TL;DR - Title
Now now before you jump the gun hear me out. The extraction looter genre is slowly picking up steam, and I’d imagine that even if it’s bad, Bungie’s extraction looter will probably still be a positive bonus for the genre as a whole, and games like Dark And Darker and Greed Is Good and the like have proven that people love the dark, medieval dungeon-crawling variant of the Extraction Looter genre. And one thing I see asked all the time among those communities, and even in Tarkov is if they have single-player modes or coop only modes. And this is where I think Blizzard is in a unique situation to capitalize on the growing Extraction Looter market.
Firstly, you would take Diablo 1 and give it the Diablo 2: Resurrected treatment. Make a version of it that has updated textures, updated to run on modern systems at modern monitor sizes, and do it separately so you don’t ruin the chance for people to go back and play the OG version, just like what was done with D2:R.
Once that’s finished, you make a Diablo 1 spin-off. Make a game that tells the exact same story, has the exact same characters, the same randomized loot, etc., etc., except you make it first person, you crank the darkness up to the nth degree. More blood, more gore, more pitch black environments. Make the monster difficulty AND density scale based on how many people you brought into coop with you. Make it single-player AND co-op, up to 3 players. Have the same 3 classes, and give it a gameplay loop that’s a cross between Diablo and an Extraction Looter. Give the players an “Madness” meter. The whole point of a closing zone in Extraction Looters is to prevent people from camping all game and force player vs player interaction. Since this would be strictly a singleplayer/coop experience, you make a Madness meter where you have to come back up to Tristram from the Cathedral on occasion or else you’ll start going more and more mad. The madder your character gets the more they hallucinate. And since it’s a Diablo game, those hallucinations can ACTUALLY harm the player, eventually overwhelming the player until they die if they don’t make it back to the light in time.
Of course despite what I said above it doesn’t have to follow the same 3 characters from the first game either. Story wise there was that period of time between when the Butcher slaughtered half the townsfolk and Aiden and his companions went into the Labyrinth where people were coming from all over to loot and pillage the catacombs. The game can take place in that brief period of time, following a new cast of 3 characters. But you’d still see the same bad guys. You’d still encounter the Butcher, you’d still come across Lazarus, you’d still end up spelunking your way into Diablo’s lair. You would just have different interactions with them. Like instead of killing the Butcher, you’d get smashed through the ground by him and wake up on some unknown floor that from that point forward in the game you find a new way up and down the labyrinth. Stuff like that.
It seems to me that you haven’t ever played Diablo 1.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a high definition appear with a few bugs patched. Just, it seems to me that your only interaction with it is through Diablo 3 and maybe forum discussions.
Extraction looters require being designed with it in mind from the ground up, they can’t just be tacked on an existing title. If not, you’ll find a plethora of issues appearing. For example, all characters in Diablo 1 can learn a spell called Town Portal. So the ability to go in and out of the labyrinth is rendered trivial. Also, movement is quite slow in that game, with only a couple of spells giving solutions to go faster (Teleport, and Warp in its expansion), so requiring players to get in and out fast quickly becomes problematic unless the player has those solutions, in which case it’s trivial.
I am not against a looter extraction game based on the Diablo franchise, but I’d rather it isn’t tied to Diablo 1. The community has already been insulted quite enough with D3’s Darkening of Tristram event, and building a game without being tied to Diablo 1 mechanics would give it a chance of being decent.
I actually have played Diablo 1. My first experience with Diablo 1 was way back in the days of dial-up internet back in the late 90’s. I got sent home from school for being sick. On the way home my mom and I stopped by a Hollywood Video to rent a movie to watch. Being sick and somewhat out of it I saw something called “Diablo” and assumed it was some sort of clay animation movie like was popular at that time so I rented it. Got home, went to put it in the VCR and realized it wasn’t a VHS it was a disc. Mom went back to work and I laid down to sleep. Woke up a few hours later and put decided to put it in the PC and then audibly screamed when Diablo laughed at me all of a sudden with the loudness of someone yelling in my ears. I hit the install button and then during the 10-20ish minute install process I sat there and read the manual booklet(since for some reason this Hollywood Video decided to just rent out the entire retail version instead of put it in it’s own box unique to the store).
I remember my first time in the game too. First NPC I talked to was Farnham. First time I encountered the Butcher I bricked my save so to speak because I hadn’t saved the game up until that point and unlike other console games of that era when you died it didn’t just start you at the start of the level, it started you at your last previous save, and since I hadn’t saved at all when I got stun-locked to death by The Butcher I had to start all over. I remember bricking my character because I face-tanked every enemy my first time through as the Warrior, and ended up fighting a room full of yellow zombies, which PERMANENTLY reduced your max HP when they hit you. I remember eating so much crap against the Chaos Knights that I learned how to dupe gold so I could afford better gear to actually stand a chance against them, thinking gear was the way to go and not realizing positioning was drastically more important than gear against them. I remember despite duping an entire inventory worth of gold still not having enough to buy that BiS item Wirt was selling, and being so satisfied in D2 to see that little jerk dead in Tristram. I remember playing online through Battle.net back then too. My first experience to online play and I joined in some dudes game and we were just about to start exploring the Monastery together and some hacker came into the game, speedhacked right to us, killed us and took all of our stuff. I remember going afk in another game a while later in town thinking I was safe only to come back and find that I was killed by someone who had abused the town PK glitch and killed everybody.
I still play D1 occasionally to this day. So yeah, I have A LOT more experience with Diablo 1 then even you probably do. Diablo 1 and 2(up until D2R) were games that I still went a couple times a year and did a playthrough of. You actually CAN make a extraction looter in the Diablo universe. It can take place in the same time frame as Diablo 1 and just not be canon. Hell Ogden and Gillian have dialogue I believe in D1 that talks about adventurers flocking to Tristram to pillage the treasures from the cathedral. Not ever entry needs to be canon. But it also doesn’t mean it can’t have canon bits in it. You can create something that exists in the same world that’s only connected to the events of the prime games by head canon, or from finding lore entries throughout the cathedral and stuff like that. It’s totally doable if done respectfully. The problem is that Blizzard hasn’t respected it’s playerbase in nearly 2 decades.
i dreamt about an hybrid thedivision/fallout and that was pretty pog.
bet thedivision/diablo hybrid wouldnt be too shabby either. might have some hellgate:london vibes to it
I am not saying it’s not possible to insert this kind of game in the lore. I am simply saying that Diablo 1’s mechanics aren’t adapted to it.
If they make a HD version of Diablo 1, I would like to make sure that it’s faithful to the original, not something that has barely anything to it. For the extraction looter, it has to either be in addition to the HD Diablo 1 (but with entirely different mechanics), or clearly not marketed as Diablo 1.