Use link shop.ekster.com/theactman or code ACTMAN to get up to 35% off. Diablo is a monstrous franchise these days, it is massively successful and popular. Yet, the first game is mostly overshadowed by it's sequels. Let's go back and visit the Demonic roots of the Diablo series and see how well the first game holds up. But more importantly, we'll find out If Diablo 1 Is A MASTERPIECE?!
We approve this message! I first played this game when i was 9 or 10. I dont think any other game has left as much of an impression on me than Diablo 1. Enjoyed with every minute and talking point. Ah the memories! 666/10
My uncle was a fan day 1. We played this series for so long. Diablo 4 was coming out and we were grinding the beta all hyped. Unfortunately, he suddenly passed away a week before it came out. Even though Diablo 4 is a huge joke, I made a character with his name so he can forever live in it. Rip uncle Max. I miss you buddy.
Before she passed away, this was my sister’s favorite game. This and Diablo 2 were great ways for to relieve stress. Edit: I should probably clarify better. I remember backing from School when I was younger and quite a few times, I would see my sister playing this game. She was so engrossed with all the blizzard games mainly the first diablo games and Starcraft 1 and BW. Whenever I tried to play these games, she always did her best to help get through (I was probably about 8 or 10 when I really started to try Diablo). Even when she got married and had kids of her own, she would still try to play Diablo 2 whenever she could. She lost her battle with MS last year and though it's been a while the pain won't ever really go away. She was a huge reason that I became a PC gamer in the first place. So I probably could of worded my first response a little bit better.
I wonder if God lets her play diablo in heaven 🤔 seriously I'm curious, seems like a conflict of interest 😅 Seriously though sorry for your loss. Hopefully they make another good one so it brings up some of the nostalgia and good memories you made with her playing the original 🙂
For me Butcher was even more iconic for D1 than Diablo himself. Everything about that quest was perfect. The build up with dying townsman, later checking for any clues with the townsfolk, Farnham having PTSD. Then you go inside, you are still pretty weak, level 2 of the catacombs, you see the chamber filled with horrifically mutilated bodies, then you open and hear "fresh meat" and run. Having Butcher that early with so crazy stats, damage, speed was a genius move by the devs. I played along my younger brother and we had about 9-10 yo at the time. Butcher was so scary and difficult that we asked our dad for help. Good memories.
I agree. Probably it's because not many players get to see and fight Diablo himself, but 99% of players will meet, unexpectedly, the Butcher, and he's the first thing to get your smile off your face and say "This isn't your standard simple fun game where the world spins around you"
Part of it lore-wise is simply that the townsfolk, apart from Cain and Adria, have no actual idea what lies beneath the town. Cain knows Diablo is down there from legends passed down to him from his elders which he refuses to believe despite increasingly overwhelming evidence something deeply fucked is happening. Adria starts out helping the player but the moment the Aidan shows up with the soulstone in his head she enthralls herself to his service. No one else knows anything about Diablo being involved. But every one of the townsfolk have been affected either directly or indirectly by the Butcher, and everyone has a horror story to tell about what they have either witnessed or directly experienced.
Something the Act Man doesn't mention (he may not be aware of it actually) is that the iconic "shove the soulstone into my forehead" ending cutscene was completely unintended by the original developers. The cinematics were made by a completely different team, and while they could discuss and suggest things they had no real control over them. Originally they intended the ending to be a lot more upbeat, and were absolutely shocked when they saw what had been made. By the time they got it it would have been very difficult to redo it, so they just made it work.
They could have just cut with him holding the stone. I guess the original idea might have been to shatter it, or store it in a box. I get the sense that the grim ending grew on em.
Everytime I see a new Act Man video uploaded, I can always safely assume it's going to have some of the most passionate, unique and interesting insight into gaming around right now, all while cracking jokes and keeping an upbeat and entertaining energy. I'm never dissapointed.
He used to be 100% more positive, like this video here. But ActMan lately also engages in a lot of unnecessary internet drama. Anyways, his style is unique and I am still around. Content made by a gamer to gamers. But I do still think he should stop engaing in useless drama.
I went back and played Diablo 1 after so long and I immediately found myself hooked on it just playing as the warrior. i loved it, despite its rough edges. Atmosphere in that game was just so damn top notch.
It's one of those games. I played through using all three classes. Rogue gotta be my favourite. Warrior is a pain once you get to the monsters that throw projectiles.
do you remember how to dupe if not i can teach you(you drop an item and as you pick it up click a potion on your belt that potion is now the item you duped)
cool trick with the warrior is to use teleport in the late game.. takes a little practice but its great if you're tired of constantl chasing down those wizards
it's the one game that i have more time then Diablo 2 just because it's my bias'd childhood game. It's not like i don't like 2 over 1, it's just that i've still yet to get burnt out by 1 then 2.
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"Hello, my friend. Stay awhile and listend" This line is iconic. Diablo's got a special place in my heart, cuz was a very dear friend that showed it to me, and he passed away last year. Every time I play it, it feels like he's close to me ❤
For what its worth Leoric's fall becomes even more tragic as you find out that he was Diablo's first choice of a host but Diablo was unable to take full control, but the mental sturggle still drove leoric to madness
Played a lot of co-op with my friend in Diablo 1. The class balance was interesting. Warrior started out strong with the sorcerer being weak. That was reversed once the sorcerer got fireball (aoe) as well as lightning and chain lightning and the sorcerer started to out-level the warrior. Once you got to the last few levels, however, the enemies started to become immune to most types of magic and so the warrior caught back up. Turns out that demons can't be immune to steel. 😄
that's why i always played as a "spellsword". A warrior with as many spells as i could master and maxed int. Once you get your hands on the teleport spell, most of the warrior's weaknesses kinda disappear. plus, the strongest spell in the game, firewall, is easily accessible to him at fairly high levels.
In the worst case, like the lord of steel, stone curse and hit em with the sword or whatever you got there ;) And it was much easier when you got that cap that gave you +1 to all spells (but you had to find shrine that was altering duration).
i believe lightforge fixed this issue...it gave a lot of to hit to the mage so they can do actual melee...it gave 25% to hit and 150% to damage...the dreamflange is for casting and lightforge is for melee...youd just swap these out on high resis stuff i actually found the rogue to be the best with the windforce and its knock back mechanic...farmed lazarus for it took about 50 runs but then the game was easy mode after that...
As a child I played it through with my friend in grade school. I still know the poem 'Halls of the blind' by heart. It was such a unique and unforgiving experience, we were scared, we were thrilled. The feeling of hearing the Tristram theme when you teleported out of a bad situation was so relieveing too. Even though how eerie the music was, in the end, it became a relief. I remember fearing that the deeper we descend to hell, the more likely it is that Tristram will be overrun. And the first time the travel point to hell appeared, we shit our pants. It was such a unique experience. And that scream. I remember always skipping at as a kid, because how scary it was.
The voice acting in this game is AMAZING. It's soooo iconic, soooo memorable. All the little quotes, everyone is so dark yet full of life! Thanks for proving it isn't nostalgia, it isn't rose colored glasses, Diablo truly is one of the best games ever made.
if it wasnt nostalgia then newer generations would be able to pick the game up and it would still be popular. but that isnt the case. it literally is nostalgia.
@@1Kurgan1 Yeah i played Diablo 1 first and when i first played Diablo 2 i didnt really like it. But when i played more i really started to like Diablo 2. Diablo 1 still 1 of my favorite games ever and im not sure if 1 or 2 is better.
When you hit the blood knights, you felt that impact. When they die, it felt so good. Even though they're regular mobs, I always enjoyed fighting them. My child brain probably liked the screams they do when they combust. Buttery smooth.
Yea, the D1 Doom Knights are some of the best enemies in any game in my opinion. Their sound effects were just outstanding, their death animations were glorious, and they were menacing. Even the D2 Doom Knights just didn't "feel" right. I feel like sound and enemy design in a lot of ARPGs just isn't as thoughtful anymore.
My grandmother played the first Diablo. She was my introduction to video games. I remember sitting hours with her watching her play Diablo, Nancy Drew, Myst, Syberia, and the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. She's gone now, but in some sense I still get to share time with her while gaming.
I played the demo when I was about 10, and then somehow I knew it had been released and was sick home from school. My mother asked me if I wanted something from the store, I asked her to go to the game store and check if they had Diablo, but I lived in a small city in the middle of nowhere. I was so happily surprised when she gave me the large box of Diablo. I was so happy.
I've always thought Diablo's overall plan was to be defeated, and then possess the hero that did it as a stairway to greater power, so I am in total agreement with your closing theory. And those drums in the cathedral levels! 🤩
I preached for years how no ARPG captured the claustrophobic horror of Diablo 1 and i have no one, content creators or devs alike, seen praising this game for this exact reasons you presented so perfectly in your video. The horror of this game lies in how it delivers story telling and the combat/exploration. I hope more people will see this and appreciate the game for this reasons. It is one of a kind and i regularly come back to it with the hell mod and its plethora of classes and extra quests and character building mechanics. It would be great to see a dev studio pick up the strengths of D1 and make a modernised take on this unique ARPG formula.
I truly believed (with every bit of my heart) that the future of video games was going to be utterly amazing and nothing could go wrong! That's what growing up thru the 90's & 2000's loving video games made me believe that the future only held great things for video games
I almost wish the 90's didn't happen because of the expectations it set on us that grew up in that era. Every fucking game was a golden banger, minus the arcade filler games. Shovelware didn't exist then.
@@bobby45825take your pink tinted glasses off my dude, your perception of the “good ol’ days” has been massively shifted towards delusion and fantasy, wdym there were no terrible poorly made games back in the day? It’s simply not true
"Big! Big cleaver killing all my friends. Couldn't stop him, had to run away, couldn't save them. Trapped in a room with so many bodies...so many friends...noooooooooo!" - Farnham the Drunk
As a member of the "ring of 1000" beta tester, I remember the utter joy when I received my Beta CD in my college dorm mail box in the mid 90s. I will die happy knowing my name will forever be linked to this masterpiece 😂
please, in the name of us all, do an copy of that disc if you are still in the possession. I really doubt that it will still be any good (CD's lifespan is only like 10-15 years (Vs. Bluray 300+ years for example)) and I recently realised that even some of my mint condition ps1 games are already broken, but there's a slim chance that you can still use your CD, store it on your PC and upload it in 10 years, when you will be 100% safe from any copyrights.
@@Drejkol sadly I misplaced it 😭, we were spoiled with 10baseT in our dorms in the mid 90s, so physical media wasnt as cherished as you may think. I regret not holding on to it. I do recall being in a rather plain presentation, not pressed but burned CD possibly, it's hazy to remember, probably why it was tossed, as you see back in those days throwing out CDs you know longer really need was common practice.
@@Drejkol The phenomenon of "disc-rot" in optical media is when the bonded layers on a disc fail and the reflective metallic layer is exposed to air, allowing oxidation and delamination to occur . This can be because of direct physical damage (as in a big gouge that pierces the layers), or from longer periods of poor storage, such as being somewhere where humidity is high (like a leaky basement or the state of Florida), or being frequently left in the open to be exposed to direct sunlight for long periods of time. It can also be due to poor manufacturing, where the bonding wasn't done correctly, in which case the disc would still work, but it has a limited time span. There are certain known batches of disc media which are known and identified as having been poorly manufactured, like how certain movies on Laser Disc are still perfectly fine, while others are infamous for withering. If your CDs weren't of a shoddy make, and you've treated them well, then they're probably still perfectly good. Even if they have scratches which cause reading problems, often those can be polished away with a special machine, typically they're a very superficial kind of damage.
