Diablo 1 for Web Browsers | Hacker News Reader

Diablo 1 for Web Browsers

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449 pointsnsoonhui109 comments

Counterstrike 1.6 in the browser for those who like quick trips down memory lane: https://play-cs.com

I am instantly taken back to a time where we literally planned to lug big tower computers to my friends house just to be able to play CS 1.6 together. Thank you for sharing!

You planned to but never did?

Planned to until Mom or Dad said what on earth are you doing with our computer.

That’s why u do these things when parents are out for the weekend.

I said "literally planned," meaning it had to be a precise operation with the parents permission (and cars), and because there were several parents involved, this was a bit of a feat :).

Ah yes lugging around CRT monitors, what a time that was.

Had a Trinitron, that thing really put the lug in lugging.

I miss LAN parties with my friends so much. It felt like we had endless free time.

Thanks for making me remember.

Still some of the best (pseudo-) random dungeon generation I've ever played. That functionality alone probably accounts for over 90% of the time I spent replaying it.

It's strange to me that so few games in the genre seem to do this as well, over 25 years later. Hades is supposed to be good, but for some reason it doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. Maybe I'll pick it up on sale at some point and find out.

Hades is excellent but the procedural generation is not one of its main selling points, IMO. For me it’s the story (elevated mainly by incredible characters) and the combat. The procedural generation is simply a means to funnel you to combat scenarios in randomized orders, but it’s less like diablo where entire levels are created but just a series of interconnected handcrafted rooms that are randomly connected. There is no real exploration, each room basically funnels you to the next by giving you a choice of upgrade and a different door for each. The main gameplay loop is basically - enter room, kill everything, get upgrade, go to next room, restart when you die. So if you’re looking for a diablo-clone, hades is not it - I would recommend Grim Dawn (but this doesn’t have procedural generation lol). Hades is still excellent but it’s Roguelite through and through, and one of the best ones at that.

Have you tried Diablo 3 yet? After the real money auction house fiasco, Blizzard did a 360 and completely turned the game around and continued to grow it over the years. It is an excellent game now.

Path of Exile is another really good one, more like D2, whereas D3 was more streamlined (plays very well, but less customization).

Both do random dungeon generation.

In a different genre, but Deep Rock Galactic has super cool underground cave systems procedurally generated... it's just an excellent game throughout: https://www.ghostship.dk/blog/procedural-level-generation

What made me dislike Diablo 3, is that for me it fails to deliver the atmosphere that really made Diablo 1 and 2 a game worth experiencing.

Diablo 3 is too colorful and looks like it has been heavily influenced by games like World of Warcraft (in a bad way).

Definitely. And it's not just the atmosphere, the gameplay is borrowed from WoW too (in a good way, IMO, but YMMV).

Path of Exile might be more up your alley. It's more D2-like both in atmosphere and depth -- it's more about traversing giant skill trees to slowly customize your character, than D3's "choose a few unique skills and learn to use them together well" model.

Funny, my one main gripe about PoE (and also D2) are the superdark graphics. I miss the WoW art style, personally... guess it's not for everyone :)

I dont know. Neither Diablo 3 nor PoE are really good comparisons for me to Diablo 2 as it stands today.

At least in the most important aspect for me. Itemization.

Diablo 3 is a game that I play every few seasons for a week after ladder reset and then stop because I have a BiS item set (if you ignore Ancient/Primal Items, which just arent fun for me, as its just "same item, just minimally better").

PoE on the other hand just goes into the completely opposite direction and you need to basically be a full-time twitch streamer to do everything in game (or be one of the 0.01% of the playerbase that has the game fully figured out including crafting/trading)

Not to mention that in PoE I can never actually relax when I play endgame. I love Diablo 2 for being able to farm some items after work and not have to on edge everywhere.

I tried playing PoE on my Steam Deck last league and I just stopped after a while because I would die all the time because I didnt see some random mob that would one-shot me on the small screen.

Part of that missing atmosphere was that in D1 (and to a lesser extent D2), you were a weak human and death was around every corner. You might walk into a room and near-instantly die. You spent a lot of time running for your life.

Contrast that to D3, where I literally beat the game the first time without using a single health potion. You were a super-hero who could punch a skeleton and send the pieces flying at level 1. And while I can certainly see the allure of such experiences (hell, I enjoy them too in other games), it was not what I wanted from a Diablo experience.

This is accurate.

>Part of that missing atmosphere was that in D1 (and to a lesser extent D2), you were a weak human and death was around every corner. You might walk into a room and near-instantly die. You spent a lot of time running for your life.

LOL. Thank You this really did made me laugh out loud. I think that is a very accurate description of D1.

