TCW 220 - Diablo 2

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Welcome to They Create Worlds, I'm Jeffrey and I'm joined by my co-host Alex.

That's right. So, uh, we're starting to play around with that. I think we're very close to being able to have a transcript of a current episode not too long after that episode comes out. It'll probably be a fair bit longer before we start working on the backlog. The backlog is huge, not quite as straightforward as uploading all the backlog to YouTube, and even that took a long time, considering how straightforward it was. So, gonna have to wait on those back episodes for a bit. But we are gonna try to get transcriptions going forward, at least.

Just making that bigger wouldn't necessarily have much of an impact. If you made the dungeon levels too big, much bigger, the gameplay would be very different, and if it's just more bigger dungeon levels, then it's very repetitive. They wanted to make it bigger, but they didn't just want to do a bigger dungeon. However, at this time, and we talked about this in the last episode, the Blizzard North people were always big, big gamers themselves. As we talked about, most of the features that defined Diablo came from the games that they were really enjoying at the time. Obviously, the Rogue-lite, like Angbond for the basic core gameplay, but then also XCOM for the isometric presentation, and even NHL 94, of all things, for the ease of getting into the game and just starting playing and just starting killing. At this time, when they were trying to think about what to do for Diablo's sequel, everyone had gotten really into MMOs.

Then hand-in-hand with this idea of having a little light crafting in the game came the idea of having a socketing system for equipment as well, where you could actually have equipment upgrades. So now you weren't just looking for drops of rings and amulets and armor and weapons that were better than what you had. You were also looking for the drops of these little gems that you could socket into your gear and therefore provide them with a few more attributes. This actually came from a rather interesting source. It just came from one of the devs, and this is how they got a lot of their ideas, because there was no dev document for Diablo 2. There was no carefully laid out plan. One of the developers on the game was watching Conan the Barbarian, you know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and was really enamored with the gems that Conan had in his sword and was like, wouldn't it be cool if we could put gems in our stuff too, and then we can make it like, give your stuff abilities and stuff. That's where that came from. It was no great thought out system. It was just like, gems on weapons are cool. We should do that in Diablo 2.

The other thing in defense of this that they really tried to do is they really tried to make the difficulty curve just super, super smooth. The main credit for that, at least according to Craddock's work, definitely goes to the lead designer on the game, Stieg Hedlund, who didn't want the difficulty spikes that the first game had. Because as I said earlier in the episode, the first game was divided into 16 levels, but there were themed areas of four levels each. You start in the crypts of the church for four levels, and then you're in the catacombs for four levels, then the caves for four levels, and then what they call hell for four levels. There's huge difficulty spikes, in that game, when you move between those sets of four levels.

Stieg Hedlund was not a fan of that, and he tried to make sure that they had just a very smooth difficulty curve throughout the game. They wanted that difficulty to keep increasing over time, over and over and over again, which is why they added two additional difficulty levels as well once you got through the game to keep you coming back, but you don't have any of those sudden stops. Like, when my friend and I played through the entire game in virtually one sitting right when it came out, we didn't have to backtrack. We could just keep moving forward. You know, the types of enemies would change sometimes, and there would be new challenges sometimes that we would have to figure out, but there was never a point where we just, bam, hit a brick wall, and it's like, this is impossible now. You can actually go through the entire game in one sitting. Once you get on the higher difficulty levels, it gets a little different, but just on that first normal difficulty level, you can just get through the whole thing, and you don't get stopped by those sudden difficulty spikes, and I think that's another way that Diablo 2 very much improved on the original Diablo, and it was 100% deliberate by the dev team that it be that way. In fact, it's kind of funny. Blizzard South initially didn't want the higher difficulty levels in the game because they were, again, they're always afraid of appearance, and always afraid of being accused of having a game that's unbalanced or unpolished, and they were afraid that a new player would come in and choose one of the higher difficulty levels and then get squished because you shouldn't play at nightmare level when you're just starting the game. So they were like, we can't have this, and of course the Blizzard North people were like, we have to constantly increase the challenge on them. We have to have this. So the compromise was that you couldn't do the higher level difficulties until you beat the game on the lower difficulty. You can't do nightmare until you beat it on normal mode. The reason for that is that Blizzard South didn't want anything that could cause accusations of being unbalanced and too hard and all of that. Just kind of a little side note of a place where the two sides of the company differed a little bit.

In terms of the levels themselves, I mean, there's not a lot to say. It's pretty straightforward. You know, it's divided into four acts. Each act takes place in a kind of different biome. They actually worked on the acts sequentially. They did act one, and then they built act two, and then they built act three, and then they built act four. They weren't developing them in parallel. This ended up getting them in a little bit of trouble because they spent a lot of time on act one because this was when they were doing all their proof of concept and figuring out how this would work, the outdoor environments tied to the indoor environments and the little sub dungeons and all of this kind of stuff, and so they just kept throwing stuff into the first level, or the first act I mean, until it was really big by standards of the day. But that meant that the other acts had to be equally as big or it would become a letdown. By not having a dev document and by spending a lot of time on the first act before they even thought about what to do in the other acts of the game, they kind of put themselves into a little bit of a corner in terms of development. This is kind of a good segue into the main thing about this game that was really hard for the company, and that was the crunch.