Diablo was the 1st game that Ive preordered in my life. Reading its manual was an epic experience. The 1st game ambient and music is still the best in the series imo. And the fear and darkness is in the right amount.
@@insensitive919 You're joking but Diablo 1 has three classes, a white male fighter warrior, a female in a melee/ranged role (not just an archer or healing class), and a male battle mage who happens to be black. I thought games supposedly didn't have representation and it was just all full of bigots lol, but even back then we already had diversity and none of it was forced. What a time it was to be alive.
Great video presentation you hit it right on all points. As part dinosaur, I fondly remember loading this up with our CD into the tray and seeing that devilish screen and dark music greet us with "connect to the internet" at the top 😄. I still play D1 to this day, presently a rogue in the D1 belzebub mod. The replayability is always there with this fantastic game.
Some of my most important gaming memories come from this gem. It caused my heart rate to shoot through the roof when I encountered a bunch of demons in a cave. I literally had to pause the game and physically go to another room to calm down for several minutes before I could continue playing. I had an absolute blast.
I grew up playing Diablo 1 and 2, thanks to one of my aunts. I'm 33 years old and they're still top tier games to me. I can remember spending countless hours playing Diablo 2 with my cousins and aunt. These two games helped shaped me as a gamer today.
The Butcher to me is the most memorable first boss. The first time playing, I really liked how the townspeople would hype him up. You'd starrt off the first level thinking its a breeze, and when you finally encounter the Butcher, you get you ass whooped. After my first encounter with the Butcher, I knew I had to grind a bit more to strengthen myself. The Bucther is the quitessential first boss.
Simple and effective. Walk into a room full of carnage... "Ahhh FRESH MEAT!" Diablo 3 was more like introducing a WWE wrestler and then having a lame battle. It should just be a mindless brawl to fit the character. A for effort, D for result.
AcKsHuAlLy, there are more than 8 surviving people in Tristram, but you can only piece that through NPC dialogue. I can only think of 2 immediately and that's Ogden's wife - Garda and Gillian's grandmother. Thank you for tuning in Nayolak's Diablo trivia corner!
24 years later, i can still recall the halls of the blind poem. This game will be eternally in my heart and i will always give it a replay every now and then. I spend 1 1/2 years playing it back then.
tried it, gameplay is too slow and boring. It's just nostalgia for people I think. theres a reason people dont play old games if they didnt grow up in that era.@@SCDJMU
@yangpaan453 I've played games from before my time and enjoyed them. A good game is a good game, no matter when. Can't speak for D1 tho, I've never played. But just based off what I've seen it looks decent. You gotta remember in the 90s there was A LOT of shit games that played like ass or had God awful controls, or both
Its ok if you don't like it, you are allowed your opinion, but theres a reason it was one of the fastest selling games of its time, people loved it and still do. As for the nostalgia argument, yeah im sure it plays a role but its a lazy argument for people who dont want to give old games a try. Why are you trying to convince people not to try something they may end up enjoying?
A few memories: - the satyrs in the catacombs who taught me to use doors (the Butcher, incidentally, does not teach you to use doors). The red satyrs were especially nasty. - getting chainmail for the first time and the Oculus amulet (or whatever it's called) which really helped me against the satyrs. This is important cos I really choked on the catacombs first time around--- prolly cos my stats had been nerfed without me realising like Act Man explained. - replaying the game and finding hidden doors, secret areas and quests I hadn't encountered before. Even after I'd probably found them all I remember salivating over the prospect of finding a new secret room and would comb every inch of every level in search of interactible objects. - getting the Grandfather sword and eventually being able to pwn blood knights after many replays
I don't know if it's just me, but I can't stop watching this video (it's maybe 7th time already), not just because of nostalgia, but because how GOOD the presentation is... This tells you exactly what the titles says, how this game was ahead of it's time and how huge impact it had moving forward. It's really sad where Blizzard ended up in the end... Thank you Act Man for bringing me back when I was 5 years old, when I played this MASTERPIECE! PS. When my dad started to install this game on PC, when the installation window booted up, I ran as fast as I could out of his room...
I remember being 6 and my uncle helping me build my first pc in ‘96. He gifted me Diablo and said it was an adult game and gave me a wink. Had nightmares about this game all the time but still was so enthralled that I really felt the terror and tension. Loved this game so much! The music was my favorite part
Ive rewatched this too many times due to the fact of how well this videos been crafted, loved every second of it Act Man keep up with the fantastic art and work.
People habe no idea what old school internet was like when you'd do an iron man with 2 other good player's online. Warrior, rogue, sorc....go inside and never come back out. Use whatever you find and mske it work.
Such a great video! I feel like the original Diablo doesn't get the love it deserves. I literally grew up playing Diablo 1, and eventually 2, and it's still fun to return (Especially with the Beelzebub mod)... In fact, this video makes me want to stream a new playthrough. If done right, I'd love to see a proper remake.
Blizzard needs to make a true diablo mmorpg or a true diablo action rpg with online and offline co-op. If theyd make one good complete game we fans would play it for the next 20 years and buy every dlc they make... do they not want our money for the next 20 years???
I played this game for the first time after watching you talk about it in the diablo 4 video. I can confirm that your enjoyment from the game is not just nostalgia. I was surprised by the atmosphere of the game, it was still creepy despite how old it is. The loot was not too much and felt rewarding. Overcoming the stun lock mechanic was fun in its own way. I also think the voice acting aged really well. Overall, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the experience, I'm even planning to play beezlebub mod. Thank you for the videos. Thid helps me try games I would take forever to try out.
It's fantastic that you are giving Diablo 1 it's due credit as one of the best games ever made. For me personally, this game is near perfect. I replay it every year and still have a huge blast. I wish you would've added more original soundtrack into your video - the catacombs (act 2) is my favourite part of the game and the music is so awesome and absolutely flawless at setting up the ambiance. Also, you should've mentioned that quests were also randomized and you could've started this game and played all to the end and never even seen the Butcher, Leoric or even Lachdanan ad be none the wiser. It also addes to the replayability. One time I've had to replay the game 3 times to get Leoric quest... I did play Diablo with friends locally - but my internet connection at the time was too slow to play online (my 486 barely chugged the game - if you thing walking was slow in town, try to play it on a 486 instead of a pentium and You will discover that it's even more ambiance building when each step take twice as long) I've beaten Diablo back in 1997, but I still remember the dread of facing the Butcher (I was afraid to open his room because I've seen what was inside) or Leoric - Leoric especially was hard as balls for me, back in the day. Diablo for some reason was quite easy for my first playthrough - I must've been lucky and had some good items on, because it took me years to figure out that the most important stat for beating the late game was fire, lightning and magic resists and extra damage on a weapon. Maybe I had the Stormshield :) The acting of the characters was pretty fine for me - actually having fully voiced character was still pretty new back then - when most games had just text, having voices and text was a fantastic boon for me to learn English as a foreigner. Only Adria and Wirt sound pretty cringy, all others are great - even characters like Gillian or Franham - they have some great monologues and are worth to listen. The monologues and character depth is even better than in Diablo 2 - just try to listen to all the monologues and compare it with Diablo 1.
I still go back and do play throughs of D1 from time to time. . The random floor layout and monster generation on each save file makes the replays so fresh every time.
I grew up w/ Diablo 1 and Hellfire. Beat it many times. learned everything from ARPGs to character editors, to making a warrior, specing into Str and Int and learning holy spells to make a paladin, to the math being stat weights etc from this game. I truly enjoy the series. Got it when I was 8yrs old. I had to tell my grandparents at the time "I was a soldier fighting for God" to make them overlook the M rating and "blood"/violence.
Very clever actually telling them that. I mean you're not even lying really. You are basically a ray of hope for mankind from the ravages of the devil. Descending from the light from whence you came into the bowels of hell.
Friend of mine, we both couch co-op complete Diablo 3 with a friend. The 3 of us beat it together. I played Diablo 1 on the ps1 with one of those 2 friends I completed Diablo 3 with together, a couple years later. I asked him which he preferred and enjoyed more. Without hesitation he said, “Diablo 1.” Even people who don’t have the nostalgia, know what a great game it is.
Fun fact. I still have my original disc copy. Also fun tip. You can do the first few levels of the dungeon then start a new game and retain your level and then run through them again to gain some more levels. This doesn't necessarily put you way ahead, but it helps for sure. Also there's an item duplication glitch that again helps, but... the game is still so hard regardless.
Yeah, the difficulty expressed in this video is misleading because you can literally restart and restart as much a you want. If you have enough patience, you can potentially steamroll the game. And it's an important feature due to the randomness of the game. You can have bad luck and not getting anything good your entire playthrough.
Im 42, I played Diablo 1 at my family's business. My older brother got it and so I would play it late at night in a dark warehouse, was scary. My family's business was arcade games and pinballs, so I do remember SF1, it was fine. I was more into racers at the time, SFII changed that.
Diablo 1 is considered hard because when you died you were done. In D2 I think Duriel was hardest boss related to your level because of his frost effect and in the last patch when you enter his room he immediately jumps you, played it last year with some friends on PS4, we were kinda dead before the load screen finished.
@@alexg7146 that was a bug in the original game which got patched out and apparently seems to have been patched back into the remaster lmao also diablo 1 is hard if you pick the fighter, the ranger and mage have an easier time
thought the same thing for years about Duriel until i played Resurected and began checking hint, tricks and build. I then realize you can down a bunch of (i think) yellow potion (Tawning potion or something like this) and it gives you ton of resist cold and freeze. Duriel becomes WAY more easy after that.@@alexg7146
I find it the opposite! I think duriel defs was the hardest part of d2 tho. In d2 i was scared of how hard hell was gunna be because hell was like impossible for me in d1, but it was so much easier for me in d2 lol
Also it looks like you mostly played as the warrior here, which as you mentioned is super easy at the beginning but very difficult at the end (if you’re mostly melee, which warriors usually would be though). The sorcerer, however, is the opposite - you will suffer with him so much in the early game but in the end game, you will be ethering whole floors.
The greatest of all the Diablos. One Dungeon that goes deeper and deeper underground. No running around outside. No teleportation way points. An artistic achievement that had to prove itself on its merit alone before Diablo became a franchise filled with lore and a "live service" universe for no-lifers who expect to spend 3,000 hrs in a single video game collecting pets and baubles to look ever sillier for their online friends. All hail Diablo.
I always liked that it was fairly straightforward about your goal, you have one main 'Quest', get to the end of the dungeon, there are other Quests but they're mostly along the way and needing only a bit of chatting in town to get going. Shows how it was inspired by Rogue and is truly one of the earlier Roguelikes (though you could say missing permadeath is 'casual' and disqualifies it) done outside of ascii, which was great for the time. Modern Diablos and the other games like it are so 'MMORPG lite', especially with MMORPGs themselves being more instanced-based these days, it all blends together for me and I don't really like any of it. Diablo 1 is a totally different game, really.
@@KnownAsKenji I just played Diablo 1 for the first time over the last few weeks and couldn't help but think how much potential there is still to be tapped in its game design. Yet no developer seems to be making a Diablo 1 clone, they all just copy Diablo 2. Given how much game development has advanced since 1996, it doesn't seem to me like it would be too difficult for even a small development studio to create a more expansive version of Diablo 1 with a larger selection of possible quests and longer more varied dungeon(s). It certainly seems like it would be much easier than attempting to follow in Diablo 2's footsteps.
I beat this game countless times when I was in highschool in the mid-2000s. Back then, I couldn't speak english and didn't know anything about the lore, so I always assumed that the ending was basically a ploy to give you a reason to beat the game again and again. "Everytime I kill Diablo, I become Diablo and another warrior has to take my place"
To be clear, unless your mod disallows it, you can absolutely grind experience. Choose New Game with your current character and it resets the game, re-rolls quest, monsters are repopulated in the game, etc etc. You keep all of your levels, gear, gold, etc. Anything you left on the ground will be gone though.
