I was wondering the same but apparently that (brilliant) feature wasn’t added till Diablo 2. Also, your character’s appearance doesn’t seem to showcase your weapons/armor…guess that was added later too. It’s funny but I don’t recall Diablo being this “primitive” but it is something like 23 years old, right?
A lot of GoG games (at least in the early days) came with soundtracks and sometimes strategy guides, that sort of thing.
Whoa, 640 MB!
Who is rocking that much hard drive space? I guess I have to uninstall Civilization 2 or or maybe that Doom-clone Quake so that I can install this fancy new dungeon crawler. Rogue never had such a preposterous footprint; it was less than 50 kB not like today’s bloated games. Whatever, hope it’s radical.
Yes, I have purchased games from GOG in the past that included various goodies including strategy guides (although having to pay extra for a game’s soundtrack still irks me). But I was thinking of what came with Diablo when it was first released.
So I got my 1996 boxed copy of Diablo down off the shelf and had a look. Included is a Game Manual and a Windows 95 CD-ROM as well as three pieces of advertising literature that expired long ago. But I noticed a README.TXT file on the CD that lists the following under 1. Hints, Tips & Tactics:
Keyboard Shortcuts:
F1: Open Help Screen
Esc: Display Main Menu
Tab: Display Auto-map
Space: Hide all info screens
S: Open Speedbook
B: Open Spellbook
I: Open Inventory screen
C: Open Character screen
Q: Open Quest log
F: Reduce screen brightness
G: Increase screen brightness
Z: Zoom Game Screen
+ / -: Zoom Automap
1 - 8: Use Belt item
Caps Lock: Toggle between Player Friendly and Player Attack
F5, F6, F7, F8: Set hot key for skill or spell
F9, F10, F11, F12: Send Macro message in multiplayer
Shift + Left Click: Attack without moving
There’s more but it’s lengthy.
I know the above won’t replace a strategy guide, but I hope that helps.
Impressions: Wow, this game is amazing.
Just like back in the day, I turned all the lights completely off and turned up the volume. The sounds and music do all the heavy lifting. They really carry the game. And the art is pretty great, the game definitely looks great compared to Indie games with Pixel art and games trying to go back to early 3D. Here we have the beautiful Tristram, with the vendors talking to you in clear, excellent voices, the characters who have light spilling out from their warm cottages that they’re standing in front of.
The dungeon is dark, and as you kill one creature after another, the sounds are so evocative and they help your imagination fill in the detail that might be lacking in the animations. As you kill a Hidden, you hear a splish splash of blood as the creature dissolves into a puddle, it sounds like.
Gameplay wise, it does feel a bit dated now, I have to admit. The movement seems really awkward for the first few minutes as you navigate around town for the first time. You can only face certain directions, and move along a grid. You can only pick up loot manually. There’s no auto-sorting options on the inventory, no way to see what’s on the ground except to mouse over it, you need to constantly click to keep swinging your sword.
But you get used to these things pretty quickly. And some of the cooler features come through too. I’m playing a warrior, who starts with a sword and shield. And honest to god, the creatures are actually getting blocked by my shield. A LOT. I can’t even remember the last time I played a sword and board character in an ARPG where I was so obviously blocking creatures left and right with my shield. It’s very empowering. I also love that creatures have a physical space, they take up room, the crowd around. If they surround you they can hit you from all sides and keep interrupting your attacks. On the other hand, you can funnel them into a door way and take them on one at a time. I love that, that was completely gone in Diablo 2. Space and positioning matters, a lot.
But the truth is, the biggest reason this feels even today like a “Triple-A” game experience in 2019 is because the audio is superb, and it creates an atmosphere that’s really unique.
In 1997/1998/1999, as a poor college graduate, I kept waiting for the price to come down. The cheapest I could find a copy of Diablo was a used copy for $25. Well, today I finally bought my own copy for $10, and it is completely worth it.
Great news all round. I will definitely pick this up long with the Warcraft’s. WarCraft 2’s soundtrack is literally woven into my neural hardware.
Hmm, no, character appearance can definitely be affected by the weapons and armour you have equipped from what I have seen. It is highly probable that the system used in Diablo is more primitive compared to Diablo II’s implementation of it though.
I bought it immediately. It’s the only Diablo I hadn’t played. Can’t wait to get to play it tonight!
The weapon types show immediately (if you switch from sword to mace or equip a shield, for example) but each character has like three armor skins – like light, medium, and heavy armor.
Does it include the Hellfire expansion? As I recall, that was pretty great.
No, and they stated no immediate plans for that if ever.
It was made by a different, now defunct company, so I imagine it would be complicated.
Am I remembering correctly that Sierra made that? That always seemed deeply weird, I assume there’s a story there. I never played it, at the time, but enjoyed the hell out of the base game in its day.
I think so, yeah.
They were identical to each other. All uniques had fixed stats.
For the people playing this, were you able to beat the Butcher on Level 2? I saved the game right before, since I remember him being really hard. I was really surprised that he was on Level 2. Anyway, so I opened the door, and I’ve already cleared the rest of Level 2, so I have plenty of room. The butcher comes out and slaughters me in 3 hits.
Wow. I think I’m supposed to come back for this guy later.
That’s another thing I really liked about Diablo: one save game. And you had to beat everyone in that one game. No dying and respawning and all that bullshit. If you’re dead, you have to reload your one saved game.
I had forgotten that. Hmmm.
He can’t go through a closed door, so if you’re mage or rogue, you could lock yourself in a room and then shoot him through the grilled walls. Otherwise, you’ll probably need to buy a bunch of potions or go down and come back later.
Well yeah, but that was really just an extra inconvenience. It’s on the fairly long list of innovations in D2 where they pulled away from being a graphical roguelike and created the entire ARPG genre.
It was definitely the reason why I didn’t like Diablo 2 at all at first. I just felt like they turned it into a game where you eventually win. You just had to keep whittling down your foes. It made it all feel so pointless.
Of course, that changed when we discovered hardcore mode, which gets unlocked after the first time you beat Diablo. I never played Softcore Diablo 2 again.
But the original Diablo didn’t need a hardcore mode, because the one save meant it felt meaningful from the get-go and it wasn’t just a matter of winning through sheer inevitable persistence.