Diablo
Blizzard Entertainment’s ‘Diablo’ is one of those games that shook the video gaming world to the core. After it was released in 1996, it was an enormous hit and set the ‘hack and slash’ genre of video games on the path towards what it is today. When the follow up sequel, Diablo 2, was realeased in 2000, Blizzard had firmly established themselves as the masters of ‘hack and slash’ games.
Though there had been many ‘hack and slash’ attempts before Diablo and Diablo 2, none of them had met with much success. The genre has its roots in an ANSI programmed game for DOS called ‘Rogue’ that was released during a time when text games and the Atari 2600 ruled the gaming market. Most early versions of ‘hack and slash’ games were turn based, and suffered from a poor graphical interface.
Diablo and Diablo 2 were the first hack and slash games to get it right, and virtually every game in the genre since their release have been at best poor imitations, and at worst blatant copies.
In Diablo you can choose between three characters, a warrior, a rogue, or a wizard. The warrior is your typical armor wearing, sword-wielding hero, the rogue is good with a bow and can disarm traps, and wizards of course rely on magic to smite their foes and heal themselves. While these characters are somewhat generic, the world in which they operate was totally new. Like the game ‘Rogue’, the game takes you down a series of dungeons that get more and more difficult. Unlike previous hack and slash games, there is actually a plot, and a town with characters you can interact with and sell treasures you find.
Diablo 2 follows with the same basic formula, but adds more options for characters, better graphics, and a much larger world. Basically, it’s the bigger and better version of the original. An expansion pack, title ‘Lord of Destruction’, was released for Diablo 2 in 2001, which added an addition two characters to choose from and made the game world even bigger.
Perhaps the most attractive part of Diablo and Diablo 2 is the fact that they can be played online with or against other players. The two were enormously popular in online play, and many people credit their multiplayer capacity as the beginning of the ‘massively multiplayer online’ genre of games that are popular today. Even though the Diablos are both somewhat dated today, they are still widely played online around the world.
Diablo and Diablo 2 are legendary games in their genre. They are the standard in the ‘hack and slash’ genre that people use to compare other games, and they will likely remain as such for sometime to come. At least until someone else finally produces something new and innovative for the genre.
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