This was actually mandatory in some edge cases, depending on loot found and power level, and even more so on the next higher difficulties nightmare/hell.
I'm so glad a larger, well known channel like yours covered this game. This game was formative in my interest in games and writing, and its been a tragedy to see what's become of the Diablo series over time. I still listen to the OST to this day! I still have all the old books and manuals complete with old poetry and sketches from people like Metzen. Yes, poems lol. When I was really little, the red screen and frantic whacking of the enemies when you died used to scare me LOL
This was the first mainstream pc game I played at 7-8 years old. I still play it and the mod "The hell" by Mordor. Definitely worth giving the mod a try imo for all the added content and readding characters and quests that got scrapped from the original game.
Diablo 1 will ALWAYS be my favorite in the series. It's simplistic and the atmosphere is perfect and has been since early 1997 (technically very late Dec 1996 depending on where you got the game at).
You can also glitch on the original Diablo 1 to activate Nightmare and Hell difficulty in SP, which allows you to unlock and purchase bountiful staff of apocalypse. You can then proceed to pull larges groups of enemies or bump near rooms full of enemies, spam Apocalypse, bolt back to town via scroll, recharge stave and rinse and repeat haha
that compilation of the blood knights brought back memories of my first encounter with them. I dont replay D1 as much as i replay D2 but i never forgot it. i love the grim story. 3 and 4 just didnt do it for me.
I only managed to play a few hours of Diablo, I had very christian parents, but I played a fair amount of D2 - it would have been more, but something about that game gave me a raging headache after an hour or so, whatever I tried. I totally get the 3/4 disappointment though, they just.... weren't the same. Torchlight 2 felt closer, even if it lacked the dark edge.
Just wanted to thank you for making this this video. It was a real nostalgic trip down memory lane for me. I fondly remember playing this with my best friend in South Africa who I lost contact with. I was 15 year's old again for 44 mins.
Thank you Act Man for covering for what is one of my top favorite games of all time. I still remember sitting on a milk crate watching my older brother play this and how he eventually promoted me to be the potions guy. My one job was to watch that life orb and it when it went down, I was there to fill it back up while my brother continue to slay demons. This game had such an impact on me that I actually used The Halls of the Blind poem for a school project. I also will never forget the respect my older brother gave me when I finally beat the game as a sorc. I also just recently bought a PS1 and a copy of Diablo to co-op with my son. Maybe one day, we’ll get a remaster.
This game music takes me way back to 1999, when I was a broke pvt in the army stationed in Hawaii and couldn’t afford to do anything when off duty. One of the guys shipping out sold me his PlayStation and a stack of games for $300 and in the evening and on the weekends all I did was play video games in the barracks, until I started making rank and made enough money to actually do things off base. Even when I wasn’t playing it I could walk past any other barracks room and hear this music and the goldeneye music. Although my only worldly possessions were a 25” TV, a plantation, Diablo, RE2, FF7, tenchu, metal gear, Warcraft, Risk, and tony hawk….I would give everything I own now to go back to that year and live it again. The following year one of my buddies got sent to Europe and he sold me his Pentium 3, PC with windows 98se, a voodoo2 gfx card and a bunch of late 90s pc games for like $500 total. It was the first PC I ever owned. What a nostalgia rush from hearing that damn theme song, I had to watch the video 3 times because I kept spacing out for like 10 minutes and just started reminiscing about that entire year every time I heard the theme 😆
This video is such a godsend. I played Diablo 1 on the PS1 when I was 9 years old. Currently 35 now, and I have always had tremendous respect for David Brevik for his vision on Diablo 1 & 2. It just breaks my heart how that style of play is lost by the monetization model as well as the high damage numbers and unbalanced stats.
Brevik wanted scummy monetization back then too. He wanted to sell item packs on CDs but it was too expensive to implement. It would have sucked if they could make it the way he wanted to back then. He's not a hero or a good guy. He was a money grubbing scumbag like most game devs these days.
Somebody should do some serious research and go back to these "limitations" and continue this legacy with another masterpiece and dark atmosphere. Seems highly unlikely that anyone will take that risk.
@@ITSAHARDNUGLIFE Once AI can code 95% of the game for me and generate the art, I totally will be building a new old school Diablo game. Also want to do a Cyberpunk themed one. Retirement goals if I ever get there.
What I love about Diablo is that how toned down and basic it is and yet complex enough to be compelling. I feel like new ARPGs cannot go back to that level of simplicity anymore. :(
For it's time and genre Diablo was actually quite complex, not full blown RPG complex, but it introduced complexity to the action genre that previously wasn't really a thing. People got used to that, and then Diablo 2 introduced more complexity, until people got used to that, and so on.
I still vividly remember playing this the first time when I was 16 years old during my first internship at a games store. I bought it a couple days later to play it at home. Needless to say it really sucked me in until this very day.
i remember finding diablo at walmart in the 90's. It was miss-marked to almost half the price of any of the games on the shelf next to it. I immediately dragged my dad over to look at it, being 10 at the time. My dad was happy i found it and bought it for me, one of my greatest gaming memories.
What a great video! I remember I dedicated my whole spring break to playing Diablo shortly after it came out. It's an absolute masterpiece. It was a time when hardcore gamers made games for gamers and without being dictated by greedy execs. And, yes, I'm one of the rare ones who actually beat the game back in the spring of '97 (I bought it a few months after it came out)! Like so many others, the music and the Butcher "Ahh... Fresh Meat!" and so many other encounters and sounds will be forever engraved in my brain.
There was two other special elements of Diablo 1. 1. Diablo 1 was one of the first of it's kind to create the online lobby system and RPG multiplayer before every Steam game started to have online multiplayer. 2. Diablo 1 had friendly fire. Meaning it had another layer of challenge when playing through with friends for you not to hit them And guess what this friendly fire was ALSO the PvP. You have to be weary that your allies might not turn against you and there was no shear way to know if they are other than the actual socialization communication you have done with them. They can shoot an arrow at you from behind if you weren't careful.
I'm glad you mentioned class specific gear. That's one of the things that made me fall in love with the Dark Souls/soulslike genre in general. You can build your character how ever you want. It crushed my soul when I found out that so much of the items in D4 were class specific. I thought they learned their lesson from D3. Guess not.
They learned that you can charge the same amount of money for the same shit for every class seperately. When you wonder why something is designed in certain way in a blizzard game the answer is always money.
Lesson? The lesson they learned is that games don’t have to be perfect to turn a profit. Slap a battle pass and some MTX in there and you’ve made the investors happy
regarding the blood knights, if you stack on full healths you could try to lure them away from the stairs, portal back to town and then take the shortcut to floor 13 and go down the stair again, that if you had cleared some of the level already, if thats the first room you are in deep shit.
Diablo is like the first game I have memories of, my parents used to play and to this day I remember seeing the rivers of blood of hell and the screaming demons, the strongest and most lasting impression has been left on me. I started playing on Diablo 2 when I was a kid, I didn't understand the language the was in and had no clue what was going on, but still the game was good and fun to play. This year I took my dad's cd and actually played Diablo 1 for the first time and what an experience that was. This game is so hard, I died so many times and soft blocked myself by not putting enough points in dexterity and I got stuck because my warrior hit with the precision of a toddler with a plastic sword. I took me several months, like almost the entire year to finish the game, but it was so worth it. After I had to restart from zero and I had a better understanding of the game I thought it was so easy, I slaying away, taking my loot, getting more gold than I would ever need, until I got to hell. I died so many times, it took me so long to get through those levels and find diablo, I'm a pretty chill person but I even had to stop playing for some several weeks because I started raging from how hard it was. But it was still one of the best gaming experiences I've had, one day I'll play it again, see everything this game has to offer, but for now I'm going to beat Diablo 2 and do what my kid self tried so hard to do but couldn't. An absolutely iconic franchise, it's a shame what it has been turned into by greed and corporate bs, like just let the creatives be creative and do something fun without a load of micro and macro transactions.
actually most of the uniques were crap, expcept for like 4 or 5 (thinking cap, naj's plate, dreamflange, royal circlet, can't think of any other usefull one, maybe deadly hunter or sparking mail, but for specific use) magic ones outscaled uniques.
I actually did a playthrough of Diablo and the original Diablo 2 just last year! The original Diablo is a true classic to me, right up there with games like Super Mario Bros. and Doom.
my friend and I had played so much of it that we went through 3 copies of it then started to make burner copies (they were exploding in our CD trays from so much use). hundreds of not thousands of hours. we knew all the stats and how to min max effects. we would challenge ourselves to things like never coming out of the dungeon (first Iron man game afaik). racing runs, first to kills the big D. we could even predict the procedural layout of the levels with a few clues of the area around the entrances to each level. BTW, easiest way to win against Diablo was the holy bolt spell (could hit him from off screen). also if you get stuck by the knights, the best way is to run past them into an area away from the stairs, pop a TP and then come back down, it would allow you to grab your things and replan an attack.
Diablo 1 was the first game I ever played online and was my first PC game I played when my family got our first PC back in 1997. I still consider this game as either my favorite game of all time or at least in the top three.
You should make a decently long review of Diablo 2, as while 1 set the ground work for action RPGs, 2 improved in many ways, which I think is worth mentioning.
Diablo 2 defined the genre in a way that's still followed to this day. Every Blizzard game does it, but not as much as Diablo 2 did for hack and slash.
@@christopherniewiadomski4075 Yeah, that's kind of what I've heard. It really did a lot for evolving action RPGs from Diablo 1, with things like skill trees and such.
Diablo 2 elevated the series to a mainstream hit, however some D1 fans were quite disappointed when the D2 came out, because it shifted its tone from gothic horror towards action fantasy and was much more colorful. Ironically, it's a similar criticism Diablo3 got when it released, however the D3 pushed it too far. D2 made the atmosphere lighter, but at the same time offered a generational leap in gameplay improvements, so most of the naysayers forgave it. D3 couldn't defend itself, because almost everything was a downgrade.
@@kazioo2 Well, maybe, but I think that that is a pretty ridiculous reason to be "disappointed" with a game, just because it's not so grimdark that it goes straight into grimderp territory. Because if you look back at D1's art style, it's simple but also seems like it was trying way too hard to be scary and all that. I mean, I wasn't the biggest fan of D3, but I hardly think that its art style was as bad as some people make it out to be. It honestly just felt like updated designs and such rather than trying to change the themes. I just think that far too many people tend to try to cling to the old ways and just assume that they were all just 100 times better simply because they're older.
@@christopherniewiadomski4075D2 nailed something very early that is common psychology in slots - create a gameplay loop that provides the 3 components: 1) You know you will get a reward if you do activity X eventually (in d2 case loot) 2) The reward can widely vary 3) The task is repeteable The genius twist of Blizzard was to then use the above to drive fighting stronger and stronger monsters hence repeating the entire loop but with increasing risk/reward. It works amazingly well, and D2 probably still has the best loot system ever designed.
As a 54 year old gamer I did play and complete Diablo in my 30s. It is definitely a masterpiece and I speak from experience. The constantly charging dungeon design was genius as was the unpredictable branches in what you might encounter.
