Visit: A to Z

This is another article from the Diabloii.net Archives. It was originally posted in December 1999, and the game info in it is obviously no longer current. Enjoy it for the historical value.

This was the largest report written after Diabloii.net's visit to Blizzard North. It ran 9 pages in the original HTML format. Many of the original images have been restored, but most of the links are not included, since they point to long-dead pages on the old website.

Diablo II Overview: From Acts to Zoom

Here is our extensive report on Diablo II, based on 3 days of nearly non-stop gaming at Blizzard North. The report is alphabetised, based mostly on the questions you guys submitted before our visit. Where there have been no changes to what has been released previously we link to the appropriate section which contains the most up to date information. The report spans nine pages covering a vast range of topics and includes a healthy crop of brand new pictures. This overview covers nearly every aspect of Diablo II, except for specific character skill info, and that will be covered in our Character Section as we update the existing pages in the days to come. There is much here, most of it new information, so grab a hot toddy, kick your slippers off and get stuck in.

Acts

The Acts of Diablo II are far, far too large and complicated to describe in detail in this format, but we can provide a quick general overview:

Act One serves as the introduction to the world of Diablo II. So many things have changed, including the interface, the speed of the game, the lack of blue and red potions to buy, the lack of a healing skill, and much more, that Act One has to be kept somewhat simple for people to get the hang of the game. So the difficulty here is lower than in the rest of the game, the quests are simplier and more straight-forward, and you are generally guided through the Act as it proceeds in a much more linear fashion than the rest of the game will.

Which is not to say that it's just a training mission, or extremely easy, there is still challenge and fun aplenty to be found. The landscape and monsters of Act One will all be somewhat familiar from Diablo. Not that many of the monsters are repeated, but none of them are really new or radical. They fit well with their environment. The Act is structured so that you can't wander off and suddenly find yourself facing monsters that are far too powerful for you to deal with; to get to the more difficult areas you must pass through very large intermediate areas, which build up your character and prepare you for the more difficult action that is yet to come. The NPC's give you a lot of introductory information about the quests and the plot of the game, and the monsters aren't too vicious. It is not a complete cakewalk though; there are still plenty of difficulties, you can die very quickly and very easily if you are careless, and Andariel and some of the other bosses you'll encounter on the level are not at all easy.

Act Two is a bit more wide open. You'll need to search out the appropriate NPC's to get more info on the quests, and you can wander the desert (literally) for quite a while and not find the right tombs to search for quest items. The setting is well-known from screenshots, but it's a desert: Rocks, sand, palm trees, lots of stone crypts, massive monoliths half-buried in sand, a level set under the city in the sewers, and some other, very interesting areas that have not been publicly revealed yet. The quests are noticeably more difficult. You have to talk to a lot of NPC's to see where to go next, unless you want to just go everywhere and eventually complete the quests by process of elimination. And this is not a speedy process; the act is enormous, far larger than Act One. The monsters are a lot nastier also, more of them have powerful magical attacks, they are able to hide or reproduce rapidly, and they are larger and tougher as well.

Act Three is sort of Act Two to a higher power. The jungle setting is less open than the highlands of Act One or the desert of Act Two, with lots of twisting pathways between impenetrable forest and swampy lagoons. Less is known about the quests of this act, but we expect them to be still grander in scale than the ones of Act Two, requiring intelligent and observant play to solve them. The monsters are much more fearsome as well: spell-casting monster mages, fast-moving packs of Fetish (with a variety of nasty attacks), powerful swamp monsters and heavily-armoured Thorned Hulks are among the demons that await you in this act.

Act Four, also known as the Finale, is still entirely unknown. Rumours about the setting range from icy wastelands to the fiery pits of hell, and everything in between. The monsters you'll face here, the types of quests and townsfolk you'll see, the items you will find, whether it will be set in a single or multiple locations, and everything else is still nothing more than rumour and guesswork, and looks likely to remain so until the game is actually released. The only hope for some earlier info is if Blizzard will leak a few tidbits, but they have remained totally silent about it thus far.