Diablo II is still more fun to play than Diablo III (in my opinion). The community behind Diablo II is just 100x more passionate and loyal. The rune word system in Diablo II is still being expanded which makes the game re-playable every season.

Agreed, D2 is/was the pinnacle of and set the benchmark for two-dimension dungeon-crawler RPGs. It's still an enjoyable game even 20+ years later. It's probably a good thing there's no Web/Android/iOS version because I'd be hooked, and don't have time for that anymore!

I grew up playing an inordinate amount of Warcraft I, II, III, and StarCraft in the 90s with my siblings. The quirky character voices and scripts were downright amazing and AFAIK remain unparalleled to this day.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=scweL0LVrcM

Check out this song... https://youtu.be/nqdWDpyPt8I

Just.. no. Thanks anyway.

Agreed - D2 has not been paralleled to this to day.

Your reflection sounds eerily similar to the one D2 dev who said the same thing after he (accidently) stayed up all night (sound familar?) on a Friday evening "testing" the latest change they implemented in the engine architecture unti he noticed day-light was peaking into his office window...

There seems to be a secret sauce in D2 that is impossible to replicate.

Pointing out the obvious that doing a 360 would change absolutely nothing since you'd end up facing the same direction you started with.

Did you mean: 180?

Wrong. You would get all the dizziness that wouldn't be there otherwise.

…turn 360 degrees and walk away.

The dungeon and item generation randomization is great. The real time isometric view, gameplay, and atmosphere, while groundbreaking, would not have been enough to get me to replay more than a handful of times. Without the randomization, the game would have had to have many more expansions.

I have played Diablo for far too many hours to count. On the other hand, Baldur's Gate is a game I replay about once every 5 years due to the atmosphere being so good.

One thing I loved about this game was the vast amount of fan pages dedicated to it in the early years when I was learning how to play. I have spent some time compiling links to those sites, that are still hosted or archived, at my website https://mgpat-gm.github.io/links.html. If you want a trip down memory lane, click away.

Here’s an old fan site for other games of the era, though in Spanish: http://islanegra.clandlan.net/ (The look is what’s fun)

I loved growing up with the internet where sites like that were dime a dozen.

Hope you came across Dead Cells.

Incredible game with an amazing value for almost infinite-replayability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32529645

I posted this if anyone is interested. It's Ultima Online in a browser, allows you to connect to official server or private.

All written in C#.

These different games in browsers are incredible. Always blown away at the cool stuff people do.

You can play the free game here: https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-windows-games-o...

Wow, I grew up during the mid-90s when the internet was just starting to consume the world. Diablo (Battle.net) and QuakeWorld were my jams at the time. After that came the MMORPGs of the late 90s, Ultima Online and Asheron's Call. Good times.

I was recently reading Masters of Doom and this fits right in with the vibes of that book. Incredible seeing the lasting impact of the games of that time.

I revisit Masters of Doom every year or two. I adore that book. The audiobook is fantastic, as well.

Asheron's Call was my first MMO. Played it for like 6 years before moving to WoW where all my friend's were. One thing I loved about AC is you could run from one side of the world to another without zoning(for the most part). This was pretty unique back then. Another was the skill based system. No classes. It still holds a special place in my heart.

Still need to get around to trying the server emulator but I'm on Linux.

You might like the book "Stay a while and listen" which is similar and about the making of Diablo 1.

Diablo 1 and 2 is me and my brother’s favorite past time when we were kids.

What happened to the source code ? Or was it Diablo 3? I can't remember. I remember they released the symbol files by mistake or something. I was under the Impression that we would be playing Diablo on every toaster in town by now.

It links to https://github.com/diasurgical/devilution. WHich explains it: Climax Studios was contracted to make a Playstation port. And it ended up being shipped with the debug symbols still in the game executable. The pc version also has a lot of debug information still in the game files. So reversing engineering the source was made a lot easier.

It’s even playable on mobile.

To well actually. I just wanted try see how it worked and ended up spending an hour at it.

It's kinda hard to believe that Diablo was a cRPG at some point.

Wait is it now known as something other than an RPG?

The latest one is a micropayment gamble game on phones.

Ohhhhh yeah sorry I forgot about that one. Something like pay-to-win, and costs $100k to 100% the game?

Yes. Although the main story line can be done without paying a single cent, the endgame nudges you towards real money shop all the time. After some point credit card becomes the main progression path.

I personally enjoyed playing through story on iPad, but was unimpressed with the endgame. It is very shallow, limited to the same generated locations or dungeons you have already seen. There is virtually no build diversity either. Not sure why someone would pay money for the experience.

More like 600k (from currently known max upgrades). And good luck doing anything if you don't have team of 8 whales which you need for raids. So more like 4.8 million for proper maxing...

