Diablo, Diablo 2

Diablo II, sequel to the popular Diablo, is a dark fantasy-themed action role-playing game in a hack and slash or "Dungeon Roaming" style. It was released for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS in 2000 by Blizzard Entertainment. more...

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Diablo II was developed by Blizzard North.

By April 2001, Diablo II had become one of the most popular online games ever. Major factors that contributed to Diablo II's success include what fans found to be addictive hack and slash gameplay and free access to Battle.net. Diablo II may be played as a single player game, multi-player via a LAN, or multi-player via Battle.net, with the latter being the most popular. It has also become the second best selling computer game and number one best selling RPG for the PC, selling over fifteen million copies.

The game was conceptualized and designed by Stieg Hedlund, with Blizzard North founders David Brevik, Max and Eric Shaefer acting as Project Leads for the other disciplines (Engineering, Character Art and Environment Art, respectively). The main Production roles were handled by Matthew Householder and Bill Roper.

An expansion to Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, was released in 2001, and is now at version 1.11b.

Gameplay

The player assumes the role of a hero, fighting monsters while traversing overland and dungeons. The storyline of Diablo II is played through four acts. Each act follows a predetermined path with preselected quests, although some quests are optional. Each act culminates with the destruction of a boss monster, upon which the player proceeds to the next act. Battle is conducted in real-time, using an isometric oblique top-down viewpoint (basically, this just means that the game has a set, hovering camera angle, a viewpoint often called "2.5D" because it is between 2D and 3D). Players fight monsters to level their character up and gain better items.

Diablo II emphasises combat, and randomly generates many monster properties, level lay-outs and item drops. Most of the maps themselves are randomly generated. In single player mode, the map is randomly generated but locks the setting thereafter; in multiplayer mode, it resets each time you restart.

Diablo II allows the player to choose between five different character classes: Necromancer, Amazon, Barbarian, Sorceress and Paladin. Each character has different strengths and weaknesses and sets of skills to choose from.

In addition to the four acts there are also three difficulty levels: Normal, Nightmare and Hell. A character must complete these difficulty levels in order; only once a character completes normal difficulty can that character play at nightmare difficulty, and similarly for hell difficulty. Each difficulty is a greater challenge than the last, with such features as increased creature difficulty, experience penalties upon death, and other challenges. A character retains all abilities, equipment, etc, between difficulties, and may return to earlier difficulties at any time. Upon completion of the game in normal difficulty, a player may create a hardcore character. While for normal players the game doesn't end when they die (as they can simply resurrect in that acts base of operations), the game ends when a hardcore character is killed.

Read more at Wikipedia.org