My context on how good this game was: I used to play D@D before it was popular back in the 90s. My mom did not want me to play it because the whole "you'll start worshipping vampires and kill me in my sleep" meme was still alive back then. We had one of the BEST DMs ever. I can't stress this enough. Dude would go to GENCON and sell out his campaigns everytime. One of the highest ranking DMs on WoTC. We were so lucky to have him as a DM looking back. The campaigns he made for us were INSANE. And despite all that you actually didn't mind if your character was knocked out of a fight (you always cared if they were dead(dead)), because it meant you got to go play D1 on his pc while everyone else kept battling. This was my introduction to arpgs and as an avid fan still to this day, I'll never forget this time I spent in D1.
I remember beating this game for the first time maybe a year or or two after it came out in the late 90’s. I went over to my friend Dom’s house after school and we played it on his old CRT monitor Pc, getting through hell and beating Diablo for the first time is a great memory
A go-to strategy for playing a warrior in the vanilla game (as in, not Beelzebub or Tchernobog) in the early game is to max out Dexterity as quickly as possible. You can get by with 30 strength for a very long time and use +Magic items for reading books. It makes you a tad fragile but you max Dexterity by level 9 or so and have gobs of ToHit% and Armor Class. Especially if you do what I do and troll Griswold for a 13AC leather armor, 4AC skull cap, and 8AC small shield. I also grab a war hammer as quickly as possible - it doesn’t do as much max damage as a Claymore or Broad Sword but it has a higher minimum damage and does 50% more damage to undead, which is most of what you’re facing in the church, and is still useful in the catacombs to an extent. Also take the Undead Crown from Leoric if you’re playing single player. That basically makes you a walking buzzsaw for the butcher, Leoric, hell you should be fairly survivable through the early Catacombs to pick up Arkaine’s Valor in single player. Later on, your holy grail will be a King’s Bastard Sword of Speed or Haste - either works, you’ll hit the animation breakpoint for fastest attack on a warrior either way, and King’s as a prefix adds both damage% and +ToHit%. This advice is more for all classes, but max your resists early from jewelry if you can. Emerald and Obsidian prefixes are white whales. And Stormshield is basically THE best shield in the game, though an Obsidian shield with a +health suffix will also be fine. You can look for hidden shrines and set up your inventory such that you’re always boosting the durability of whatever item you want. It’s permanent and if you can get it to 255 it becomes indestructible due to that number being what signifies indestructible status. If you’re willing to G R I N D, you can have a loadout that would make people swear you’re running hacks. I disagree when you say that Beelzebub is the definitive way to play the game. It’s a fun mod, but it changes far too much to be faithful to the original. The definitive way to play the game is actually the DevilutionX source port, able to run on basically anything that gcc can compile for that has an SDL2 port. :) You have a lot of the quality of life fixes, but the game is still basically the same.
Anyone else get around that "finite xp" issue by abusing the loophole of starting a modem game but leaving the phone cord unplugged so no one could call in, replaying each 4-level set (church, crypt, caverns, hell) as many times as needed to get as much XP as you wanted? 😁
Glad to see Brevik on the vid! Brevik's panel at the GDC on Diablo game design post mortem was one of the best out there. Very entertaining and crazy informative.
I find it so very odd how now diablo 1 and 2 are getting as much love as they deserve given how bad 4 was and now 3 is the really hit or miss one. Hope The Man goes on to review 2 and try 3 finally.
ive got the same story as you with D1. It was the first PC game i ever played. i was 6 i belive. And i first saw it when my grandmother played it actually. So when she went to bed. i was sneaking up to the pc, put the cd in. And instantly shat my pants.. because of that pop up screen. and the Cathedral theme still haunts me to this day. i was so scared. But i still wanted to keep playing! Because it was so awesome, and scary at the same time.
Fantastic job Act Man! Loved this! As a 42yr old gamer from back in those days I appreciate what you did bringing this game out to a new generation of players!
I recently replayed it twice. Best Diablo game. It hasn’t aged well, but the passion behind it still comes through. Unlike some followups. Most followups.
This video feels like a bonfire in DS1. You run through these really important videos that make you see how terrible the world is but finally you can sit down and remember good times. Of course what you are doing with many of the bad RUclips stuff is great but this just feels like a breath of fresh air
May be a bit too late but: With the hell levels (13-16) the biggest problem is, that they don't have doorways anymore, which you could use to trap monsters to fight 1v1. But you can use corners now to fight max 3 at once. Stack your inventory on full hp potions and drink from inventory. Also use a shield! Blood Knights attack very slow. Most important thing as a warrior is to get dex to 60 asap. Then your block chance is 100% you can then block the butcher at character level 9. You can kill the butcher usually when you reach him by just stacking dexterity and using a shield. Beasts receive more damage from swords and less from maces, for undead it's turned around while demons receive the same damage from all types of weapons. Blood Knights are demons. Axes are the only melee weapon type that deals the same amount of damage to all types of monsters. While axes give you a crazy amount of damage, they rob you off the shield which will save your life so good in melee vs the Blood Knights, which gave you problems. With an axe you can try to stun lock one of them but you need very clever movement there. Nearly impossible if you haven't already cleared one side of level 16. Movement has some tricks in Diablo 1. Since the game is ordered in rectangular tiles, but allows you to move in 8 directions and not 4 from tile to tile , there are some bugs, coming from the fact that 4:3 is not square. When you move horizontally, due to the isometric arrangement of the tiles, you basically skip a huge part of the map. And also some frames. You become unhittable for ranged attacks. Like 100% unhittable. You can left right right left right between 2 tiles in a room full of succubi and never get hit. It doesn't work like this when moving up down over the corner of a tile. I don't know why. But this way you also move faster. Try it out it's the number 1 technique to win. Also when playing as a rogue never align yourself before your shots in a horizontal line. Take the diagonal directions or the vertical line. The way to play Diablo 1 in Single Player is okay. But you're missing out on the higher difficulties. Hellfire fixed this. But Hellfire was never playable on Battle.net and was published by Sierra and not Blizzard. It also feels a lot different than the original game. So the best way to my opinion to play Diablo 1 is to play Multiplayer, even if you play it just for yourself. Because then you can play the higher difficulties, Nightmare and Hell. The fun really begins when you can run Nightmare dungeon levels 13-16 , because here already some of the best items can drop. For any more information on Diablo 1 nostalgia, feel free to contact me. I played it actively back in the days and was active in the battle net PVP-scene I had a level 50 rogue and level 48 warrior. Alternatively consult Jarulf's Guide - which is to this day a brilliant source of information and a glorious display of Diablo 1s great game mechanics. For anythign else, visit the lurker lounge.
Playes this when I was like 8 or 10, met some russian dude that said hed be my guardian. We became really good friends so easily through this game lol.
Thank you, The Act Man. I haven't watched your video yet, but for me, the answer is obvious: it's a masterpiece. Because it's a completely coherent experience, a mood, a descent into hell, towards madness, a theme so simple yet metaphysical. I don't think we emphasize enough how the composer Matt Uelmen defined the franchise. It's hard to put it into words, it gets to your core, you feel the despair and absolute evil, all while pursuing a mystical quest. Not to mention the ending that offers no relief, the ultimate sacrifice, the irony of fate. When I was younger, I couldn't even get past level 8 because this game was so terrifying.
I remember being 17 and borrowing the game from a friend at the gym in 98…the rest is history. I’ve been playing a version of Diablo for the last 25 years on and off.
Use link shop.ekster.com/theactman or code ACTMAN to get up to 35% off.
Diablo is a monstrous franchise these days, it is massively successful and popular. Yet, the first game is mostly overshadowed by it's sequels. Let's go back and visit the Demonic roots of the Diablo series and see how well the first game holds up. But more importantly, we'll find out If Diablo 1 Is A MASTERPIECE?!
Will do sugar cheeks
Hi. 😊
Yes sir !!! I want to get into Diablo so bad, and this video was just the motivation.
I kind of want to try the first 3 diablo games sometime.
Shame they never did a remaster for it that would be cool!
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I first played this game when i was 9 or 10. I dont think any other game has left as much of an impression on me than Diablo 1. Enjoyed with every minute and talking point. Ah the memories!
666/10
Yo thank you Carbot. I have been watching your videos since the 1st episode of Starcrafts.
Everyone's best friend
CARBOTTT!!!!!
Carbot! what a pleasant surprise!
I played the second one around the same age...
My uncle was a fan day 1. We played this series for so long. Diablo 4 was coming out and we were grinding the beta all hyped. Unfortunately, he suddenly passed away a week before it came out. Even though Diablo 4 is a huge joke, I made a character with his name so he can forever live in it. Rip uncle Max. I miss you buddy.
My condolences for your loss.
RIP Uncle Max. Those are good memories to have
o7
My condolences, man. This is a beautiful way to hold your uncle in memory :)
He sounds like a wonderful man! RIP
Before she passed away, this was my sister’s favorite game. This and Diablo 2 were great ways for to relieve stress.
Edit: I should probably clarify better. I remember backing from School when I was younger and quite a few times, I would see my sister playing this game. She was so engrossed with all the blizzard games mainly the first diablo games and Starcraft 1 and BW. Whenever I tried to play these games, she always did her best to help get through (I was probably about 8 or 10 when I really started to try Diablo). Even when she got married and had kids of her own, she would still try to play Diablo 2 whenever she could. She lost her battle with MS last year and though it's been a while the pain won't ever really go away. She was a huge reason that I became a PC gamer in the first place. So I probably could of worded my first response a little bit better.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I hope she plays a game located in hell in heaven
bro sorry for the bad joke , r.i.p
I wonder if God lets her play diablo in heaven 🤔 seriously I'm curious, seems like a conflict of interest 😅
Seriously though sorry for your loss. Hopefully they make another good one so it brings up some of the nostalgia and good memories you made with her playing the original 🙂
I'm sorry for your loss 😞
For me Butcher was even more iconic for D1 than Diablo himself. Everything about that quest was perfect. The build up with dying townsman, later checking for any clues with the townsfolk, Farnham having PTSD. Then you go inside, you are still pretty weak, level 2 of the catacombs, you see the chamber filled with horrifically mutilated bodies, then you open and hear "fresh meat" and run. Having Butcher that early with so crazy stats, damage, speed was a genius move by the devs. I played along my younger brother and we had about 9-10 yo at the time. Butcher was so scary and difficult that we asked our dad for help. Good memories.
I agree. Probably it's because not many players get to see and fight Diablo himself, but 99% of players will meet, unexpectedly, the Butcher, and he's the first thing to get your smile off your face and say "This isn't your standard simple fun game where the world spins around you"
first playthrough i never dared to even go back to lvl2 lol
And the fact that he jump scares you out of the door. Shat myself the first time he showed up.
I definitely fought the butcher more times than I battled Diablo.
Part of it lore-wise is simply that the townsfolk, apart from Cain and Adria, have no actual idea what lies beneath the town. Cain knows Diablo is down there from legends passed down to him from his elders which he refuses to believe despite increasingly overwhelming evidence something deeply fucked is happening. Adria starts out helping the player but the moment the Aidan shows up with the soulstone in his head she enthralls herself to his service. No one else knows anything about Diablo being involved. But every one of the townsfolk have been affected either directly or indirectly by the Butcher, and everyone has a horror story to tell about what they have either witnessed or directly experienced.
Something the Act Man doesn't mention (he may not be aware of it actually) is that the iconic "shove the soulstone into my forehead" ending cutscene was completely unintended by the original developers. The cinematics were made by a completely different team, and while they could discuss and suggest things they had no real control over them. Originally they intended the ending to be a lot more upbeat, and were absolutely shocked when they saw what had been made. By the time they got it it would have been very difficult to redo it, so they just made it work.
Yep, I did hear this. I'm glad they ended up sneaking it in
Man, I loooove dark "bad ends" like this. They're so rare, and it's just perfect for Diablo.
