Hellfire

Hellfire is an expansion pack for Diablo. Hellfire is an add-on, not a full new game, and once Hellfire is installed the Diablo CD must be in your cd-rom drive to play. This wiki contains full information for Diablo I and Hellfire. See the Diablo I Main Page for a directory structure.

Though Hellfire was an official game release by Blizzard, the plot and events in the game are considered non-canon by the Diablo III developers.

Hellfire Features

Hellfire adds one character class, the Monk, two new dungeon areas the Hive and the Crypt, a few new shrines, some new item prefixes and suffixes, a few new uniques (mostly jewelry), and new specialty items including oils and runes. Other improvements and enhancements include numerous bug fixes, the ability to move at a double-speed walk while in town, and the option to select Nightmare and Hell difficulty levels in single player. Griswold sells more items than he did in Diablo, and he will attempt to offer you higher quality items than you currently possess, making it possible to buy very high quality gear. A few new spells are added, and every spell can be learned by reading books, including Apocalypse, which could only be used from scrolls and staff charges in Diablo.

Undocumented Features

There are several undocumented features in Hellfire. While the product works with single player or multiplayer in v1.00, the official v1.01 patch removes multiplayer capability. It's easy to unlock the multiplayer capability (Hellfire can not be played over Battle.net, but works nicely with a LAN or TCP/IP) though, and there are additional features available as well. There are also two additional characters to choose from; the Barbarian (who uses the Warrior's graphics) and the Bard (who uses the Rogue's graphics). A couple of additional quests can be enabled as well, and Na-Krul can be given a humorous bonus speech. Finally, it's possible to lock the color palette in the Hive to always be consistent rather than chosen at random as most palettes are.

Unlocking the Undocumented Features

You must have hellfire installed on your machine before any of the following will do you any good. We do not have information about where you can obtain Hellfire. Neither Sierra nor Blizzard sell it through their online store, it is not part of the Diablo Battlechest, and few stores will have the game in stock at this time. You can find used copies through Amazon.com and other game retailers, but they are usually expensive. Checking ebay.com might be your best bet, or finding a friend who owns it who would let you borrow it. You do not need the Hellfire CD to run the game, once it's installed.

1. Download this file (640k, zip) hosted by the Unofficial Diablo Site. It contains Sierra's official Hellfire v1.01 patch (also can be downloaded directly from the Sierra site), the hacked hellfrui.dll you need to enable multiplayer in Hellfire v1.01, and the command.txt file.
2. Open the zip and run hf101.exe to upgrade to the Hellfire v1.01 patch.
   1. You must be up to v1.01 for the Barbarian to be enabled; the Bard will work in v1.00, but not the Barb.
3. Extract hellfrui.dll and command.txt to your hellfire folder (C:/sierra/hellfire by default). Hellfrui.dll will overwrite the existing version of the file.
4. That's it. The Bard, Barbarian, the Theo quest, Cow quest, and multiplayer are now enabled.

Command.txt Editing

Here is the full list of all possible commands.

 cowquest;theoquest;bardtest;multitest;barbariantest;nestart;

It does not matter what order these are in, so long as they are listed in this fashion, with a semicolon separating each command. You can mix and match as well; removing any portion will turn it off without breaking the rest of the operations. For instance, if you don't like the cow suit quest, just remove that part of the code, leaving this.

 theoquest;bardtest;multitest;barbariantest;nestart;

The instructions are fairly self evident by their names, but here's a quick explanation:

• cowquest -- Enables the Jersey's Jersey quest. See that page for more details.
• bardtest -- Enables the Bard character.
• barbariantest -- Enables the Barbarian character.
• multitest -- Enables multiplayer. (You'll need to change another file as well, in Hellfire v1.01. See above.)
• nestart -- Enables a different palette for the Hive. Try the game with and without this option to see the fairly slight difference.

Hellfire is Non-Canon

The Diablo III developers do not consider Hellfire to be part of the Diablo III storyline, and the Monk character is not acknowledged as a forerunner of the Diablo III Monk. Diablo 3 community manager Bashiok replied to a forum comment about the Hellfire Monk in November 2009: [1]

However they announce the Monk... He's from Diablo Hellfire, while technically not a Diablo 2 character (and I think Hellfire was someone else's project) hes still known in the Diablo universe. So why did blizzard tell us no more old classes then throw us a curve ball in the Monk?

Bashiok: It’s not a recognized part of the Diablo franchise, and to be honest it is so much so not recognized, that when people asked about returning classes in the Q&As and in some of the press interviews the Hellfire expansion just wasn't in anyone's minds.

Plus, it isn't the same class. We aren't taking an old class and updating it. The monk from Hellfire, and in fact the story and content of Hellfire, doesn't exist as far as game lore and story is concerned going into Diablo III.

They happen to share a name, the same as all of the other monk classes that have existed in all other RPGs since the beginning of time. It doesn't mean they're related kit/story/flavor wise.

This point was also confirmed at Blizzcon 2009, by D3 developers Julian Love and Kevin Martens. [2]

GamePlanetNZ: Diablo: Hellfire (the 1997 expansion by Synergistic Software) was obviously not a Blizzard game, but I have to ask about the Monk, because it appeared in Hellfire - did you guys look at Hellfire and draw any kind of inspiration from what they did with the Monk in that?

Julian Love: We can't really talk about non-Blizzard games usually...

GP: So it's no relation at all?

Kevin Martens: No, the monk is much more inspired by... - it's a pretty disparate group of influences, but for example on the gameplay side a pen-and-paper monk from D&D (Dungeons & Dragons), it's kinda like that for the early inspiration. And obviously kung fu movies, Jackie Chan all that sort of stuff, Once Upon a Time in China, many, many things from there. He's a got a bit of that Eastern European monastic thing, as far as cultural development goes.

There's the fighting game mechanic, his combo system. So the way we try to do it is we take something that's archetypal - in this case, a fast but weaker melee character - but we try to put twists on it, with the culture, with the moves, with every aspect of this we can, we try to give it something fresh and interesting. So if we're going to introduce a new class, you know, it's not just the "assassin" by another name, it has some similarities to that but there's enough different about it that he not only plays differently but he feels different, and looks and fits into the world differently as well. We haven't met anyone from his part of the world in the game before, so he's actually expanding the universe and the story as well.