D4 looks like it might be okay

ARPG or more specifically the subgenre Hack and Slash I suppose?

Both are RPG subgenres though I'd say.

Edit: This was for D1-3, sibling makes a good point that the current incarnation might be classified as a gacha or something :-D

Yeah I was only thinking of the original trilogy too.

I can't see it as anything other than a top-down, epilepsy-inducing brawler with some pseudo-rpg elements.

I've always regarded it as a real-time roguelike. In fact it's probably the first game I played and thought, "this is like Rogue."

I remember going to a talk by David Brevik at NZGDC where he not only explained that the majority of Diablo was written in assembly, but that it was originally turn based, and his staff kept whining and whining about how good it would be if it were real-time. So in one weekend he made the necessary changes (ie run 1 turn/x time), ran over to a skeleton and hit it with his sword; he was sold!

I'm sure he tells the story in that format a lot but it was still awesome hearing it from the man himself.

It's so good, even the old trick for copying items works !

Yep, this was the first thing I checked! Brings backs memories!

What's the trick?

Put an item (e.g. a potion) on your belt. Then drop another item (e.g. a stack of coins) on the ground, then walk away a bit. Click on the coins on the ground, then the instant before it gets picked up, click on the potion. If you do it correctly, dropping the potion on the ground will drop a duplicate stack of coins instead.

Tip: an easier way to know if you've duplicated the coins is that when you pick up the potion, the bottom of your screen should say you've picked up coins.

My singular memory of D1 was that you had to clickclickclickclickclick.

It got to the point that I hurt my hand, it never really recovered from it.

I never got very far in D1, but played a lot of D2 and boatloads of D3.

I go back to D3 once or twice a year when a new season hits.

I've been teaching myself POV-ray with an eye towards using it to render 2D sprites for indie games. Thinking about how 3D rendered scenes could be tile-ized lead me to an epiphany last night about a difference between Diablo 1 and later Diablo's that I could never put my finger on before what I was seeing.

When a game uses the same bitmaps for terrain tiles at the edges of the screen as at the center, it necessarily emulates an orthographic camera. Put another way, if you render a scene with the default non-orthographic 3D camera, terrain elements at different positions on screen will be seen at slightly different angles. The effect is minimized if you use a far-off camera with a narrow field of view, but it never goes away completely.

(The same effect applies to sprites, but it would be less noticeable than with architectural elements.)

Diablo 1 used true 2D graphics whose tile bitmaps don't change no matter where they fall in the field of view - therefore, orthographic. Diablo 2 was a 2D/3D hybrid that painted the visible landscape onto a single giant triangle mesh (used in a non-standard way). And Diablo 3 and later of course were simply 3D graphics.

I always felt there were things about the mood and atmosphere of Diablo 1 that were lost when another team made Diablo 2, and then further left behind with Diablo 3. I now realize it's also analogous to the difference between the 2D Zeldas and the 3D Zeldas in an almost literal way.

(The use of 3D tech in the original Diablo 2 engine was weird. I don't know if it's because the programmers misunderstood how 3D meshes are "supposed to" be used, or if it was an optimal way to do it given the hardware and APIs of the time. Most 3D engines would use a dedicated, usually unchanging, mesh object for each chunk of terrain and load/unload these chunks as needed thus loading/unloading meshes. The developers of Diablo 2 seemed to consider generation of their terrain mesh expensive (it shouldn't be) and changing their terrain mesh less expensive (not true for VBOs). What the did was generate only one mesh, one time for the entire visible playfield, and just vary the vertex height and UV map of the entire thing as you walk around the level. The algorithm is rather like draping a sheet over the ground and dragging the sheet over rocks and bumps as you walk around.

This had the side-effect that the graphics would go crazy in Diablo 2 if you used a mod to set the screen resolution higher than ~ 1440x900. The problem was that they used 16-bit indices for the triangle list, and using one giant mesh of tiny triangles overflows the available number of unique indices representable with a 16-bit int. (Investigating this problem is what led me to figure out everything in the previous paragraph. I worked all of it out from first-principles once I realized the cause of the screen resolution problem.)

Huh. That is a very interesting tidbit, thanks for sharing!

So in essence the character just stood in the middle of a singular big mesh and the world was rendered to that viewport as you moved it around?

If they would add multiplayer support I’d be super happy.

I would love that! Then I'd Bookmark it for instant dungeon crawls during lunch breaks!

That's nice but it just pointed me to:

https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/releases

Native Diablo 1/Hellfire for a lot of platforms. Probably much easier on your battery if you're playing on a laptop.

Oh man, this definitely took me down memory lane! Awesome work! So many good games back then

Prime example that mechanics, not graphics make the game.

