Diablo 1 earned a lasting admiration from gamers & is touted as the darkest entry in the franchise, and not just for its Gothic themes, subterranean dungeons or even knowing the Lord of Terror lie in wait beneath your very feet.
In fact, the perpetual unease & gloom is a feeling that Diablo 4 is desperately trying to recreate, so much so that its tagline on the main website is “Return to Darkness” & was echoed multiple times at Blizzcon as a main feature, no doubt to garner goodwill with disenfranchised fans.
But what exactly does darkness mean?
If we are talking purely the color palette, clearly Diablo 3 stepped away from the more muted tones of the original.
But, there’s something deeper that caused a deep seated dread for players.
See, even Diablo 2 had something of a day/night cycle, where the lightning was drastically different depending on the time of day & even the NPC’s would acknowledge this.
Combined with Desert biomes, its hard to not make the game bright under the unyielding sun.
A sun that was not present in Diablo 1 as Demons were known to fear the light.
So, with that in mind a question to ask players 25 years later is… what time was Diablo 1 set at?
Because I personally was blown away when Diablo 2 designer Phil shenk revealed the answer in an interview:
Tristram had this sort of gray, stormy color scheme to it, he said. It wasn’t day, it wasn’t night. And I was thinking how did they come up with that? Its not night & its not daytime, It felt like an in between world. I thought: those guys are GENIUSES.
Bear in mind that in Diablo 1, demons were known to attack villages at night, so to hold the sense of dread for the hero * townsfolk of Tristram, the developers leveraged that fear of feeling perpetually on the knifes edge of dusk… moments before Hells minions would burst forth & tear the town to shreds.
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