Really proves this game truly was lightning in a bottle.
would've almost ruined the game if they made it a happy ending after all that
@WayStedYou we wouldn't know that really, bad stuff can still happen after a happy ending.
They could have just cut with him holding the stone.
I guess the original idea might have been to shatter it, or store it in a box.
I get the sense that the grim ending grew on em.
Everytime I see a new Act Man video uploaded, I can always safely assume it's going to have some of the most passionate, unique and interesting insight into gaming around right now, all while cracking jokes and keeping an upbeat and entertaining energy. I'm never dissapointed.
Thank you, kind sir
@@TheActMan Human beings may not be perfect, but "the Act Man's review on why deus ex is so awesome" is probably the answer to the world's problems.
the majority of the time he just. makes. sense.
love his content also
He used to be 100% more positive, like this video here. But ActMan lately also engages in a lot of unnecessary internet drama.
Anyways, his style is unique and I am still around. Content made by a gamer to gamers. But I do still think he should stop engaing in useless drama.
That's funny, I just expect more lies, being wrong, and arrogance.
The way the levels generated different each time made the replayability amazing.
makes* ... makes the replayability amazing.
@@wheeze9378 penis* ... penis thou wish for christmas.
@@wheeze9378 true diablo chad
@@wheeze9378 The OP is speaking in past tense, so your correction is incorrect.
@@wheeze9378no.. "generated" is the past. Hence, "made" is right.
I went back and played Diablo 1 after so long and I immediately found myself hooked on it just playing as the warrior. i loved it, despite its rough edges. Atmosphere in that game was just so damn top notch.
It's one of those games. I played through using all three classes. Rogue gotta be my favourite. Warrior is a pain once you get to the monsters that throw projectiles.
do you remember how to dupe if not i can teach you(you drop an item and as you pick it up click a potion on your belt that potion is now the item you duped)
cool trick with the warrior is to use teleport in the late game.. takes a little practice but its great if you're tired of constantl chasing down those wizards
@@gitstoopid I would just turn them to stone and hack at them. I always found that easier and mana cost-effective than using teleport.
it's the one game that i have more time then Diablo 2 just because it's my bias'd childhood game. It's not like i don't like 2 over 1, it's just that i've still yet to get burnt out by 1 then 2.
"Hello, my friend. Stay awhile and listend"
This line is iconic.
Diablo's got a special place in my heart, cuz was a very dear friend that showed it to me, and he passed away last year. Every time I play it, it feels like he's close to me ❤
"Hellod myd friendd stayd awhiled andd listend" - Deckard "putting the d in" Cain
Wow! What can I do for ya?
For what its worth Leoric's fall becomes even more tragic as you find out that he was Diablo's first choice of a host but Diablo was unable to take full control, but the mental sturggle still drove leoric to madness
Played a lot of co-op with my friend in Diablo 1. The class balance was interesting. Warrior started out strong with the sorcerer being weak. That was reversed once the sorcerer got fireball (aoe) as well as lightning and chain lightning and the sorcerer started to out-level the warrior. Once you got to the last few levels, however, the enemies started to become immune to most types of magic and so the warrior caught back up. Turns out that demons can't be immune to steel. 😄
that's why i always played as a "spellsword". A warrior with as many spells as i could master and maxed int. Once you get your hands on the teleport spell, most of the warrior's weaknesses kinda disappear. plus, the strongest spell in the game, firewall, is easily accessible to him at fairly high levels.
In the worst case, like the lord of steel, stone curse and hit em with the sword or whatever you got there ;) And it was much easier when you got that cap that gave you +1 to all spells (but you had to find shrine that was altering duration).
i believe lightforge fixed this issue...it gave a lot of to hit to the mage so they can do actual melee...it gave 25% to hit and 150% to damage...the dreamflange is for casting and lightforge is for melee...youd just swap these out on high resis stuff
i actually found the rogue to be the best with the windforce and its knock back mechanic...farmed lazarus for it took about 50 runs but then the game was easy mode after that...
@@GraveUypo mini mage rogues were the way to go imo. Able to kill large numbers of mobs with spells and use a bow against those immune.
As a child I played it through with my friend in grade school. I still know the poem 'Halls of the blind' by heart. It was such a unique and unforgiving experience, we were scared, we were thrilled.
The feeling of hearing the Tristram theme when you teleported out of a bad situation was so relieveing too. Even though how eerie the music was, in the end, it became a relief.
I remember fearing that the deeper we descend to hell, the more likely it is that Tristram will be overrun. And the first time the travel point to hell appeared, we shit our pants.
It was such a unique experience. And that scream. I remember always skipping at as a kid, because how scary it was.
I know there is a limited amount of masterpieces out there, but this is one of my favorite series on all of RUclips, and we need more.
I just have to shout out Spec Ops: The Line, Unreal World, and Deep Rock Galactic.
there are a lot of masterpieces out there haha it just takes a long ass time to make a video worthy of them
There are so many masterpieces out there that you could not play them all in a lifetime.
@@TheActMan Human beings may not be perfect, but "the Act Man's review on why deus ex is so awesome" is probably the answer to the world's problems.
The voice acting in this game is AMAZING. It's soooo iconic, soooo memorable. All the little quotes, everyone is so dark yet full of life! Thanks for proving it isn't nostalgia, it isn't rose colored glasses, Diablo truly is one of the best games ever made.
I also adore the voice acting. It's like sitting in at an old school D&D table with a DM that loves grimdark fantasy
if it wasnt nostalgia then newer generations would be able to pick the game up and it would still be popular. but that isnt the case. it literally is nostalgia.
did you know all of this was made by blizzard south not blizzard north? north focused exclusively on combat and loot
Greetings good master, welcome to the tavern of the rising sun!
I recognized Paul Eiding from metal gear in some of the cutscenes. Great job from all VAs.
The atmosphere of despair and terror in Diablo 1 is something I've never quite felt in any other game. Experiencing it as a kid was life-changing.
This. I know a lot of fans started with D2, but D1 had the far better atmosphere.
Ye.. OOT made my life, but ALTTP, tought me what a real game is.
I love D2, but D1 got some lessons to teach.
@@1Kurgan1 Yeah i played Diablo 1 first and when i first played Diablo 2 i didnt really like it. But when i played more i really started to like Diablo 2. Diablo 1 still 1 of my favorite games ever and im not sure if 1 or 2 is better.
@@Kornn66 They are both great games but D1 will stay truly unigue.
Was traumatizing* some of those lines sound recorded with incredibly real terror. Some of that is horrific but its so good lol
When you hit the blood knights, you felt that impact. When they die, it felt so good. Even though they're regular mobs, I always enjoyed fighting them. My child brain probably liked the screams they do when they combust. Buttery smooth.
Yea, the D1 Doom Knights are some of the best enemies in any game in my opinion. Their sound effects were just outstanding, their death animations were glorious, and they were menacing. Even the D2 Doom Knights just didn't "feel" right. I feel like sound and enemy design in a lot of ARPGs just isn't as thoughtful anymore.
Amen.
My grandmother played the first Diablo. She was my introduction to video games. I remember sitting hours with her watching her play Diablo, Nancy Drew, Myst, Syberia, and the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. She's gone now, but in some sense I still get to share time with her while gaming.
That's fantastic. I grew up much the same, watching my Dad. Have a good life friend.
I've never had relatives like that, but I hope to be that relative one day 😁 I'm glad you guys had good memories like that!!
Grandmother?! Damn!
Love Myst
MYST!!!
I played the demo when I was about 10, and then somehow I knew it had been released and was sick home from school. My mother asked me if I wanted something from the store, I asked her to go to the game store and check if they had Diablo, but I lived in a small city in the middle of nowhere. I was so happily surprised when she gave me the large box of Diablo. I was so happy.
W mom
Awesome mother
if you only had know the terror that awaited you
I've always thought Diablo's overall plan was to be defeated, and then possess the hero that did it as a stairway to greater power, so I am in total agreement with your closing theory.
And those drums in the cathedral levels! 🤩
What about the drums at the intro of Hell's theme? It is so atmospheric!
Part of why it's such a good horror story. And stuck with me till this day. A powerful story.
Sound is so key in gaming. And great observation about the clarity associated with the results of doing things.
What a classic, genre defining game. I cant wait to watch this!
Its literally just a dungeon out of the 1E D&D DMG which already had plenty of games just like this.
@@h347hchill out nerd
@@Bigdogeatkid okay incel
@@h347h nerd
@@h347h damn i just got owned
I preached for years how no ARPG captured the claustrophobic horror of Diablo 1 and i have no one, content creators or devs alike, seen praising this game for this exact reasons you presented so perfectly in your video. The horror of this game lies in how it delivers story telling and the combat/exploration. I hope more people will see this and appreciate the game for this reasons. It is one of a kind and i regularly come back to it with the hell mod and its plethora of classes and extra quests and character building mechanics. It would be great to see a dev studio pick up the strengths of D1 and make a modernised take on this unique ARPG formula.
I truly believed (with every bit of my heart) that the future of video games was going to be utterly amazing and nothing could go wrong! That's what growing up thru the 90's & 2000's loving video games made me believe that the future only held great things for video games
how naive :D
I almost wish the 90's didn't happen because of the expectations it set on us that grew up in that era. Every fucking game was a golden banger, minus the arcade filler games. Shovelware didn't exist then.
@@bobby45825take your pink tinted glasses off my dude, your perception of the “good ol’ days” has been massively shifted towards delusion and fantasy, wdym there were no terrible poorly made games back in the day? It’s simply not true
@@chadjensen2027 ok zoomer.
@@bobby45825’ery noice counter argument sir, so convincing
I just installed it 2 days ago and started playing it again with the widescreen mod... I still love it
Try DevilutionX mod. It's my fav. Keeps the original vibe, but you can choose from a good set of QoL changes.
"Big! Big cleaver killing all my friends. Couldn't stop him, had to run away, couldn't save them. Trapped in a room with so many bodies...so many friends...noooooooooo!" - Farnham the Drunk
Thanks for the amazing lore videos, man ❤
As a member of the "ring of 1000" beta tester, I remember the utter joy when I received my Beta CD in my college dorm mail box in the mid 90s. I will die happy knowing my name will forever be linked to this masterpiece 😂
We need to put u in a museum of video game history God damn
please, in the name of us all, do an copy of that disc if you are still in the possession. I really doubt that it will still be any good (CD's lifespan is only like 10-15 years (Vs. Bluray 300+ years for example)) and I recently realised that even some of my mint condition ps1 games are already broken, but there's a slim chance that you can still use your CD, store it on your PC and upload it in 10 years, when you will be 100% safe from any copyrights.
@@Drejkol sadly I misplaced it 😭, we were spoiled with 10baseT in our dorms in the mid 90s, so physical media wasnt as cherished as you may think. I regret not holding on to it. I do recall being in a rather plain presentation, not pressed but burned CD possibly, it's hazy to remember, probably why it was tossed, as you see back in those days throwing out CDs you know longer really need was common practice.
@@Drejkol The phenomenon of "disc-rot" in optical media is when the bonded layers on a disc fail and the reflective metallic layer is exposed to air, allowing oxidation and delamination to occur . This can be because of direct physical damage (as in a big gouge that pierces the layers), or from longer periods of poor storage, such as being somewhere where humidity is high (like a leaky basement or the state of Florida), or being frequently left in the open to be exposed to direct sunlight for long periods of time.
It can also be due to poor manufacturing, where the bonding wasn't done correctly, in which case the disc would still work, but it has a limited time span.
There are certain known batches of disc media which are known and identified as having been poorly manufactured, like how certain movies on Laser Disc are still perfectly fine, while others are infamous for withering.
