The first Diablo is legendary in so many aspects in that it basically invented its own microgenre and style of gameplay and game design philosophy. It released in late 1996 during a time where people were almost getting tired of traditional turn based RPG games and story laden games. Games were becoming more about action and fast paced pick up and play experiences like all the sidescrollers on consoles at the time. Diablo reinvented the RPG by making gameplay and action front and center, and rejecting extensive story and dialogue. Most rpgs at the time centered around long drawn out segments where you just talk to NPC's or read paragraphs and paragraphs of writing and here and there do little turn based segments, but in Diablo you get a brief introduction of these creepy dark gothic cutscenes depicting demons and a lone wanderer, then of voice acting by the various town NPC's you talk to, then you're off to immediately crawl down into the Church dungeon to suddenly be thrown into hordes upon hordes of demons to kill, and thats the rest of the game! It was innovative and revolutionary to have this rich RPG experience be completely focused upon raw action gameplay rather than long winded storytelling.
The game features co-op multiplayer functionality, which is surprising considering how old it is, and also goes to show again how innovative this game was. What other rpg let you play through the whole game over the internet with a friend back then? Very few. I have no nostalgia for this game either as I've only first played it about 5 years ago and since then beaten it multiple times, in single player and a few times in multiplayer. Most recently just a few days ago in co-op. The single player and co-op experience is mostly the same but there are a few key differences. In single player theres a couple dozen optional quests that you can randomly get assigned to do, making each playthrough slightly more different. These quests usually reward special unique items. In multiplayer, you get the same three or four optional quests and its kind of buggy, and they also usually do not reward those special unique items like singleplayer and there is almost no reward for doing them. But at least you still get the Butcher, Skeleton knight, and Archbishop lazarus quest, although you miss out on the iconic Archbishop cutscene and dedicated battle room sequence in multiplayer. In single player, you can save and load at any time, and upon death you simply reload your last save. However, in multiplayer, death is a serious setback and consequence, because when a player dies in multiplayer, they drop all of their equipped items and must either wait to be respawned via a resurrection scroll, or respawn in town from the Esc menu and try to come back to get your items. Its very possible for both players to die, lose all their items, and have to reset the dungeon by making a new game and having to claw your way back, getting new items. You save your stats, level, experience when you reset the dungeon, but all of the cleared monsters are now respawned. The entire premise of the game is that you start off going into this Cathedral dungeon, and you just keep finding staircases further down, and down, and down. All the way to the final floor, 16. In singleplayer since you can save at anytime its hard to lose progress as enemies dont respawn, and its easy to get back and forth with town portals. However, in multiplayer each time you launch the game all the enemies respawn and you lose your progress in the dungeon. Thankfully, there are exlucsive multiplayer shortcuts that let you skip to various floors of the dungeon. The dungeon has four general areas/themes. First its the Cathedral dungeons, Catacombs, Caves, and finally Hell. There are shortcuts in town in MP mode to floor 5, 9 , and 13. So its easy enough to get back to the general area you left off at, and multiplayer even rewards grinding and resetting dungeon because the enemies are much harder than single player and the general difficulty of the game is increased to compensate for more players, coupled with losing items upon death.
I would describe the gameplay as very simplistic to pickup and learn, but kind of hard to master. There are three playable classes, each of them offer a significantly different experience and vibe. The warrior, Rogue (archer), and Sorcerer. Any character can use any item or spell, but they each offer inherent buffs and abilities. Like the Warrior inherently has more health and defense and gets more of a bonus from Strength attribute, the Rogue gets a damage bonus from Dexterity, and the Sorcerer naturally is higher in magic and spellcasting abilities. You walk slowly, something I think many people over the years have complained about, but its only a 'problem' in town trecking back and forth for items and health potions. In the dungeons the movement speed is perfectly suitable. The game is real time, and you simply click on enemies over and over to attack. There are magical spells you can learn, in the form of randomly spawning Books you can read which grant permanent access, but for the most part its completely fine to play through the entire game with at least Rogue and Warrior by using zero spells and just your default attack. Its a very minimalistic game compared to other RPGs where you dont need all sorts of different abilities and attacks, just swinging your weapon at the enemy is all you need to know for the most part. The Sorcerer typically uses all sorts of these crazy spells like Mana Shield, Fire Bolt, Fire wall that compeltely changes the gameplay, and its rewarding and worth it to play through the game with every single character. Also, in multiplayer mode, the Rogue and Sorcerer can hurt players with their projectiles, something which cannot be disabled. For example, playing through co-op with Rogue and Warrior needs a lot of cooperation and strategy because its very easy as the Rogue to accidentally shoot the other player with your arrows so you need to constantly be communicating where eachother is standing, something I actually appreciated and thought benefitted the hardcore, intense feeling of tension that the game has. Even the loot is very simplistic especially compared to other older and more modern RPG's. Most of the loot for the first quarter of the game is just basic generic White items that do stuff like 2-6 damage, 1-10 damage, etc for weapons. And for armor its just things like +3 armor, +5 armor etc. Easy. You can open the character to sheet to see exactly how much damage you do and your defenses and total health to check what items are upgrades or not. You start finding Magic items which are Blue and usually just have an extra stat or two, something like 15% Fire resistance, or 'Fast Attack', or +10 dexterity/strength, etc. There are some quirky stats you can get like Hit recovery%, Light Radius, Pentrate armor, Chance to hit % which keeps the itemization fresh and interesting coming across these oddities. Much of the loot is about finding slightly better versions of basic gear which is an addicting but rewarding process, because unlike other RPGs you dont have to pull up spreadsheets or endlessly number crunch or anything to try to determine what to use, its mostly intuitive and exciting sorting through items. You can find Unique gold colored items that give very special interesting stats, but these are few and far between, but they are very fun to find.