Ambient Features

Part of the atmosphere of Diablo II are numerous ambient features. Such visual treats as chickens squawking around the Act One Rogue Encampment, bats and rats in cave and dungeon areas, scorpions and large scarab beetles in the Act Two desert, and small snakes in Act Three are great for the mood and theme of those areas. There are also ambient sounds: the soft background chirping of crickets, frogs croaking, the rustle of wind in the trees, and more. All non-essential, but there to add some more realism and character to the game. You will like.

Arenas

A special "Arena" game mode, designed exclusively for PvP combat, was initially planned for Diablo II. But at this point, the Development Team has decided that it will not be included in the game at this point. There is talk from Blizzard North that they might include it at a later time, possibly in a patch or an expansion pack, if they do one for Diablo II.

Duelling is not a major part of Diablo II, and PK'ing is going to be very difficult to manage, with how the party system is set up. You have to go to "hostile" to even harm another character, and be in town to go "hostile," and everyone else in the game receives a warning message when you do, so they'll always see you coming, and have time to flee, unless they are right next to a town portal or waypoint that you are coming though.

The PK, even if he is successful, receives virtually no reward for his actions. A token, such as an ear drops, and half of the gold the victim was carrying falls to the ground (the other half vanishes), but no equipment is lost, and the PK can't even get any evil thrills by guarding the body, since the victim can just start a new game and the corpse will be right there in town when he starts up.

The point is that recreational PK'ing is almost eliminated in Diablo II. Thus, one of the main reasons to include the Arena - to give people who wanted to fight a place to do it and reduce PKing in games - is no longer as essential. If people want to fight, they have to agree to it, since it's so easy to avoid combat now. So the need for an Arena is mostly lost if people can and will be duelling in normal games.

The Arena would have taken much more time to create, to develop the tile sets and programme the mechanics of it, to set up the ladders, to balance for PvP play, etc. And we all agree that Diablo II has taken just about long enough already. There is still the possibility that Blizzard North will add it in later, in a future product.

See PK'ing and PVP for more on this subject.

Battle.net

Battle.net for Diablo II is much different than it was for Diablo. You can see the new chat channel interface here. We didn't get much new info about Battle.net in our time at Blizzard North, so if you want full info on it you should look over our Battle.net section since there haven't really been any big changes made lately. A few new things we did hear about mostly involve features that were considered but won't be in the final game. Friends will be able to message into and out of games, similar to how it is in Battle.net now. But plans to allow trading of items from right in the Battle.net chat had to be scrapped; you will have to chat with a person who wants to trade something, and then get into a game with them to trade it. Also, they will need to have their character stored on the same Realm as you to play or trade together.

There are a lot of outstanding issues that have not yet been resolved, at least not publicly. Things we don't yet know about but are looking into include: If there will be some sort of bulletin board for trading and/or bounty hunter issues, where exactly the new Diablo II European and world-wide servers will be located and when they'll be operational, what will happen with unique character names when/if they allow server-to-server transfers, and if 3rd party programmes like Topaz chat will be allowed and function in the new Diablo II Battle.net chat interface.

Many issues remain to be tested or resolved with Battle.net for Diablo II, and certainly those will be dealt with intensively once the beta test starts, and there are 1000+ warm bodies packing on to Battle.net and running into problems about which no one has yet thought.

Belt

See Interface.

Beta

At this point, Blizzard has stated there will be two stages to the beta test. You can read all about the test and what you need to know if you want to participate in it in our Beta Buzz Section. We didn't get a whole lot of new info from Blizzard North about the beta, mainly since they've not substantially changed their plans on it recently. As a result our Beta Buzz info is still largely correct.

What we do know about it is that the closed, private beta is currently targeted to begin after the Holidays, most likely in January 2000. This "closed" beta will be carried out by 1000 testers selected from the general public, and a few hundred others, including Blizzard employees, members of the media, others in the gaming industry, friends and family, etc. This closed beta will be most of Act One, all five characters, and at least half of the skills, and there will be intensive testing involving both server and Battle.net issues, as well as lots of bug-hunting and opportunities for feedback to Blizzard North about all sorts of game issues from difficulty to skill functioning to interface ease of use.