If your CDs weren't of a shoddy make, and you've treated them well, then they're probably still perfectly good. Even if they have scratches which cause reading problems, often those can be polished away with a special machine, typically they're a very superficial kind of damage.
Yessss ... I remember Diablo echoing in the dorm hall in 1996!
Diablo was the 1st game that Ive preordered in my life. Reading its manual was an epic experience. The 1st game ambient and music is still the best in the series imo. And the fear and darkness is in the right amount.
Hopefully it was also the last?
The guy at Babbage's gave me a Demo copy for free, we went and bought the retail the next day.
I can't pick my pronouns tho. Why is this game so racist?
@@insensitive919 You're joking but Diablo 1 has three classes, a white male fighter warrior, a female in a melee/ranged role (not just an archer or healing class), and a male battle mage who happens to be black. I thought games supposedly didn't have representation and it was just all full of bigots lol, but even back then we already had diversity and none of it was forced. What a time it was to be alive.
I still have the manuals for D1 and D2. I miss game manuals so much.
Great video presentation you hit it right on all points. As part dinosaur, I fondly remember loading this up with our CD into the tray and seeing that devilish screen and dark music greet us with "connect to the internet" at the top 😄. I still play D1 to this day, presently a rogue in the D1 belzebub mod. The replayability is always there with this fantastic game.
Some of my most important gaming memories come from this gem. It caused my heart rate to shoot through the roof when I encountered a bunch of demons in a cave. I literally had to pause the game and physically go to another room to calm down for several minutes before I could continue playing. I had an absolute blast.
thats so fucken weak lmao.
Same. I will never forget the butcher chase me down for the first time, "hmmm, fresh meat!"
That's slightly pathetic, ngl.
@@Cheximus I was a pathetic child, what can I say 🤷♂️🤣 I cringe myself when reflecting back.
I grew up playing Diablo 1 and 2, thanks to one of my aunts. I'm 33 years old and they're still top tier games to me. I can remember spending countless hours playing Diablo 2 with my cousins and aunt. These two games helped shaped me as a gamer today.
The Butcher to me is the most memorable first boss. The first time playing, I really liked how the townspeople would hype him up. You'd starrt off the first level thinking its a breeze, and when you finally encounter the Butcher, you get you ass whooped. After my first encounter with the Butcher, I knew I had to grind a bit more to strengthen myself. The Bucther is the quitessential first boss.
So iconic he's even referenced in Fallout 2. Head slaver is named Metzger (german for butcher) and says "Ah, fresh meat" when you open the door.
Cant we have a video about Grim Dawn to end creatively bankrupt companies Monopoly
Simple and effective. Walk into a room full of carnage... "Ahhh FRESH MEAT!"
Diablo 3 was more like introducing a WWE wrestler and then having a lame battle. It should just be a mindless brawl to fit the character. A for effort, D for result.
"Did you know Diablo was the first Strand-type game?"
I'm listening to this playing Angband, an acknowledged inspiration for Diablo.
AcKsHuAlLy, there are more than 8 surviving people in Tristram, but you can only piece that through NPC dialogue. I can only think of 2 immediately and that's Ogden's wife - Garda and Gillian's grandmother.
Thank you for tuning in Nayolak's Diablo trivia corner!
24 years later, i can still recall the halls of the blind poem.
This game will be eternally in my heart and i will always give it a replay every now and then.
I spend 1 1/2 years playing it back then.
The Act Man always manages to invest me into a game that I otherwise wouldn't be interested in
you haven't played diablo 1? wtf kid go play it now
Yeah he's a salesman lol
tried it, gameplay is too slow and boring. It's just nostalgia for people I think. theres a reason people dont play old games if they didnt grow up in that era.@@SCDJMU
@yangpaan453 I've played games from before my time and enjoyed them. A good game is a good game, no matter when. Can't speak for D1 tho, I've never played. But just based off what I've seen it looks decent. You gotta remember in the 90s there was A LOT of shit games that played like ass or had God awful controls, or both
Its ok if you don't like it, you are allowed your opinion, but theres a reason it was one of the fastest selling games of its time, people loved it and still do. As for the nostalgia argument, yeah im sure it plays a role but its a lazy argument for people who dont want to give old games a try. Why are you trying to convince people not to try something they may end up enjoying?
A few memories:
- the satyrs in the catacombs who taught me to use doors (the Butcher, incidentally, does not teach you to use doors). The red satyrs were especially nasty.
- getting chainmail for the first time and the Oculus amulet (or whatever it's called) which really helped me against the satyrs. This is important cos I really choked on the catacombs first time around--- prolly cos my stats had been nerfed without me realising like Act Man explained.
- replaying the game and finding hidden doors, secret areas and quests I hadn't encountered before. Even after I'd probably found them all I remember salivating over the prospect of finding a new secret room and would comb every inch of every level in search of interactible objects.
- getting the Grandfather sword and eventually being able to pwn blood knights after many replays
I don't know if it's just me, but I can't stop watching this video (it's maybe 7th time already), not just because of nostalgia, but because how GOOD the presentation is...
This tells you exactly what the titles says, how this game was ahead of it's time and how huge impact it had moving forward. It's really sad where Blizzard ended up in the end...
Thank you Act Man for bringing me back when I was 5 years old, when I played this MASTERPIECE!
PS. When my dad started to install this game on PC, when the installation window booted up, I ran as fast as I could out of his room...
I remember being 6 and my uncle helping me build my first pc in ‘96. He gifted me Diablo and said it was an adult game and gave me a wink. Had nightmares about this game all the time but still was so enthralled that I really felt the terror and tension. Loved this game so much! The music was my favorite part
Ive rewatched this too many times due to the fact of how well this videos been crafted, loved every second of it Act Man keep up with the fantastic art and work.
People habe no idea what old school internet was like when you'd do an iron man with 2 other good player's online.
Warrior, rogue, sorc....go inside and never come back out. Use whatever you find and mske it work.
Such a great video!
I feel like the original Diablo doesn't get the love it deserves. I literally grew up playing Diablo 1, and eventually 2, and it's still fun to return (Especially with the Beelzebub mod)... In fact, this video makes me want to stream a new playthrough.
If done right, I'd love to see a proper remake.
It is absolutely underrated
Blizzard needs to make a true diablo mmorpg or a true diablo action rpg with online and offline co-op. If theyd make one good complete game we fans would play it for the next 20 years and buy every dlc they make... do they not want our money for the next 20 years???
@@TheActManDiablo 2 review in the future acting male?
Diablo 1 was a big deal back then. It was not just an overlooked game. PC gaming was just not that big yet
You should play Diablo: The Hell 2
I played this game for the first time after watching you talk about it in the diablo 4 video. I can confirm that your enjoyment from the game is not just nostalgia.
I was surprised by the atmosphere of the game, it was still creepy despite how old it is. The loot was not too much and felt rewarding. Overcoming the stun lock mechanic was fun in its own way. I also think the voice acting aged really well.
Overall, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the experience, I'm even planning to play beezlebub mod.
Thank you for the videos. Thid helps me try games I would take forever to try out.
It's fantastic that you are giving Diablo 1 it's due credit as one of the best games ever made. For me personally, this game is near perfect. I replay it every year and still have a huge blast. I wish you would've added more original soundtrack into your video - the catacombs (act 2) is my favourite part of the game and the music is so awesome and absolutely flawless at setting up the ambiance.
Also, you should've mentioned that quests were also randomized and you could've started this game and played all to the end and never even seen the Butcher, Leoric or even Lachdanan ad be none the wiser. It also addes to the replayability. One time I've had to replay the game 3 times to get Leoric quest...
I did play Diablo with friends locally - but my internet connection at the time was too slow to play online (my 486 barely chugged the game - if you thing walking was slow in town, try to play it on a 486 instead of a pentium and You will discover that it's even more ambiance building when each step take twice as long)
I've beaten Diablo back in 1997, but I still remember the dread of facing the Butcher (I was afraid to open his room because I've seen what was inside) or Leoric - Leoric especially was hard as balls for me, back in the day. Diablo for some reason was quite easy for my first playthrough - I must've been lucky and had some good items on, because it took me years to figure out that the most important stat for beating the late game was fire, lightning and magic resists and extra damage on a weapon. Maybe I had the Stormshield :)
The acting of the characters was pretty fine for me - actually having fully voiced character was still pretty new back then - when most games had just text, having voices and text was a fantastic boon for me to learn English as a foreigner. Only Adria and Wirt sound pretty cringy, all others are great - even characters like Gillian or Franham - they have some great monologues and are worth to listen. The monologues and character depth is even better than in Diablo 2 - just try to listen to all the monologues and compare it with Diablo 1.
I still go back and do play throughs of D1 from time to time. . The random floor layout and monster generation on each save file makes the replays so fresh every time.
I created always network characters.. no chance to save the game
I grew up w/ Diablo 1 and Hellfire. Beat it many times. learned everything from ARPGs to character editors, to making a warrior, specing into Str and Int and learning holy spells to make a paladin, to the math being stat weights etc from this game. I truly enjoy the series. Got it when I was 8yrs old. I had to tell my grandparents at the time "I was a soldier fighting for God" to make them overlook the M rating and "blood"/violence.
Very clever actually telling them that. I mean you're not even lying really. You are basically a ray of hope for mankind from the ravages of the devil. Descending from the light from whence you came into the bowels of hell.
Friend of mine, we both couch co-op complete Diablo 3 with a friend. The 3 of us beat it together. I played Diablo 1 on the ps1 with one of those 2 friends I completed Diablo 3 with together, a couple years later. I asked him which he preferred and enjoyed more. Without hesitation he said, “Diablo 1.” Even people who don’t have the nostalgia, know what a great game it is.
Fun fact. I still have my original disc copy.
Also fun tip. You can do the first few levels of the dungeon then start a new game and retain your level and then run through them again to gain some more levels. This doesn't necessarily put you way ahead, but it helps for sure.
Also there's an item duplication glitch that again helps, but... the game is still so hard regardless.
Yeah, the difficulty expressed in this video is misleading because you can literally restart and restart as much a you want. If you have enough patience, you can potentially steamroll the game. And it's an important feature due to the randomness of the game. You can have bad luck and not getting anything good your entire playthrough.
Im 42, I played Diablo 1 at my family's business. My older brother got it and so I would play it late at night in a dark warehouse, was scary.
My family's business was arcade games and pinballs, so I do remember SF1, it was fine. I was more into racers at the time, SFII changed that.
I never thought it was hard. I finished it many times as a kid. Now Diablo 2 was brutal, Duriel and Diablo itself were total pain
Diablo 1 is considered hard because when you died you were done. In D2 I think Duriel was hardest boss related to your level because of his frost effect and in the last patch when you enter his room he immediately jumps you, played it last year with some friends on PS4, we were kinda dead before the load screen finished.
Duriel is easy@@alexg7146
@@alexg7146 that was a bug in the original game which got patched out and apparently seems to have been patched back into the remaster lmao
also diablo 1 is hard if you pick the fighter, the ranger and mage have an easier time
thought the same thing for years about Duriel until i played Resurected and began checking hint, tricks and build. I then realize you can down a bunch of (i think) yellow potion (Tawning potion or something like this) and it gives you ton of resist cold and freeze. Duriel becomes WAY more easy after that.@@alexg7146
I find it the opposite! I think duriel defs was the hardest part of d2 tho. In d2 i was scared of how hard hell was gunna be because hell was like impossible for me in d1, but it was so much easier for me in d2 lol
Also it looks like you mostly played as the warrior here, which as you mentioned is super easy at the beginning but very difficult at the end (if you’re mostly melee, which warriors usually would be though). The sorcerer, however, is the opposite - you will suffer with him so much in the early game but in the end game, you will be ethering whole floors.
