With the word of Diablo III in the wind, I also began to reminisce about the days of the original Diablo back in 1997 and it goes a little something like this…

Diablo was set in the kingdom of Khanduras where the player took control of a male or female character in an ultimate battle with Diablo himself. It was the classic dungeon crawler with a top down view that allowed you to run around different randomly spawning dungeons with randomly spawning loot. Diablo was a mature game with plenty of gore and a very dark plot and feel that revolved around pure evil. You were an inhabitant of the town of Tristram and you were trying to save it from the Dark Lord by delving into its deepest and darkest dungeons to rid it of all the evils that dwelled there.

Diablo was one of the first games to bring action into an RPG game, where you clicked on mobs to actually fight with them in a real time scenario. The commands in Diablo were pretty basic and clicking on a mob meant you were going to attack them. Loot would drop from enemies that you could visibly see and pick up, with harder enemies giving rarer loot. Diablo introduced the basic premise of different text colors for items: white was a basic item, blue was a magical item and gold was a unique item. The different color schemes for items has spilled over into almost all of Blizzards other titles and is a very easy way to recognize rare items from common ones.

The original Diablo was broken into 16 levels of carnage with Levels 1–4 being set in the Cathedral, Levels 5–8 in the Catacombs, Levels 9–12 in the Caves and the final Levels 13–16 being set in Hell itself. Each set of levels in Diablo had a unique feel and architecture to it so that you knew what section you were in at all items. Diablo also allowed the player to choose from three basic character classes: the Warrior (straight forward hack and slash specialist), the Sorcerer (the strongest magic wielder), and the Rogue (the bow master).

Diablo allowed players to customize their character by leveling up and increasing their stats which were Strength, Magic, Dexterity and Vitality. Strength governed how much physical damage you dealt, magic affected your spell damage and mana, dexterity affected your percent to hit and ranged damage and vitality was the amount of hit points you had. You also could use scrolls, potions, elixirs and spellbooks. Potions restored your mana and health, scrolls allowed you a one time use of magic, and elixirs increased a stat and spellbooks allowed you to learn magic spells.

Diablo also introduced the notion of equipment having a lifespan. The more damage you took or the more you wailed on an enemy would affect how long your equipment would last. If a player did not attempt to fix his gear, it would eventually break and disappear. Unfortunately to the downfall of Diablo, people figured out how to dupe items and destroyed any notion of having anything rare. Multiplayer allowed you and a friend to dungeon crawl together but became a breeding ground for dupers and cheaters.

Diablo II came in 2000 and followed up the tradition of hack and slash from the original Diablo. It introduced five playable classes of characters: the Necromancer, the Barbarian, the Amazon, the Sorceress, and the Paladin. The Amazon was similar to the Rogue and used ranged attacks, the Barbarian was similar to the Warrior and focused on hand to hand combat, the Sorceress was the same as the Sorcerer and focused on magic, the Necromancer was a spell based character that could summon minions, and the Paladin was a mixture of the Warrior and Sorcerer.

It also introduced three difficulties: Normal, Nightmare and Hell, each harder than the next. But, more importantly, after someone beat the game on normal they could create a hard-core character. A hard-core character was special in that once that character died, it was gone forever (typically in normal games players were resurrected back in town, not in hard-core).

Diablo II was also a multiplayer game, but in order to play online, you had to save your character on the server side to eliminate the rampant cheating that existed in the original. It also introduced socketed items where you could place certain gems in weapons and armor to further enhance its abilities, as well as sets of armor and weapons which gave bonuses when worn together.

One of the most memorable things in Diablo II was the famous Secret Cow Level, where you battled upright standing cows called Hell Bovine led by their leader the Cow King. These cows were hard to beat and carried huge Halberds, but if you killed the last boss, the Cow King, you were not allowed to revisit the Secret Cow Level again. This all stemmed form a running joke at Blizzard and was then introduced as a real level.

Diablo and Diablo II set the stage for many action RPG games to come and to this day are still played. We are all anxiously looking forward to the upcoming Diablo III and what it will bring to the table.