After as long as they feel the closed beta needs to run (hard to estimate, but say 4-6 weeks?), there will probably be an open beta. This would be almost like a Battle.net-only demo, where anyone who wanted it could download the beta client (or possibly get it from computer game magazine CD-ROMs) and participate. This would be much more a server stress test, just a way to get as many people as possible on Battle.net at once, to see if it could handle the strain before the actual game was released. The open beta would most likely be just one character and a limited amount of Act One, since character and monster animations, and background art, take up tons of size, and since the open beta will presumably be for downloading, size will be a major issue.

The open beta would not be compatible with the closed beta, since all of the art, four of the characters, skills, etc, on the closed beta CD would be incompatible with the demo-sized open beta players.

None of this is at all set in stone though, so expect changes still.

Combat

The combat engine for Diablo II has been completely rewritten. Any similarities between it and the way combat worked in Diablo are completely coincidental. And it is our feeling that most of the changes in Diablo II are definitely for the better. The whole game flows much more smoothly, but also more rapidly, and the way combat is handled is a large part of this new feeling.

Diablo was not turn-based, but the combat was much more orderly. Monsters would often walk up one at a time, mostly at a rather sedate pace. They had to get right next to you to hit you, and you had plenty of time to aim your spells or arrows, or swing and wait for them to get into range. Most monsters, once you got a haste weapon, were doomed, because they were unable to recover from your hit before you were hitting them again. Also, movement in Diablo was very stilted. If monsters were hitting your character, you often couldn't fight back or escape, since they would hit you and interrupt your movement animation.

All this is very different in Diablo II. The speed of everything - movement, swing speed, spell casting, etc. - is much increased. Even things that aren't actually faster just feel faster, since the floor isn't tile based, so you can always stop on a dime and cast a spell or swing, and you don't need to be right next to something to hit it. Different weapons have much different ranges. You can stand more than a step away from something and stick it with a spear or swing a pole arm at it, where you do need to get up close to hit with a short sword.

This makes the game feel much more realistic, and much smoother. Running makes a big difference also. Both monsters and characters can run, and being able to dart in and out of a tight spot is very nice.

The whole combat system is different, not just in swing speed and range, but in how blocking, hitting, hit recovery, and everything else works. Characters and monsters don't stop as though paralysed then they get hit while walking or running. Recovery time from being hit is much shorter also, for both monsters and characters and this makes it possible to run past something, get hit, and not come instantly to a stop. This contributes to the whole game having a much smoother flow, as we said a moment ago.

Other factors that add to this are the more reasonable swing speeds for characters (Mage chars aren't laughably slow with larger weapons now), the full 360 degree directional running, and better monster AI, so their movement doesn't occur in such fits and starts.

PvP combat is much like PvM. The same changes that so greatly improve the feel of battling the monsters come into play when battling other characters as well. PvP in Diablo II will not be just "two-hit kills," or one-shot Fireball deaths. Skills and stats will be better balanced, damage will be generally more reasonable, arrows and Chain Lightning won't strike you down from two or three screens away, and so forth.

The most anticipated addition for PvP play was going to be the Arena game, a type of game designed specifically and exclusively for head-to-head combat. This is unfortunately not going to be in Diablo II initially, but you can still fight in a regular game if you wish. The Arena might be implemented in the Diablo II Expansion pack if Blizzard North does such a project.

See also Arenas and PK'ing.

The Character Window

The Character window is much changed for Diablo II, and people have long been wondering what exactly all of the new numbers and terms mean. Well wonder no more, here is your full explanation. Click here for full details about all of the information boxes on the page.

Characters

The five characters in Diablo II all start off pretty weak, with only a few attributes. Characters only get around 75 total attribute points to start with, compared to 85 in Diablo. The Sorceress and Necromancer have but 10 or 15 strength at the beginning, so it's a long climb to get strong enough to equip even the most mediocre of weapons or armour. The actual figures for their starting attributes are subject to change, and could be raised if people in the beta test find them too weak, so don't attach too much importance to debating them at this point.