You level by of course killing monsters, and you get rewarded 5 attributes to distribute between Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Magic. Which are all self explaination, except maybe Dexterity because it raises your chance % to hit, but also as Rogue gets special bonus damage from it which isnt explained in-game. So reading the manual is something expected of you and was commonplace at the time.
So while the game is easy to pickup and play, and understand, the 'hard to master' part is the overall brutal difficulty curve and challenge the game offers. Each new floor you progress gets much harder than the last. The general slow, methodical nature of the game ensures that you must be very careful with every last step you take, because each step you take is another chance to attract another horde of demons and monsters, that if you move wrong, can get yourself cornered and overwhelmed in an instant. The game almost has this sense of horror and dread and tension unlike any other RPG or even Diablo game I've played. It's almost akin to a Survival horror experience, where you have to be very aware and concerned with your various resources, potions, and methodically choose your fights and battles carefully because its so easy to make one wrong action and get totally destroyed in an instant. You cant just blindly run in and swing at most monsters because many rooms are just filled to the brim with all sorts of demons that will overwhelm you. You press TAB to see a overview map of the area, and there is this 'Fog of war' effect where you cannot see areas on the map you have not yet discovered. And each uncovered area of the map is certain danger. So its this constant dance of being afraid to uncover more of the fog, and retracing previous 'safe' areas while dragging monsters to them to fight in your 'safe zones'. Because again, especially in multiplayer, death is a serious consequence and you drop all your equipped items you worked so hard for, and its a real risk that you can never get them again if you cannot get back to get them. Each new floor you climb down has all sorts of new unique threats, too. For instance, on Floor 5 you have these yellow zombie monsters called Black Plague, which everytime they hit you cause you to Permanently lose 1 maximum health point. Something that isnt very obvious at the time but if you have a keen eye and look at your hitpoints on the Character sheet, you can infact see it. Also, to add to the constant mystery and tension of the game, you have all sorts of randomly spawning Shrines, Altars, Pools, interactable objects that upon clicking them, just give you this vague obscure line of text riddles. Leaving you clueless what the hell you just clicked or what it does. Usually what they do are either temporarily buff you, sometimes Permanently buff your stats, but they can also Permanently or Temporarily reduce you stats and abilities. So theres this constant sense of mystery and confusion around the whole game, really adding to the sense of suspsense and atmosphere. Like you really are in this occult obscure world.
The graphics are music are simply great. The graphics have this distinct characteristic style of these 90's hand drawn sprites and animations, its crude but also sophisticated at the same time. It has a great color palette where everything is identifiable at a glance and especially the UI, interfaces, are very well done and eye catching. There is this gothic font used across the game that just looks badass and cryptic, the inventory screen is iconic, arguably creating the 'Inventory tetris' and micromanagement now famous in ARPGs, where each item in your inventory takes up a different amount of blocks and you have to carefully arrange your picked up items in order to be able to pickup more things, adding a real feeling of 'weight' and meaningfulness to your items. All the sprites and graphics for items look great and a distinct personality to each piece which makes finding new items and gear an exciting process. The monsters, also, look amazing and even scary and horrific at times. You have all sorts of monsters from Goat archer demons, classic humanoid demon men with horns, Insectoids, Zombies, Imps, Strange teleporting creatures, Gargoyles, Winged bat demons, Beasts, and each of them have their own specific AI personality and behaviour. Like some of them will be super aggressive and charge across the map at you, others will attack once then run away, others will stand across the map shooting projetiles, others will attack you until they get low health and run away etc, others like the zombies will just blindly run for you and attack you until they die. So its not like its just one piece of AI code copy pasted to every monster in the game. It adds a lot of variation and strategy to the various encounters, it makes target priorization a big deal and deciding what the worst threats are a crucial skill and keeps the gameplay exciting and different.