When it came time that team sizes got bigger, games got more complex, and delivering them became more difficult, nobody had those skills. The people that were running the studios, we talked about the Schaeffers and Brevik in the last episode, the people that were running the studios were the people that discovered games when they were really young and discovered programming when they were really young and thought that was cool. They weren't professional manager types. Most studios, like publishers, publishers were run by, like, professional business types, and believe me, professional business types will exploit you if they feel they can get away with it. But the studios were often run by these people that came up just working all the time because they enjoyed it, and so that became the culture of the industry. So yeah, I'm sure at some point the scales tipped from developers just love getting stuff done to marketing and executive people being like, you are here as long as we need you here. There was a point where it became more nefarious and more exploitative. I'm not trying to claim that it's not exploitative or that exploitation doesn't happen in the industry, because it happens all the time. But it was so insidious because it didn't start that way. It moved in from the bottom up.

By March 1999, Diablo 2's been in development for a while now. Been in development for, like, a couple of years. Vivendi, needing a hit out of its video game stuff, because a lot of what they ended up with, stuff from Sierra Online and other parts of the company, were not performing particularly well at this time. They really needed the big hit of Diablo 2, which everyone knew was going to be a big hit, because the first one was a hit, and this was going to be the bigger and better sequel. So they started putting real pressure on the head of Blizzard, Mike Morhaime, to get Diablo 2 out, which means that he had to really, really put pressure on the people at Blizzard North to get the game finished. In March 1999, Morhaime and the Blizzard North management made a decision that the game needed to release in November of 1999, because Vivendi was bugging them to have a big hit, and releasing in November would give them a chance to hit the holiday season and get a big return that way. There was still a lot of work to do. So in March 1999, the crunch officially began, with a target of having the game done in November. Within a few months, it became very apparent that the game would not be ready for November. So they delayed it all the way until the next June, June 2000. But just because it was delayed, the crunch didn't stop. They had 18 months straight of crunch on this game.

The other thing is feature creep. They were not very disciplined about adding features to the game. If somebody thought something was cool, they would just add it. There was no design doc that was spelling out all of the features up front. One example of that is the mercenary companions that you can have in the game, that you can hire in the towns. You can hire a rogue in Act 1. You can hire the spear guy in Act 2 and this kind of sorcerer guy in Act 3. It's not important, whatever they were. That was not planned anywhere. It's just very early on in Act 1. Again, Act 1 is where they're doing so much experimenting. There was a time when they had rogues that would just kind of be out in the world and kind of doing some of their own attacking out there, very similar to what they ended up doing in Act 5 in the expansion with the barbarians, I think. Not necessarily as well thought out or as complicated as that, but, you know, they were experimenting with having these NPCs that were just at random spots on the map doing their thing. That got them thinking, well, wouldn't it be cool if you could just have one of these rogues, like, follow you around and shoot at things with you? So they implemented that whole system, but that whole system wasn't planned. It was just like, oh, this is cool. Let's just add this. And so there were a lot of stuff that they added like that. In Act 3, another example that Craddock's books talk about is in Act 3, a lot of the act takes place in this giant temple city of Kurast, and in the couple areas of the map that represent, like, the city itself, there are a lot of buildings, big stone buildings, that you can enter and then, like, the ceiling kind of goes transparent and then you can see inside and you can explore inside all these buildings. Well, initially, none of that was in there. The buildings were there, but the buildings were just window dressing. They were just scenery. Like, you couldn't actually enter the buildings, and then one day someone was like, you know, we got all these big buildings. Wouldn't it be cool if we could actually enter these buildings? So then they had to spend time making that work. They had to give the buildings the ceilings and they had to, you know, make it so you could enter them and do those interiors. And they were doing that all the time. They were just adding stuff as they went along. Yeah, that was creating some difficulties with getting the game done. So you just had a game that was sprawling, that had no design document, that had no real development plan, and where feature creep was running rampant. Then throw on top of the fact that you have a company culture very enamored with games and playing games and has probably gotten a little too enamored with playing games. That's how you end up crunching for 18 months and having to delay a game half a year from its original planned launch date.

Yeah. So they missed the November date. Of course, Jeffrey, you remember just as well as I do from the time that Blizzard missing a launch date was just something we all expected all the time.

I mean, the first game had done well, but the second game, I mean, obviously the hype was through the roof because Diablo had been played by many and enjoyed by many. People knew what it was now and it had been delayed. It was supposed to come out in November 1999. Now it's not coming out till June 2000. And, you know, demand has reached a fever pitch. Within its first 24 hours, it sold 184,000 units, which again, for a PC game at that time, to sell that in 24 hours is remarkable. It sold a million in a week. One million in a week for a PC game. At this time, million selling PC games were more common, but you were still over the moon if you hit one million in sales on the PC. It hit one million in a week. It hit two million in six weeks. The Guinness Book of World Records is completely full of shit. It's a completely meaningless institution that rarely knows what it's talking about and is only used mostly for publicity stunts. But nevertheless, I still think it's worth saying that the Guinness Book of World Records in 2000 claimed that it was the fastest selling computer game of all time when it hit those two million in six weeks, which, you know, is probably true. I mean, I would never cite the Guinness Book as a reliable source on anything, but it's probably true, and even if it's not true, it's noteworthy that it was attracting that kind of attention as a game.