For starting equipment, the Amazon gets a small stack of javelins, the Paladin gets a short sword and a buckler, and the Barbarian gets an axe. The Sorceress and Necromancer get more interesting items, since they aren't good enough at melee to turn them loose in that fashion. They don't get a skill point though (no one does), they instead get a newbie magical item. Worth nothing to sell, costing just one gold to repair, these items are nevertheless essential. The Sorceress gets a wand of +1 Firebolt, which gives her Slvl one firebolt as long as she has the wand equipped. The Necromancer get a wand of +1 Raise Skeleton, which works the same as the Sorceress' wand.

None of the characters get any armour or gold to start off with, and they all start at level zero, needing to get to Clvl one to earn their first precious skill point.

For more information on all of the characters, their skill trees, and lots of general information about them, check out our Character Section, and be ready in the next few days for gameplay reports based on our experiences playing all five characters at Blizzard North.

Cheats and Bugs

We didn't get much new information on how hacking or other programming cheats will be combated; Blizzard is keeping their actual preventative measures secret, for obvious reasons. However we did try cheating in the game, duping and other exploits, and couldn't get them to work. Likely there will be some small bugs or loopholes in the economy found at some point, but they have rewritten the game code entirely, and have assured that duping is impossible this time around.

We didn't test some of the other bugs from Diablo, such as dying while going through a town portal and losing items, or lag eating dropped items from time to time just because there isn't really any way to test that sort of thing. It just happens from time to time while playing, and after a while people begin to notice it. Possibly things like this will crop up in Diablo II, but Blizzard North is committed to keeping the game cheat-free, and surely that translates over to fixing minor bugs, as well as major hacking attempts.

People have been asking about other anti-cheating tactics, such as how the "sanity checks" for hacked items will work on Battle.net, and what sort of punishment there will be for people caught cheating, but we don't have any new information on these things at this time.

Chests and Other Containers

Three urns and two chests.

VisitChests are a very big part of the game in Diablo II. Lots of your treasure will come from them, since monsters don't seem to carry as much loot as they did in Diablo. There are locked and unlocked chests, but they look just the same (locked are identified in the hover, but the graphics are interchangeable) and we didn't notice any difference in loot from locked or normal chests. Locked chests require keys that you can buy in town, or get when monsters drop them; they are easy to come by.

One area in particular in Act Two had zero chests in it, and after doing the whole thing we noticed that we had almost no items in our inventory, and lots of keys. So it is noticeable when you don't get chests or locked chests, and when you do they sort of blend in with the monster-dropped items.

Other than chests, which come in all shapes and sizes, there are lots of urns and barrels and other things that you have to break to get into. The chests and other containers are nicely drawn to complement the environment, so clay pots in the desert, wooden chests in the cathedral, and so forth. There is some nice varied animation for opening them, where when you click on them, your character generally kicks open the barrels and urns, rather than hitting them with their weapon. The hit is more fluid also; they don't walk up and do it as mechanically as they did in Diablo, and they can usually hit five or six closely-gathered urns from the same spot, since they don't have to be in the floor tile next to them anymore.

Urns and barrels are less likely to drop items than chests are, but there are more of them, often ten or fifteen in a small area, and you just charge over and kick them all open in a hurry. The risk there is in traps. There are a lot of trapped chests and urns, and they hurt. One of us had a number of deaths from traps, though he might use as an excuse the fact his sorceress "had low hit points." In truth, he just could not seem to associate the subtle creaking noise that warns of a trap with the impending explosion. Two out of three of us suffered no trap deaths, so you figure it out.  ;-p But it's true that you should be cautious opening chests and especially urns, since they have a variety of breaking noises, and these can easily cover up the sound of a trap creaking. When you hear that sound, run, because it could be anything from an annoying dart to a deadly nova about to cover the entire visible screen in the blink of an eye.

Locked Chests and Keys

Locked chests are scattered all over the place in Diablo II. They work just like they did in the classic game Gauntlet, where a key is a magical opening device, and expires after one use. In other words, you use up a key each time you open a locked chest, but at least the key is automatically accessed from your inventory. You don't have to stop and equip it or anything.