The greatest of all the Diablos. One Dungeon that goes deeper and deeper underground. No running around outside. No teleportation way points. An artistic achievement that had to prove itself on its merit alone before Diablo became a franchise filled with lore and a "live service" universe for no-lifers who expect to spend 3,000 hrs in a single video game collecting pets and baubles to look ever sillier for their online friends. All hail Diablo.
I always liked that it was fairly straightforward about your goal, you have one main 'Quest', get to the end of the dungeon, there are other Quests but they're mostly along the way and needing only a bit of chatting in town to get going. Shows how it was inspired by Rogue and is truly one of the earlier Roguelikes (though you could say missing permadeath is 'casual' and disqualifies it) done outside of ascii, which was great for the time.
Modern Diablos and the other games like it are so 'MMORPG lite', especially with MMORPGs themselves being more instanced-based these days, it all blends together for me and I don't really like any of it. Diablo 1 is a totally different game, really.
@@KnownAsKenji I just played Diablo 1 for the first time over the last few weeks and couldn't help but think how much potential there is still to be tapped in its game design. Yet no developer seems to be making a Diablo 1 clone, they all just copy Diablo 2.
Given how much game development has advanced since 1996, it doesn't seem to me like it would be too difficult for even a small development studio to create a more expansive version of Diablo 1 with a larger selection of possible quests and longer more varied dungeon(s). It certainly seems like it would be much easier than attempting to follow in Diablo 2's footsteps.
@@yewtewbstew547You should really play The Hell 3 mod for D1.
I beat this game countless times when I was in highschool in the mid-2000s. Back then, I couldn't speak english and didn't know anything about the lore, so I always assumed that the ending was basically a ploy to give you a reason to beat the game again and again. "Everytime I kill Diablo, I become Diablo and another warrior has to take my place"
To be clear, unless your mod disallows it, you can absolutely grind experience. Choose New Game with your current character and it resets the game, re-rolls quest, monsters are repopulated in the game, etc etc. You keep all of your levels, gear, gold, etc. Anything you left on the ground will be gone though.
This was actually mandatory in some edge cases, depending on loot found and power level, and even more so on the next higher difficulties nightmare/hell.
I'm so glad a larger, well known channel like yours covered this game. This game was formative in my interest in games and writing, and its been a tragedy to see what's become of the Diablo series over time. I still listen to the OST to this day! I still have all the old books and manuals complete with old poetry and sketches from people like Metzen. Yes, poems lol. When I was really little, the red screen and frantic whacking of the enemies when you died used to scare me LOL
This was the first mainstream pc game I played at 7-8 years old. I still play it and the mod "The hell" by Mordor. Definitely worth giving the mod a try imo for all the added content and readding characters and quests that got scrapped from the original game.
Maan every time you talk about Diablo and put this Catacombs theme...gives me chills of nostalgia and a bit of creepy 😎👍🏼
Diablo 1 will ALWAYS be my favorite in the series. It's simplistic and the atmosphere is perfect and has been since early 1997 (technically very late Dec 1996 depending on where you got the game at).
Pro tip, as a Wizard, you can use the black death to reduce your hp to 1, and while you have mana shield on you no longer get stunlocked by anything.
You can also glitch on the original Diablo 1 to activate Nightmare and Hell difficulty in SP, which allows you to unlock and purchase bountiful staff of apocalypse. You can then proceed to pull larges groups of enemies or bump near rooms full of enemies, spam Apocalypse, bolt back to town via scroll, recharge stave and rinse and repeat haha
Yep I remember that glitch. The game checks to see if you suffered enough damage to die first, so hit recovery is skipped, and THEN it checks for MS.
Crazy video, he’s clearly passionate and had fun producing this.
that compilation of the blood knights brought back memories of my first encounter with them. I dont replay D1 as much as i replay D2 but i never forgot it. i love the grim story. 3 and 4 just didnt do it for me.
I only managed to play a few hours of Diablo, I had very christian parents, but I played a fair amount of D2 - it would have been more, but something about that game gave me a raging headache after an hour or so, whatever I tried. I totally get the 3/4 disappointment though, they just.... weren't the same. Torchlight 2 felt closer, even if it lacked the dark edge.
Im still playing Diablo 1. Even now. Didnt waste money on Diablo 4 at all.
Just wanted to thank you for making this this video. It was a real nostalgic trip down memory lane for me. I fondly remember playing this with my best friend in South Africa who I lost contact with. I was 15 year's old again for 44 mins.
Thank you Act Man for covering for what is one of my top favorite games of all time. I still remember sitting on a milk crate watching my older brother play this and how he eventually promoted me to be the potions guy. My one job was to watch that life orb and it when it went down, I was there to fill it back up while my brother continue to slay demons. This game had such an impact on me that I actually used The Halls of the Blind poem for a school project. I also will never forget the respect my older brother gave me when I finally beat the game as a sorc. I also just recently bought a PS1 and a copy of Diablo to co-op with my son. Maybe one day, we’ll get a remaster.
This game music takes me way back to 1999, when I was a broke pvt in the army stationed in Hawaii and couldn’t afford to do anything when off duty. One of the guys shipping out sold me his PlayStation and a stack of games for $300 and in the evening and on the weekends all I did was play video games in the barracks, until I started making rank and made enough money to actually do things off base. Even when I wasn’t playing it I could walk past any other barracks room and hear this music and the goldeneye music. Although my only worldly possessions were a 25” TV, a plantation, Diablo, RE2, FF7, tenchu, metal gear, Warcraft, Risk, and tony hawk….I would give everything I own now to go back to that year and live it again. The following year one of my buddies got sent to Europe and he sold me his Pentium 3, PC with windows 98se, a voodoo2 gfx card and a bunch of late 90s pc games for like $500 total. It was the first PC I ever owned. What a nostalgia rush from hearing that damn theme song, I had to watch the video 3 times because I kept spacing out for like 10 minutes and just started reminiscing about that entire year every time I heard the theme 😆
This video is such a godsend. I played Diablo 1 on the PS1 when I was 9 years old. Currently 35 now, and I have always had tremendous respect for David Brevik for his vision on Diablo 1 & 2. It just breaks my heart how that style of play is lost by the monetization model as well as the high damage numbers and unbalanced stats.
Brevik wanted scummy monetization back then too. He wanted to sell item packs on CDs but it was too expensive to implement. It would have sucked if they could make it the way he wanted to back then. He's not a hero or a good guy. He was a money grubbing scumbag like most game devs these days.
Somebody should do some serious research and go back to these "limitations" and continue this legacy with another masterpiece and dark atmosphere. Seems highly unlikely that anyone will take that risk.
@@ITSAHARDNUGLIFEthere are plenty of indie games. But you have to work to find them.
@@ITSAHARDNUGLIFE Once AI can code 95% of the game for me and generate the art, I totally will be building a new old school Diablo game. Also want to do a Cyberpunk themed one. Retirement goals if I ever get there.
What I love about Diablo is that how toned down and basic it is and yet complex enough to be compelling. I feel like new ARPGs cannot go back to that level of simplicity anymore. :(
Ikr? Everything has to be insane builds. Love the feeling this one has and the aesthetics and art style wrap it together nicely.
It's like we can't have a dungeon crawler anymore, has to be a dungeon annihilator.
Games like Elden Ring & Blasphemous feel closer if anything.
You need 10000000000 factors and different RNGs and builds now.. And 50000000000000 different items with 500000000 different variance
For it's time and genre Diablo was actually quite complex, not full blown RPG complex, but it introduced complexity to the action genre that previously wasn't really a thing.
People got used to that, and then Diablo 2 introduced more complexity, until people got used to that, and so on.
diablo was great in that it did addictivity of nethack/rogue while being a LOT more accessible.
being a lot simpler and realtime goes with that too.
I still vividly remember playing this the first time when I was 16 years old during my first internship at a games store. I bought it a couple days later to play it at home. Needless to say it really sucked me in until this very day.
the tragic tale of leoric sums up the tale of blizzard, both were once loved and respected but became corrupted and fell to darkness.
i remember finding diablo at walmart in the 90's. It was miss-marked to almost half the price of any of the games on the shelf next to it. I immediately dragged my dad over to look at it, being 10 at the time. My dad was happy i found it and bought it for me, one of my greatest gaming memories.
Love this
Finally someone else who appreciates this game as much as I do.
What a great video! I remember I dedicated my whole spring break to playing Diablo shortly after it came out. It's an absolute masterpiece. It was a time when hardcore gamers made games for gamers and without being dictated by greedy execs. And, yes, I'm one of the rare ones who actually beat the game back in the spring of '97 (I bought it a few months after it came out)! Like so many others, the music and the Butcher "Ahh... Fresh Meat!" and so many other encounters and sounds will be forever engraved in my brain.
There was two other special elements of Diablo 1.
1. Diablo 1 was one of the first of it's kind to create the online lobby system and RPG multiplayer before every Steam game started to have online multiplayer.
2. Diablo 1 had friendly fire. Meaning it had another layer of challenge when playing through with friends for you not to hit them And guess what this friendly fire was ALSO the PvP. You have to be weary that your allies might not turn against you and there was no shear way to know if they are other than the actual socialization communication you have done with them. They can shoot an arrow at you from behind if you weren't careful.
I'm glad you mentioned class specific gear. That's one of the things that made me fall in love with the Dark Souls/soulslike genre in general. You can build your character how ever you want.
It crushed my soul when I found out that so much of the items in D4 were class specific. I thought they learned their lesson from D3. Guess not.
They learned that you can charge the same amount of money for the same shit for every class seperately. When you wonder why something is designed in certain way in a blizzard game the answer is always money.
Lesson? The lesson they learned is that games don’t have to be perfect to turn a profit. Slap a battle pass and some MTX in there and you’ve made the investors happy
regarding the blood knights, if you stack on full healths you could try to lure them away from the stairs, portal back to town and then take the shortcut to floor 13 and go down the stair again, that if you had cleared some of the level already, if thats the first room you are in deep shit.
when i was a child i had diablo 1 on my ps1 and i literally played for like 2 minutes before quitting because i was terrified by tristram's theme
Diablo is like the first game I have memories of, my parents used to play and to this day I remember seeing the rivers of blood of hell and the screaming demons, the strongest and most lasting impression has been left on me. I started playing on Diablo 2 when I was a kid, I didn't understand the language the was in and had no clue what was going on, but still the game was good and fun to play.
This year I took my dad's cd and actually played Diablo 1 for the first time and what an experience that was. This game is so hard, I died so many times and soft blocked myself by not putting enough points in dexterity and I got stuck because my warrior hit with the precision of a toddler with a plastic sword. I took me several months, like almost the entire year to finish the game, but it was so worth it.
After I had to restart from zero and I had a better understanding of the game I thought it was so easy, I slaying away, taking my loot, getting more gold than I would ever need, until I got to hell. I died so many times, it took me so long to get through those levels and find diablo, I'm a pretty chill person but I even had to stop playing for some several weeks because I started raging from how hard it was.
But it was still one of the best gaming experiences I've had, one day I'll play it again, see everything this game has to offer, but for now I'm going to beat Diablo 2 and do what my kid self tried so hard to do but couldn't. An absolutely iconic franchise, it's a shame what it has been turned into by greed and corporate bs, like just let the creatives be creative and do something fun without a load of micro and macro transactions.
Yes! The unique loot was THE BEST in this game! Such great times. The story progression pure chef’s kiss!
actually most of the uniques were crap, expcept for like 4 or 5 (thinking cap, naj's plate, dreamflange, royal circlet, can't think of any other usefull one, maybe deadly hunter or sparking mail, but for specific use) magic ones outscaled uniques.