What's wrong with the graphics?

Nothing, looks pretty good, specially the atmosphere.

Anyone have the MPQ handy?

Or DII, I'm craving it.

Are you asking for the Shareware version? Otherwise prob the wrong place to ask ;)

I'll say this: archive.org is quite the trove for things of this nature

I know I have it backed up somewhere but don't have the easy-search filesystem setup yet for tens of PB. No worries.

(It's on archive.org, they're really good at not caring. Except that isn't working out very well for them maybe)

https://www.gog.com/game/diablo

it’s out there :)

It takes you literally a single google search after the filename.

Omg It's incredible

Damn, those load times.

I think it's mostly just download time. Didn't take long for me.

Oh, do you mean between game areas? I didn't actually play it yet!

Yes, the load times between levels are super fast. I remember waiting for perhaps 30 seconds when playing the game on my PC in 1997.

Also, I would've sworn that the shareware version included the Butcher on level 2. It doesn't...

I had a shareware version that did, and I know this for a fact because I never played the full version and still remember facing him.

i played diablo shareware with my friends in 1997 on our school pcs. I still remember us beating the butcher in shareware.

The Butcher isn't a guaranteed quest on every playthrough, maybe that's also true of the Shareware version?

This is awesome but needs the expansion

Judging from source code expansion is supported

Controls surprisingly well on a phone

That's really cool.

This is cool

Legendary

It speaks volumes that a shareware copy of a multi decade old game running on a browser entertained me more than all the crap games optimized for engagement that are installed on my ipad.

Now I got the quest for the water supply poisoning but I cant find the entrance. Is that area even available on shareware version?

> The tainted water source is located in a sublevel which originates from the second floor of the dungeon. The entrance appears as an opening in the wall, and there are several candles nearby. Inside, there is more of the yellow-colored water. Once all enemies within the sublevel are defeated, the water changes back to normal, indicating the completion of this quest.

Maybe games are generational like some long running film franchises.

I have such fond memories of Blizzard from back then. Such a shame at what they've become.

Does it ever happen that a company manages to grow that big and not become something like that?

I think that the only way for large companies to stay cool is to remain private.

In the games business, Valve is surprisingly OK. Also they're private and not interested in becoming part of a roll-up. I don't think those things are unrelated.

They also got that steam train they've been riding which makes it pretty easy to say they're not interested in being part of a roll-up.

Good point, uh, GabeR

Valve dooes not make games anymore though. One game ( VR ) in the last 10 years?

They're still very much in the games business, though. And it's better to have published few games than to milk their "franchises" dry in the usual way.

"better"? The only reason they don't make game anymore is because Steam is a printing money machine.

Well, yeah. But it is better. I'll trade not having HL3 for not having "spend P2W gems to boost production" type games.

But sure, Valve has loot crates in TF2, so they're not saints, it's very likely true that it's just because they're printing money that they're not shovelling crap (of their own). But other companies shovel crap despite printing money.

That game was really good though. I was reminded of a comment I read earlier to the extend that HL3 was never made because they couldn’t find a way to make it as much of a game changer as HL1&2 had been.

What have they become? I think most of the issues that have haunted them lately were related to people that worked on the games early on in their history and the culture that carried. I assume bad people can't hide there anymore with as much scrutiny that company has received. Or maybe your talking about the quality of games? I don't think Diablo Immortal is any indication of Diablo IV seeing as Diablo III is still releasing content without crazy monetization.

I look forward to Diablo IV personally. However I do feel that sense of nostalgia for the early Blizzard games. It's fun to see a post like this. Not sure the company is done with good content though. I still play their games a lot... I'm biased.

IMO the sense of wonder and the defined dark aesthetics of both the worlds created for Diablo 1 and 2 are something Blizzard will have to proove it can still pull off.

Diablo 1 and 2 were made by Blizzard North, a different group of developers than Blizzard. There's a reason Diablo 3 feels so different.

There is that... and then there is explicitly mocking the fans who wanted the dark/gritty asthethic.

Do you have a smartphone though?

D3 was initially also developed by Blizzard North. But then it got overhauled, multiple time. I'd say Diablo 3 became a good game... but it started out terrible. The RMAH has taught me a great thing though (something I should've learned by playing MtG back in the days).

I mentionned that Diablo 3 feels different. Its art style and gameplay loop are both going in a different direction. It's quality has nothing to do with it.

Monetization details for D4 were released it’s not pay to win but it’s cranked to the max : game purchase + dlc + cosmetic skin + paid currency + battle pass + paid battle pass upgrade ...

I was vaguely interested in it but meh, guess if I need to scratch that itch I’ll test POE2 or relaunch d2r.

Cranked to max? The only mtx are cosmetics.

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