Diablo III is for real

[Chesspiece_face]

I was referring to slow walk speed being required due to the technology available in 1996, rather than a design choice of the game.

You're really serious about all this? Either you've never played much post-level 30 Diablo or your memory of the game is very foggy. High level warriors who follow the tactical advice of Bolty's guide are likely to cast teleport over 200 times on a level full of ranged attackers, not as a reset button but as a way to get close to the enemy faster. High level mages aren't likely to ever walk at all, except in town or to avoid annoying their playing partners with all the wooshing sounds. Bow rogues probably benefit from teleport more than anyone, since it gives them an instant distance advantage over all enemies and costs a fraction of even a single stonecurse.

I just did about 200 blind teleports through normal hell with a level 27, low AC mage without mana shield and only a few levels of teleport, and never died or experienced any of this "loading" you speak of. Unlike D2, Diablo has no dynamic level loading. The level you are on is in memory, and the others are not. You cast teleport, the screen redraws sometime in the next .05 seconds or so, end of story. There is a slight glitch with the cursor location sometimes causing you to teleport to the wrong spot in rare circumstances but it's hardly a show stopper. The bottom line is, they could have made Diablo character move at whatever speed seemed appropriate, they chose the one they chose, and they happened to make most of the enemies move at roughly the same speed which turned out to be a good choice. That, and the supposedly faster pace of D2 or any other RPG is almost entirely illusory, because Diablo can be one heck of a frantic game if you choose to play it that way.

It's a question of processor speed and the load-hit-store. Because of the tile based gameplay and the filter lighting design they chose, each tile requires a value to be addressed to it to associate it with a certain lighting filter. As should be obvious, the faster a character moves the faster the computer has to go through the load-hit-store function for the tile lighting. What happens when the character moves too fast is that the engine will begin calling for data which hasn't had enough time to be written yet and it creates a stall. This leads to dead tiles or even possibly a complete game freeze.

Teleport was probably a bad argument for me to pursue because it isn't relevant to the discussion. When you teleport it acts as a total lighting whipe. The game doesn't have to rewrite lighting values for the tiles, it just starts fresh.

D1's character movement speed is a direct correlation to the speed at which computers of that time could move through the load-hit-store cycle. If it takes (insert cycle amount) processor cycles to write a lighting value for a tile to the cache and the game is trying to read that value before it's done writing you've got a broken game. And in D1's case we are looking at computer speeds back in 1996.