Maybe you haven’t been waiting for a new Diablo game since Blizzard released Lord of Destruction in 2001. Maybe you’ve observed the Diablo discussion from afar and wondered why series fans are so excited. Well gear up, dungeon crawler, it’s time to discover what you’ve been missing.

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Developed by Blizzard North, the first Diablo was released in late 1996, combining roguelike elements of randomization and dungeon exploration with a real-time combat system presented from an overhead perspective. That may sound complicated, but the basic gameplay was pretty straightforward, making it a more approachable, exciting take on the action-RPG genre compared to many of its contemporaries.A dark, sinister tone helped distinguish Diablo, established in large part by the screaming strings on the soundtrack and dark, shadow-soaked visuals. Your quest was to seek out and slay Diablo, the Lord of Terror, who spawned an army of demons deep beneath a monastery in the rural town of Tristram and generally made life difficult for everyone involved.To get to him, naturally, you had to kill a whole bunch of monsters. You fought, returned to town to restock, fought, and repeated the process from the game’s beginning to end, with short breaks now and then for a bit of NPC chatter in scrolling text dialogue boxes. You amassed experience, leveled up and expanded your skill set as one of three archetypal classes. The sturdy Warrior was best at cleaving things to bits with huge weapons, the Rogue excelled with bows, and the Sorcerer was physically weak but skilled with spells. The layout of each dungeon level, monster group and rewards dropped from corpses was randomized to a degree, so you were never quite sure how many skeletons you’d fight at a time, or what kind of magic weapon or armor piece would tumble from their corpses.Part of why Diablo quickly gained popularity was because you didn’t have to sift through a meter-thick tome of instructions to figure out how to start playing. You simply clicked on monsters to hit them with swords and arrows and, at least in the first few dungeon levels, they died pretty quickly. They also dropped loot all over the ground, which was really what kept you playing, ceaselessly tempting you to proceed further with the promise of greater rewards. Every play session was characterized by near constant loot showers triggered by slicing apart a demon with a broadsword or creaking back a sarcophagus’ stone cover, from your first steps into the uppermost dungeon level to the final battle in the depths of Hell.

Another draw of Diablo was its fantastic pacing and the way it tied together challenge and reward. As you went deeper through the dungeon levels the enemies became tougher and more menacing in appearance, the environments changed from simple stone crypts to hellish fiery halls, continuously revitalizing the combat experience even though mechanically it never really changed. No matter how powerful you thought you were, a new type of creature was always waiting to shatter your pride and cut you to pieces. Skeletons were replaced by goat men, and further down you fought hulking magma demons and deadly succubi. Within these categories of enemies Blizzard built in plenty of variety, including stronger unique types, which were always worth taking on because the stronger the enemy, the better the loot.In the years following its launch the name Diablo became synonymous with its sub-genre. Any game with fast action, elements of randomization and an emphasis on acquiring and sifting through huge quantities of loot could be labeled an action-RPG, but was just as often described as a Diablo clone. The label remains relevant to this day, and can be applied across an even wider category of games: Gearbox’s Borderlands shares many of Diablo’s defining qualities, for instance, and it’s a first-person shooter.Not surprisingly, Blizzard developed a sequel . Diablo II was released in the summer of 2000 and expanded upon just about every idea that was built into the original. With a much larger game world, complex character classes, varied enemy types and attack patterns, and a huge loot table, Diablo II went on to sell one million copies in less than one month. Blizzard followed up with Lord of Destruction, a major expansion to Diablo II that added more customization systems, story content, loot and classes in 2001.

Despite the big jump in complexity from the original to Diablo II, the core gameplay was still easy to pick up and play. Outside of the occasional out-of-nowhere difficulty spike, like the Duriel boss battle at the end of Act II, Diablo II’s pacing was excellent, shuttling you through a huge variety of haunting environment types populated with finely detailed and animated creatures programmed with an impressive variety of attack routines.Each of the seven classes could be customized to fight in remarkably different ways, so even if you and your friend played Assassins, your martial arts-focused build would result in a completely different style of gameplay compared to your friend’s emphasis on traps. In conversation with other Diablo players, you wouldn’t say you were playing an Assassin that used traps, you’d say Trapsassin. A bow-using Amazon was known as a Bowazon, and Paladins that focused on the Blessed Hammer skill were Hammerdins. Class customization became an obsession, with detailed guides appearing online showing off exactly how to build a character into as efficient a killing machine as possible. Truly mastering class customization became something of a science within the community because by neglecting to do the proper research, it was fairly easy to allocate skill and attribute points in a less than ideal manner.

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While Diablo II had a story and, at the time, incredible pre-rendered cut-scenes to break up the gameplay, finding out what happened with Diablo, his demon brothers, the archangel Tyrael and the Worldstone wasn’t what sustained interest. The real meat of the experience was replaying the game, over and over at higher difficulties, cycling through the content again and again, chasing the rarest loot in an attempt to put together the perfect set of gear. A crafting system combined with the ease of co-operative play through battle.net contributed to Diablo II’s lasting appeal, and Blizzard’s continued patch support long after Diablo II’s launch helped keep the truly hardcore players engaged.Despite Diablo II’s popularity, it would take Blizzard seven years after Lord of Destruction’s launch to officially announce a sequel. Why the delay? In the time between, Blizzard North ceased to be, with some studio heads moving to now-defunct Flagship Studios and eventually winding up at Runic Games where work began on the Diablo-like Torchlight series. Also, that whole World of Warcraft thing happened.Because chasing new gear was so central to Diablo’s appeal, and to try and cut out the black market item trading that sprung up around Diablo II, Blizzard built an all new real money auction house . Many times while playing you find items you don’t want or can’t use. You can sell them to NPC vendors for in-game gold, and in Diablo III you can put them up for auction so any other player can place bids with real dollars. Of course, Blizzard takes a cut of the transaction, but having the option to turn your rarer discoveries into money through a reliable, Blizzard-backed system is certainly welcome. And if you hate the idea of buying and selling virtual items with real money, you can ignore that aspect completely, or only interact with the auction house that supports transactions with in-game gold. The downside is that because of the real money element, Blizzard requires you to be online at all times while playing, much like in an MMO.For the dedicated players who replayed Diablo II multiple times, Blizzard also created a new difficulty setting for Diablo III called Inferno , accessible after playing through the game on Normal, Nightmare and Hell difficulties, which provides not only the highest degree of challenge, but also the best rewards. The focus on adding more ways to play the game shows Blizzard’s commitment to making Diablo III a game that can be played for months, if not years, over and over and over again as you hunt for better items.Whether or not Diablo III achieves the same kind of long-term success as Diablo II remains to be seen, but from the design changes, it’s clear that Blizzard is betting big that it will. After May 15, 2012, you can decide for yourself whether Blizzard went in the right direction with a franchise that has defined and dominated a genre for over fifteen years.