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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting to those who haven't read the pitch: the original design for Diablo was turn-based. The hexagonal movement system was causing a huge headache for the programmers, however, and eventually they decided to make it real-time.

The now-defunct Gametrailers did an amazing retrospective on the Diablo series at some point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83bFa9qL8XQ

EDIT: I also thought some of the side illustrations looked familiar. They are taken from some illustrations for the Dictionnaire Infernal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_Infernal#/media/F...

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Allow me to quote Diablo developer David Brevik describing when he finally yielded to demands and hacked together a "real time" version of his turn-based Diablo, by making turns elapse the rate of 20 turns a second.

'I remember taking the mouse, and I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and and smacked the skeleton down, and I was like "Oh my god! That was awesome!".'

'And the sun shone through the window, and God passed by, and the angels sung, and sure enough that was when the ARPG was kind of born at that moment, and I was lucky enough to be there.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc?t=27m

If you're in this part of this comment thread, you'll probably enjoy the whole video.

Mm, yep, thanks for that. Primary sources always better than secondary.

I kinda take issue with saying "the ARPG was born at that moment", though. We had JRPGs for almost a decade before that included realtime combat.

ARPG is not the same as a realtime RPG...

If you're interested in Blizzard history, there's a 4-hour interview with Rob Pardo hosted by Civ 4 lead and Offworld Trading Company creator Soren Johnson. Pardo also recounts the beginnings of Diablo in part one around ~1:27:00, although he wasn't involved in the project at that time.

Starcraft, WoW, and Hearthstone are also discussed. Warning: audio quality is not great.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-...

on that note, i read a book on blizzard's history "stay awhile and listen" that was not worth it. maybe it was because i read it right after masters of doom, but it felt like they were afraid to say anything negative, and as a result it's boring and also very hard to learn from whatever failures and successes they had.

Timed link is wrong, use this for that exact moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc&t=27m

This is really significant ; I remember playing a real-time (multilayer) Angband variant for like a minute: the gameplay didn’t translate at all to "realtime".

It's one of my strongest experiences of ux ever. The actual realisation of going from turn based balanced fun to tick based balanced fun is far from obvious!

Ultima Underworld (1993), Ultima Underworld II (1994), Ultima VII (1994), and The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) all come to mind quickly as computer-based action RPGs that preceded Diablo (1996). And the Japanese were making top-down action RPGs as early as the '80s, especially those made by Nihon Falcom (Ys) and Quintet (Soul Blazer). I would particularly cite Brandish (1991, Nihon Falcom) as a similar type of realtime action dungeon crawler (although it wasn't released in the West until 1995).

All that isn't to diminish the substantial achievements of Diablo, which was quite innovative. The fast, smooth gameplay was novel, as was the setting. It was compulsively playable and accessible while a lot of earlier action RPGs were kind of clunky. The art design was superb -- everything from the dreary, gothic environs to the satisfying animation and sound of a pile of gold bursting forth from a slain enemy. It's fair to say that Diablo was a milestone in ARPG history and highly influential.

I'll add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faery_Tale_Adventure (1987) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_of_Lore (1988)

I'll disagree on all those (and the Ultima's etc in the grandparent comment). They were all focused on RPG and story first, then adding some action on top of that (via isometric, fps etc. modes).

Diablo changed things in that it focused on action first, whereas the RPG element is just an add-on. Its gameplay cycles between essentially going deeper in a dungeon that's becoming more difficult, obtaining/selling etc. of items/potions in town so that you can descend further. Its story isn't really of (heavy) importance.

So what about Zelda II: Adventure of Link? The RPG elements were clearly secondary, given that they were absent from the original LoZ.

I swear i have seen some video from a conference or similar where Brevik talks about being staunchly in the turn-based camp, until he sat down and implemented real-time (the game already ran on a system of ticks so he basically allowed the ticks to run even without any input from the player) over a weekend and had his proverbial mind blown by the experience.

Haha, I was typing my post before I saw yours, else I would have made it a reply!

For "over a weekend" read "in a few hours" :)

Generally, isometric grids don't work well in gameplay.

I beat "Into The Breach" 3 times on hard mode with 3 different classes, and I can safely say that a top-down perspective would have been more intuitive.

It feels like every time I look at the map, I need to rotate the image 45 degrees in my head before I could process what unit needs to do what.

> Generally, isometric grids don't work well in gameplay.

As with any general rule, there are some great exceptions, such as RTSs (Age of Empires, Starcraft) and city builders (SimCity 3000, Caesar 3).

And X-COM, and Jagged Alliance 2, and Ultima VII

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