Informative Hellgate: London gameplay video

[Thecla]

I never played much of the original Diablo (perhaps I will someday -- I couldn't stand the abysmally slow walking pace when not anywhere dangerous).

I think it is hard to go back to that once you're used to the pace of DII.

What was it about the level randomization that made it interesting and therefore key?

Well, it's a good question, and I'm not sure I can really put my finger on it. But, certainly, DI had relatively small levels and it would have had very little replayability without randomizing the layouts, stairs, shrines, monster combinations, bosses etc --- even if the loot had benn randomized completely. That concentration of levels in D1 and the fact that you could return time and again with different topography and different challenges until you knew how to master them (almost like a game of chess or solitaire) was IMO a key part of D1 success.

The other extreme is a game --- like Dungeon Siege, say --- with a huge long linear pre-scripted world, which in the worst case-scenario has the same monsters appearing every time at the same place (even if they drop random loot). There's no limit to the size of a virtual world one can create these days, but give me a small part of an interesting and unpredictable world over a large part of a boring and "immaculately crafted" world any day.

I played Diablo II heavily, and I don't think the replayability in that game was really keyed by the randomization of levels all that much.  Sometimes you'd hit particularly nasty combination of mods on a boss, and sometimes you'd have to search longer to find what you wanted, but that seemed to be incidental rather than key.

I played plenty of DII as well. ;) But I'm convinced I wouldn't have done so if it wern't for the randomization of the maps (even if a non-random short cut through the jungles of Kurast would have been a vast improvement). Even though randomization in DII wasn't as effective somehow in DI (maybe because the emphasis on DII's outdoor areas over DI's entirely dungeon-based crawls didn't quite come off, I don't know).

DII also differed from DI in that is wasn't as tactically rich as D1 in the actual fighting (in part because of the lack of friendly fire in multiplayer --- needed to avoid pk problems --- and maybe in part because the demands of configuring DII for server side play --- with the laudable aim of reducing cheating --- removed some of the immediacy of D1's client side combat). In DII, the main strategy was simply to smash everything in your path, while looking out for the very occassional real threat, like a msleb in earlier times.

It was a nice feature but I thought the replayability stemmed more from the amazing array of interesting options you had when building your characters, and the "uncertain reward" factor of jaw dropping random loot drops.
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Do you think if every level in DII was exactly the same every time you played it, and --- say -- you knew exactly the shortest route to Mephisto every time, after your first time through, that you really would have played it as much as you did, character building options and random drops notwithstanding? (And perhaps you would have --- I'm not trying to tell you what you enjoy!)