I actually did a playthrough of Diablo and the original Diablo 2 just last year! The original Diablo is a true classic to me, right up there with games like Super Mario Bros. and Doom.
After a horrible day at work, an Act Man video is JUST what I needed. You're a homie, Act Man.
my friend and I had played so much of it that we went through 3 copies of it then started to make burner copies (they were exploding in our CD trays from so much use). hundreds of not thousands of hours. we knew all the stats and how to min max effects. we would challenge ourselves to things like never coming out of the dungeon (first Iron man game afaik). racing runs, first to kills the big D. we could even predict the procedural layout of the levels with a few clues of the area around the entrances to each level.
BTW, easiest way to win against Diablo was the holy bolt spell (could hit him from off screen). also if you get stuck by the knights, the best way is to run past them into an area away from the stairs, pop a TP and then come back down, it would allow you to grab your things and replan an attack.
Bros were playing until the CDs exploded, that's wild
Diablo 1 was the first game I ever played online and was my first PC game I played when my family got our first PC back in 1997. I still consider this game as either my favorite game of all time or at least in the top three.
An Actman video on Diablo at 10 in the morning on a Saturday!? Bring it on baby!
You should make a decently long review of Diablo 2, as while 1 set the ground work for action RPGs, 2 improved in many ways, which I think is worth mentioning.
Diablo 2 defined the genre in a way that's still followed to this day. Every Blizzard game does it, but not as much as Diablo 2 did for hack and slash.
@@christopherniewiadomski4075
Yeah, that's kind of what I've heard.
It really did a lot for evolving action RPGs from Diablo 1, with things like skill trees and such.
Diablo 2 elevated the series to a mainstream hit, however some D1 fans were quite disappointed when the D2 came out, because it shifted its tone from gothic horror towards action fantasy and was much more colorful. Ironically, it's a similar criticism Diablo3 got when it released, however the D3 pushed it too far. D2 made the atmosphere lighter, but at the same time offered a generational leap in gameplay improvements, so most of the naysayers forgave it. D3 couldn't defend itself, because almost everything was a downgrade.
@@kazioo2
Well, maybe, but I think that that is a pretty ridiculous reason to be "disappointed" with a game, just because it's not so grimdark that it goes straight into grimderp territory.
Because if you look back at D1's art style, it's simple but also seems like it was trying way too hard to be scary and all that.
I mean, I wasn't the biggest fan of D3, but I hardly think that its art style was as bad as some people make it out to be. It honestly just felt like updated designs and such rather than trying to change the themes.
I just think that far too many people tend to try to cling to the old ways and just assume that they were all just 100 times better simply because they're older.
@@christopherniewiadomski4075D2 nailed something very early that is common psychology in slots - create a gameplay loop that provides the 3 components:
1) You know you will get a reward if you do activity X eventually (in d2 case loot)
2) The reward can widely vary
3) The task is repeteable
The genius twist of Blizzard was to then use the above to drive fighting stronger and stronger monsters hence repeating the entire loop but with increasing risk/reward. It works amazingly well, and D2 probably still has the best loot system ever designed.
As a 54 year old gamer I did play and complete Diablo in my 30s. It is definitely a masterpiece and I speak from experience. The constantly charging dungeon design was genius as was the unpredictable branches in what you might encounter.
What a brilliant tribute to one of the greatest game ever made.
Thanks Act Man for bringing tears to my eyes. Absolute legend.
My context on how good this game was: I used to play D@D before it was popular back in the 90s. My mom did not want me to play it because the whole "you'll start worshipping vampires and kill me in my sleep" meme was still alive back then. We had one of the BEST DMs ever. I can't stress this enough. Dude would go to GENCON and sell out his campaigns everytime. One of the highest ranking DMs on WoTC. We were so lucky to have him as a DM looking back. The campaigns he made for us were INSANE. And despite all that you actually didn't mind if your character was knocked out of a fight (you always cared if they were dead(dead)), because it meant you got to go play D1 on his pc while everyone else kept battling. This was my introduction to arpgs and as an avid fan still to this day, I'll never forget this time I spent in D1.
I remember beating this game for the first time maybe a year or or two after it came out in the late 90’s. I went over to my friend Dom’s house after school and we played it on his old CRT monitor Pc, getting through hell and beating Diablo for the first time is a great memory
A go-to strategy for playing a warrior in the vanilla game (as in, not Beelzebub or Tchernobog) in the early game is to max out Dexterity as quickly as possible. You can get by with 30 strength for a very long time and use +Magic items for reading books. It makes you a tad fragile but you max Dexterity by level 9 or so and have gobs of ToHit% and Armor Class.
Especially if you do what I do and troll Griswold for a 13AC leather armor, 4AC skull cap, and 8AC small shield. I also grab a war hammer as quickly as possible - it doesn’t do as much max damage as a Claymore or Broad Sword but it has a higher minimum damage and does 50% more damage to undead, which is most of what you’re facing in the church, and is still useful in the catacombs to an extent. Also take the Undead Crown from Leoric if you’re playing single player.
That basically makes you a walking buzzsaw for the butcher, Leoric, hell you should be fairly survivable through the early Catacombs to pick up Arkaine’s Valor in single player.
Later on, your holy grail will be a King’s Bastard Sword of Speed or Haste - either works, you’ll hit the animation breakpoint for fastest attack on a warrior either way, and King’s as a prefix adds both damage% and +ToHit%.
This advice is more for all classes, but max your resists early from jewelry if you can. Emerald and Obsidian prefixes are white whales. And Stormshield is basically THE best shield in the game, though an Obsidian shield with a +health suffix will also be fine.
You can look for hidden shrines and set up your inventory such that you’re always boosting the durability of whatever item you want. It’s permanent and if you can get it to 255 it becomes indestructible due to that number being what signifies indestructible status. If you’re willing to G R I N D, you can have a loadout that would make people swear you’re running hacks.
I disagree when you say that Beelzebub is the definitive way to play the game. It’s a fun mod, but it changes far too much to be faithful to the original. The definitive way to play the game is actually the DevilutionX source port, able to run on basically anything that gcc can compile for that has an SDL2 port. :) You have a lot of the quality of life fixes, but the game is still basically the same.
Anyone else get around that "finite xp" issue by abusing the loophole of starting a modem game but leaving the phone cord unplugged so no one could call in, replaying each 4-level set (church, crypt, caverns, hell) as many times as needed to get as much XP as you wanted? 😁
Glad to see Brevik on the vid! Brevik's panel at the GDC on Diablo game design post mortem was one of the best out there. Very entertaining and crazy informative.
I love listening to Brevik!
I find it so very odd how now diablo 1 and 2 are getting as much love as they deserve given how bad 4 was and now 3 is the really hit or miss one. Hope The Man goes on to review 2 and try 3 finally.
4 is much better than 3 was at launch. and it's getting better by the season.
@@sauvagemusic1844 Whoopi Goldberg begs to differ, mf.
@@sauvagemusic1844 Brother im gonna to absolutely disagree with that.
@@sauvagemusic1844 Cope harder, 3 and 4 are dogshit
3 was dog shit at launch. 4 was an even bigger pile of dog shit at launch
ive got the same story as you with D1. It was the first PC game i ever played. i was 6 i belive. And i first saw it when my grandmother played it actually.
So when she went to bed. i was sneaking up to the pc, put the cd in. And instantly shat my pants.. because of that pop up screen. and the Cathedral theme still haunts me to this day. i was so scared. But i still wanted to keep playing! Because it was so awesome, and scary at the same time.
Fantastic job Act Man! Loved this! As a 42yr old gamer from back in those days I appreciate what you did bringing this game out to a new generation of players!
I recently replayed it twice. Best Diablo game. It hasn’t aged well, but the passion behind it still comes through. Unlike some followups. Most followups.
This video feels like a bonfire in DS1. You run through these really important videos that make you see how terrible the world is but finally you can sit down and remember good times. Of course what you are doing with many of the bad RUclips stuff is great but this just feels like a breath of fresh air
May be a bit too late but:
With the hell levels (13-16) the biggest problem is, that they don't have doorways anymore, which you could use to trap monsters to fight 1v1. But you can use corners now to fight max 3 at once. Stack your inventory on full hp potions and drink from inventory. Also use a shield! Blood Knights attack very slow.
Most important thing as a warrior is to get dex to 60 asap. Then your block chance is 100% you can then block the butcher at character level 9. You can kill the butcher usually when you reach him by just stacking dexterity and using a shield.
Beasts receive more damage from swords and less from maces, for undead it's turned around while demons receive the same damage from all types of weapons. Blood Knights are demons. Axes are the only melee weapon type that deals the same amount of damage to all types of monsters. While axes give you a crazy amount of damage, they rob you off the shield which will save your life so good in melee vs the Blood Knights, which gave you problems.
With an axe you can try to stun lock one of them but you need very clever movement there. Nearly impossible if you haven't already cleared one side of level 16.
Movement has some tricks in Diablo 1. Since the game is ordered in rectangular tiles, but allows you to move in 8 directions and not 4 from tile to tile , there are some bugs, coming from the fact that 4:3 is not square. When you move horizontally, due to the isometric arrangement of the tiles, you basically skip a huge part of the map. And also some frames. You become unhittable for ranged attacks. Like 100% unhittable. You can left right right left right between 2 tiles in a room full of succubi and never get hit. It doesn't work like this when moving up down over the corner of a tile. I don't know why. But this way you also move faster. Try it out it's the number 1 technique to win. Also when playing as a rogue never align yourself before your shots in a horizontal line. Take the diagonal directions or the vertical line.
The way to play Diablo 1 in Single Player is okay. But you're missing out on the higher difficulties. Hellfire fixed this. But Hellfire was never playable on Battle.net and was published by Sierra and not Blizzard. It also feels a lot different than the original game. So the best way to my opinion to play Diablo 1 is to play Multiplayer, even if you play it just for yourself. Because then you can play the higher difficulties, Nightmare and Hell. The fun really begins when you can run Nightmare dungeon levels 13-16 , because here already some of the best items can drop.
For any more information on Diablo 1 nostalgia, feel free to contact me. I played it actively back in the days and was active in the battle net PVP-scene I had a level 50 rogue and level 48 warrior. Alternatively consult Jarulf's Guide - which is to this day a brilliant source of information and a glorious display of Diablo 1s great game mechanics. For anythign else, visit the lurker lounge.
Absolute masterpiece. First game that I've ever played online. Oh, the memories.
I spent a lot of time in the PKK bounty hunter lobby. I don't think I can think of an equivalent gaming experience to this day.
Playes this when I was like 8 or 10, met some russian dude that said hed be my guardian. We became really good friends so easily through this game lol.
Remember the first time I went online I was so excited, then I got PKd almost immediately :D
Learning the Dupe hack and cloning the knockback axe and bow and apocalypse staff were hilariously broken lol
Act man. I cant watch RUclips with out thinking about her, somehow you sensed this and made me a video where no heartbreak was felt. god tier content
Thank you, The Act Man. I haven't watched your video yet, but for me, the answer is obvious: it's a masterpiece. Because it's a completely coherent experience, a mood, a descent into hell, towards madness, a theme so simple yet metaphysical. I don't think we emphasize enough how the composer Matt Uelmen defined the franchise. It's hard to put it into words, it gets to your core, you feel the despair and absolute evil, all while pursuing a mystical quest. Not to mention the ending that offers no relief, the ultimate sacrifice, the irony of fate. When I was younger, I couldn't even get past level 8 because this game was so terrifying.
I remember being 17 and borrowing the game from a friend at the gym in 98…the rest is history. I’ve been playing a version of Diablo for the last 25 years on and off.