The floors are mostly procedurally generated. Meaning each game you start the layout of the floors will be completely different, what shrines spawn, the items, the monster placements, all of that is random. What stays the same is the general themes of the floors and mostly what kind of monsters you will encounter. For example floors 1-4 is always the Cathedral basement, then you move onto the Catacombs style levels, then Caves, then Hell areas. So its not "fully random" which is great because it remains a steady sense of pacing and progression. The graphics of these different areas are great and its not like the whole game is just the same 'look'. Each 'area' looks completely different and at one point you feel yourself climbing closer to Hell because you start to enter these lava areas, and then when you reach Hell its very obvious as youve climbed into this otherworldly domain where theres stairways made of ribcages and bone walls everywhere.
The entire audio design is amazing, the sound effects are implanted in my mind I can hear them without playing the game , everything has a distinct unique sound attached to it, the monster groans when you hit them, gold hitting the ground, sound of health potions. All the voice acting is great from all the town NPC's as well as the dialogue and story is thoroughly interesting because the game doesnt have much of it,so the bits you get are that much more important and interesting. Sometimes saying less is more, developers! The music is just perfect. Tristram theme is one of the greatest pieces of music, maybe period. Its like a composition akin to Mozart or some shit, perfectly sets the vibe and atmosphere of the whole game as soon as you launch it up. As you progress through the dungeon floors the soundtrack shifts and morphs into all sorts of creepy moans and cries, sometimes of even human babies crying in the distance, weird jittery hair raising music morifs, Dark ambience, generally creepy unnerving soundtrack thats perfect for the whole game. I especially admire towards the end of the game you start getting these almost sarcastic/ironic funny kind of marching band pan flute War march music thats all twisted and distorted to sound demonic and turned evil as you march onwards to Diablo.
The last few floors of the game are a real challenge, especially as the Warrior. There are lots of these witch type enemies that shoot magic across the room at you, and run away when you get close. You have to be very careful to get them one at a time or else you'll get pelted with magic bolts that kill you fast unless you have good resistances. The game requires and demands different strategies from you at each step of the way. Sometimes it rewards you for going all in and tanking 10 enemies at once, other times it brutally punishes you so you have to be very aware of your surroundings and play accordingly. Its hard to be bored while playin this game, something exciting and new is always happening, you always have to manage your resources, set up your Town portals especially in co-op appropriately, go back and forth to vendors selling items and getting gold for potions and possibly new items. Its satisfying using the town as a sort of item storage just throwing all sorts of gold and items on the ground for later, because items never disappear in single player, and in multiplayer only disappear when you close the game. So it was fun stockpiling gold and items for later, especially in multiplayer making sure you have a secondary backup item setup incase things go wrong and you get killed , dropping your equipment, and have to go back to salvage it.
Finally when you reach stage 16 you face Diablo and its an iconic classic fight, hes hard as hell but if youve grinded enough in multiplayer he goes down swiftly. You get this crazy cinematic where the main character jams Diablo's evil stone into his forehead (?) which is just bizarre and weird enough to be unforgettable, then the game ends with a mysterious robed figure saying The End. Its a perfect ending to an arguably perfect game. After the ending screen, you cant keep playing in single player. You can only reload your previous save to before you killed diablo, or start a "New game+" kind of mode where you reset the whole dungeon but keep your stats. I wouldnt change anything about it, really. All the weird quirks and flaws are fine and add charm and personality to the game, the game isnt as replayable as other RPG's like Diablo 2, but still you can play through it a dozen or more times and have fun. The single player and multiplayer experiences alone are different enough to warrant multiple playthroughs, not to mention the 3 different classes. Single player only has one difficulty, while multiplayer strangely enough has 3 difficulties that you can keep playing as you level higher and higher. I dont think the higher difficulties in Multiplayer change the game in drastic ways like it does in other ARPGS like Diabo 2. I think the monsters just get stronger but the loot is mostly the same. Its simply an iconic game that any fan of ARPG's should play at least once.
10/10