Keys are plentiful: NPCs sell them for a low price, and monsters frequently drop them as well. Keys can fit up to 10 in a stack, and that takes up just one inventory space, so they are a nice added feature, w/o being an inconvenience or nuisance to use.

Convert

Convert is gone from Diablo II at this time, and will likely not be returning. After the initial novelty wore off, the D2 Team came to regard it as a nuisance, and they had simplified it a couple of times, partially automating the process, until it became apparent that it was pointless. So there is no more Convert as a basic skill, and no monsters drop eyes, or hearts, or jaws, or any other such reagents. They do drop quite a few healing potions, and some mana potions, and occasionally other items such as explosive or poison throwing potions, that you would have gotten in the form of odd reagents previously, and which you would have had to convert in order to obtain a usable item. The Barbarian's skill Find Heart has now been changed to 'Find Health Potion' to reflect these changes.

Convert does still exist in the game in a much modified form, related to an Act Two quest item, and using that item you can convert potions and other things to new and more useful items. Only the basic conversions are listed, it will be up you to to experiment and find if there are other things to convert that might create very special and rare goodies.

Controls

The controls for Diablo II will be immediately familiar to everyone who has played Diablo. How you move or pick things up, open windows, target monsters, and more are all done in the same way as in Diablo. Some new additions include support for the Microsoft Explorer five-button mouse, fully customisable hot keys for all keyboard functions, the "mini panel" (small row of icons to open various windows that appears over your belt), running as a default (when Caps Lock is on you run always), the Alt key to pop up all the item tags, and numerous other conveniences.

Crashes

During our play time at Blizzard North, we ran into a number of crash bugs, and even character corruption problems. These were all due to the pre-beta nature of the game, but when you lose a Clvl 19 Sorceress to a waypoint overflow bug, like Flux did, or a Clvl 18 Amazon to a corrupted character save file, as Gaile did, or several start-up Paladins due to a quirky computer system, as Elly did, it's still a bit painful.

In Diablo II over Battle.net, the characters are backed up almost perpetually, so if there is a crash on your end, you won't lose more than a few seconds. The game stays alive for a few minutes, even if there isn't anyone in it, so you can reconnect if your ISP boots you, and probably get back on in time to continue your same game. If you leave a game with your corpse still in it, the oldest remaining corpse (corpses without any items on them vanish almost instantly) will appear in town in your next new game.

For the final release, the problems will be more worrisome when they are on the server end. Such errors would of course boot everyone in a game at that time, and character save files would drop back to the last server backup, which would hopefully be just an hour or 30 minutes or so ago. Occasional technical difficulties are inevitable, this is the Internet after all, though that wouldn't be much consolation to a person who lost that great new item they found ten minutes ago, or who lost a Hardcore character to a crash or a disconnect.

Corpses

Something that did not exist at all in Diablo, corpses are a major part of the game in Diablo II. There were of course dead bodies in Diablo, but they were intangible, just visual evidence of the battles. Once a monster died it was gone forever; you couldn't highlight or hover on the corpses, nor did you have any reason to want to do so. Also, the corpses were there forever, you could play all sixteen dungeon levels, and go back to level one six hours later, and all of the Fallen, Skeletons, Zombies, Corpse Eaters, ad other monsters would still be lying there, dead on the floor.

This is very different in Diablo II.

Monster Corpses

Corpses are now an essential part of the game. The Necromancer and Barbarian have numerous skills that require corpses to be used, including such nice ones as Corpse Explosion, Raise Skeletal Mage, Find Health Potion, and Grim Ward. Corpses now have a decay rate as well. It's not anything as simple as a time delay; where corpses would vanish 15 or 30 minutes after they hit the floor, for example. The way it works in Diablo II is that if you keep them onscreen they will last forever. But once off screen, and especially as you get farther away, they vanish after a little while. This is largely due to technical reasons: the game has to keep track of all the corpses and what sort of monster they were, and if it's tracking hundreds and hundreds of corpses off the screen, most of which will never interacted with again anyway, that's a big system drain.

