One of the most anticipated PC games in recent memory is due out within the next few days, but years of delays may take some of the fire out of Diablo II.
The long-awaited Dungeons and Dragons-like game, originally slated to ship in the summer of 1998, is finally due to go into a public beta testing with 100,000 users and is set to ship in July, but not before angering even its most loyal fans.
"A lot of fans feel cheated by the delays. I guess I'm more patient than them," said Flux, a part-time stadium food vendor and SAT prepper who helps administer the unofficial fan site diabloii.net.
But even Flux admits to being a little tired waiting for the follow-up to the popular Diablo online game created by Blizzard Entertainment.
"If I had known in early '98 when I started (working on the site) that two years later, there still wouldn't be a game, I wouldn't have paid this much attention," he said.
Members of The Chaos Guild, a Diablo gaming group, are also antsy.
"Prepare yourself," begins a spoof of the new game's intro on their site. "The second coming is at hand. Again. We're serious this time. No, really!"
And while some fans are peeved at the delays, industry watchers still expect Diablo II to be a hit. "Most games have a limited window of potential success. But Blizzard is the only developer that really has a flawless track record for putting out quality games. So fans are willing to cut them a little slack," reports Christian Svensson, editor of the gaming trade magazine MCV.
Like the original Diablo, the new version is a straight-forward game: kill monsters, get treasure, improve your character. It doesn't rely on bleeding-edge graphics technology and looks nearly identical to the old.
So what's taken so long?
Diablo II producer Matt Householder said it's a question of size. Act I of the four-act sequel is as large as the entire original game.
"It's a big game, with a much larger world than the original, a lot more quests, and better story integration," he said.
The game's architecture also needed to be completely overhauled, to prevent the cheats who sunk online play of the first Diablo. The game was one of the first to become widely played over the Net. But after players got their hands on code which gave their characters unlimited strength, armor, or magical powers, Diablo online melted down quickly.
Using seemingly innocuous game names like "Need help friendly" or "Newbies welcome," bands of cheat-endowed players would lure the unsuspecting into a dungeon, and ruthlessly cut them down with walls of flame or hyper-powerful magic blades.
Within weeks, these "PKs" (short for "player killers") had taken over Diablo. Collaboration between adventurers ground to a halt. Fellow players came to fear each other more than the monsters. "Ears" ripped from character's corpses became more coveted than any treasure. Many fans retreated to private, password-protected games. A few even asked for their money back.
Designers of Diablo II have been determined not to repeat the PK nightmare. Originally a peer-to-peer game, the sequel's structure had to be recast in a client-server mold in order to prevent cheating, Householder said. Character files, which used to reside on gamers' home computers, are now stored on Blizzard servers.
Some of the most prodigious hackers of the original game, like "KingArthur", have been contracted to try and break into the new game. Hacking has also been made more difficult by forcing characters to declare themselves friendly or hostile toward each other -- and by limiting a PK's use of the "town portals" which zap adventurers around the game.
But the sweeping nature of the changes doesn't fully account for all of the delays, some Blizzard employees said. In the years since Diablo's release, Blizzard has gone through a series of often-traumatic ownership changes. In 1998, executives at one former Blizzard parent, the Cendant Corp., were caught cooking the company's books.
In an attempt to please investors, then-chairman Walter Forbes and his cohorts played with Cendant's balance sheets to create approximately $500 million dollars in fake profits over three years.
Cendant's stock dropped dramatically but Forbes walked away with a $35 million severance package. The events weren't exactly a morale-booster for the company.
"Finding out your boss' boss is a notorious white collar criminal -– and then watching him walk away with millions -- doesn't exactly make you want to get up and work real hard," remarked one Blizzard employee, who asked not to be named.
