7 design lessons from the history of Diablo

gamedeveloper.com:

The Diablo series is one of the longest-running in games, spanning a whopping 27 years that culminated in the release of Diablo IV this month. Nothing lasts that long in entertainment without doing at least a few things right. And between the addicting click-clack of its hack-and-slash combat, its gothic tones and character classes, the unending quest for rare loot and armor, plus those late-night multiplayer sessions, there’s actually a lot Diablo excelled at. Despite, or perhaps because of, its long shelf life, there are lessons we can learn from its development that are still applicable today.

Here are some of those lessons, compiled from developer postmortems, guides, talks and blogs from the last three decades.

The first Diablo game was released on PC on December 31, 1996, and was originally dreamed up by creator (and then high-schooler) David Brevik, who says that the series name was inspired by where he lived at the time—the base of Mt. Diablo. While it was initially conceived as a turn-based, single-player DOS claymation (!) game, the team would later take cues from the classic X-Com, copy-pasting its tiles to form the basis of Diablo’s isometric visual style, and adopting a real-time multiplayer format at Blizzard’s suggestion (a fateful, genre-defining decision they put to a studio vote, if you can believe it).

Taking a look at how Diablo came together also gives insight into the passion and enthusiasm of the small teams that built some of the industry’s earliest games. For example, twenty years after the original Diablo’s debut, Brevik did a postmortem at GDC 2016 that gave a good look at what went right and wrong in the course of the game’s development, including how they achieved Diablo’s dynamic gothic