So once you go offscreen and some distance away, if you retrace your steps a while later, the area will be as clean and pure as it was when you first entered. This is somewhat of a pain for a Necromancer, as he really needs those corpses, and it's also somewhat difficult when trying to navigate the levels, since you have to rely on the mini-map only, rather than being able to see where the bodies are and knowing that you've already been there. Of course the absence of monsters would tip that off to some extent, since there is no monster repopulation anymore.

To most of the characters, corpses are as they were in Diablo. Just eye candy on the floor. The Sorceress, Amazon, and Paladin don't have any skills that require or utilise corpses. So they can't even see a name tag on a corpse when they highlight them. The Necromancer and Barbarian can, but only if they have a corpse-using skill hot-keyed. If a Necromancer has Kick and Attack as his skills, he'll see just a bunch of bodies. However if he has Raise Skeleton up, for example, every corpse will display with a tag like, "Fallen Corpse", or "Greater Mummy Corpse". Corpses have stats, they are not all the same, since skills like Revive bring back that particular dead monster to fight for the Necromancer, and Corpse Explosion blows up a monster, dealing damage to others near it based on how many hit points the dead monster had while it was alive.

Another interesting thing about corpses is that monsters killed with a cold attack, or that were cold or frozen when they die, don't leave a corpse. They shatter into tiny blue chunks of ice, (much like Stone Cursed Monsters did in Diablo) which quickly melt into the floor and vanish. This is not a big favourite of the Necromancer, but it can be useful when dealing with monsters that like to resurrect their dead, since they can not do so if the body has dissolved into the floor.

Character Corpses

Character corpses are important also, of course. When you die in Diablo II, your body drops to the ground, and you see it from above, with the text, "Hit Space to Continue" displayed. Monsters know when you are dead now, they don't continue attacking your corpse after you die, as they did in Diablo. With a click of the space bar you will appear in town, with full health and mana, but missing everything you had equipped at the time of your death. Full information on this subject can be found in the Death Section.

The Character corpse is seen on the map with a pink +, and you will of course want to clean out some of your inventory while in town, perhaps don some spare equipment from your stash, and head back to your body. The monsters that killed you will still be there, but it's easier to reclaim your equipment in Diablo II, since you can run and lead the monsters away, and also because your equipment doesn't scatter all over the ground when you die. It stays on your corpse, and can only be accessed by you, or any friendly players you have set to "Loot" in the Party System menu. And with just a click on your corpse, you will automatically equip everything you were wearing, providing that you don't have some other item in that space already. This isn't anything special, you automatically equip everything you pick up in Diablo II, if there is space for it and the item isn't an unidentified magical object, but with your corpse you are of course picking up more items at once than you will at any other time in the game.

No corpse skills, such as those used by the Necromancer or Barbarian, can be used on player or hireling or minion corpses. So you can't blow up a corpse of a player you have just defeated in battle. This was considered as a feature, but as it would only be of benefit or fun for two of the five characters, and would be an annoyance to the Paladin, Amazon, and Sorceress, it was not included.

Day-Night Cycle

There is a working daytime to night-time cycle in Diablo II, and you will notice and appreciate it while playing. It has long been said by Blizzard North that there would be somewhat different monsters around at night vs. in the day, and though we didn't play long enough to notice that, it would be a nice addition. Monsters are generated on the fly, just ahead of where your character is, rather than all of them being pre-set when the level is loaded, so changes in the monsters due to the time of day or the number of members in your party can be implemented by the game engine.

There have also been plans for including items that would have different properties at night vs. in the day. Sword of the sun or moon, for example, but we didn't see anything like this to test it, and don't know if this will still be in the game or not.

The biggest change is of course that it gets dark. Dark makes it harder to see monsters, especially on the edges of the screen, though they don't seem to have that problem with you. ;) But you spend a lot of your time in the game in subterranean dungeons anyway, so whether it is day or night while you are down there is unknown and essentially irrelevant. You will miss the sun when the dark comes though. There is an Act Two quest involving a prolonged eclipse, [Tainted Sun] and after wandering the desert in the darkness for a few hours, you'll start to definitely miss the daylight. More incentive to finish the quest there, perhaps.