War Stories: Diablo’s loot lottery was almost a turn-based affair

The year 1997 means a lot to me – it’s not just the year I met my wife, but it’s also the year I sacrificed hundreds of evenings and nights at Diablo, the new grandfather of loot lottery games. No game I had played before had anything like it Diablo a raw power to alter the flow of time – like, you look at the clock, you see it’s a little before midnight, you run over some monsters, and then suddenly the sun peeks out the window.

If the Lord of Terror could be said to have a father, it would be lead designer David Brevik. Much of what would become Diablo sprang from his mind, including the name itself (taken from Mount Diablo, located near where Brevik lived during the time of Diablo start). All those wasted nights and troubled-eyed mornings should be properly laid at his feet – although, as Brevik originally envisioned, Diablo would be more traditional Naughty– case of turns and understeer actions. Diablo The signature real-time loot-spitting fight was kind of a late addition – and one Brevik himself opposed it.

Smash and grab

As Brevik explains, it boiled down to a simple show of hands in the office at the end of a long week. Brevik and maybe a couple of others wanted to keep the turn-based game on, and more than a dozen others voted to convert the title into a real-time game.

Brevik expected the actual change to take at least a month to implement, but he sat down this Friday night to take a break to start and within hours he had hacked enough real-time items. to support test gameplay. To call the resulting change “remarkable” would underestimate how transformative the decision was for the player’s experience.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Brevik recalls. He was stomping around the dungeon now in real time and spotted his first real time enemy: a skeleton. “My character came up and rocked and slammed the skeleton. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing.’ It was so good! way better.”

The clouds parted, the angels sang, and Brevik became the very first person to waste a few hours of his life at Diablo. When the team arrived on Monday morning, “it was obvious this was the way to go and we never looked back,” he said.

(Oddly enough, this is almost the exact opposite of what happened with Sid Meier and Civilization—This iconic title started in real time, before going turn-based halfway through development. Game development is sometimes as much an intuitive art as it is a business science.)

Until the sun comes up

There is much more to discover in the video – and we hope to post a longer version of this discussion as well, as Brevik has been extremely generous with his time and researching unique and new stories to tell us about the development of the one of the most popular gaming franchises to ever exist. Stay a while and listen!