
On April 1, 1999, a Diablo II Screenshot of the Week featured cows fighting. People wondered if the screenshot was an April Fool's joke or if there really was a Secret Cow Level planned for Diablo II. It turned out that there was a cow level. To access the level, one must kill Diablo (or, in Lord of Destruction, kill Baal), return to Rogue Encampment in Act I within the same difficulty level, and then transmute Wirt's Leg with a Tome of Town Portal in the Horadric Cube. This will open a portal to the secret level (defeating Baal in the difficulty that the player wishes to enter the cow level in is no longer required, as of patch 1.11b. One only needs to be able to access a certain difficulty to enter its cow level). There is an item set named "The Cow King's Leathers" which may be dropped upon killing the "Cow King". However, when a player kills the cow king for their first time on a difficulty level, any player in the secret cow level at the time of the king's death becomes unable to reopen the portal to the level on that difficulty level.
Reception
Diablo II was a runaway success for Blizzard. The game has achieved an overall score of 88 on Metacritic. Gamespy awarded the game an 86 out of 100, IGN awarded the game an 8.3 out of 10, and Gamespot awarded the game an 8.5 out of 10 along with earning the 2000 runner-up Reader's Choice Award for role-playing game of the year. It was awarded a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records "2000 edition" for being the fastest selling computer game ever sold, with more than 1 million units sold in the first two weeks of availability, by January 2001, it had sold 2.75 million copies worldwide.
References
- ^ Introduction to Vivendi Games. http://www.vivendi.com/ Vivendi's online website. Retrieved on November 20, 2006.
- ^ "The Secret Cow Level". http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/ The Arreat Summit.
- ^ http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/diablo2?q=diablo%20II
- ^ http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/reviews/diablo2_a.shtm
- ^ http://pc.ign.com/objects/010/010629.html
- ^ http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/diablo2/review.html
- ^ http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/bestof_2000_rc/p6.html
- ^ Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade. Official U. S. Playstation Magazine.
- BlueNews news article[1]
- Inside Mac games news article[2]
- GameZone news article[3]
- Internet Movie Database[4]
- CVG interview with Bill Roper, [5]
See also
External links
- Official Site
- The Arreat Summit, official Strategy Guide
- Planet Diablo - IGN/GameSpy's Diablo Fansite
- DiabloII.net - Unofficial fansite for Diablo, Hellfire, Diablo II, and Lord of Destruction
- Diablo II at GameFAQs
- Diablo II at MobyGames
- Diablo Wiki - a Wikia of the Diablo Series
