The One on One series is a collection of comprehensive interviews with people influential in the Diablo I/II community.  This interview's subject is the tag-team duo and , founders of the mod movement of Diablo and authors of the popular V&K and V&K Middle Earth mods.  You can find both mods along with their mod workshop at their website, Diablomods.

So, to start things off, can you tell us a little about yourselves?

Khan: Well, I am studying Printing Technologies at Stuttgart right now (this is about printing methods/machines, publishing, layout etc). I am 27 years old and live near Stuttgart in southern Germany. Apart from playing Diablo, I often meet with Varaya and some other guys to play several Multiplayer games in a LAN (Racing Simulation 2, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Need for Speed, Baldur's Gate, Rogue Spear). We also play Magic, and discuss which Star Trek season rules from time to time. Personally, I am also interested in medieval history and current politics. Ah, and my favorite author, of course, is J.R.R. Tolkien right after Terry Pratchett.

Varaya: In real life, my name is Jens Baumann (btw: Khan's RL name is Martin Reich, don't know why he left it out :-) ). Like Khan, I live near Stuttgart, Germany. We both do not exactly live next door to each other, but it is only a few minutes of reckless car driving to his place. On May 1st, I will celebrate my 30th. Man, I am getting old ... After finishing my studies (computer science with a special focus on distributed systems), I work as a network administrator (NT/Novell). Hobbies? Well, of course, games (while I prefer RPGs, I have not that much interest in single player games recently, so I tend to prefer those which you can also play on a LAN, like Baldur's Gate), but also photography and all kinds of PC hardware stuff (I like to grab used equipment, built halfway decent machines and then sell them for horrendous prices :) ). Books? Yes, Tolkien of course. But I also like other authors, e.g. Hesse or some of the works of Lovecraft.

Khan: Hesse, huh? Well, I was never really into real literature - always thought that Shakespeare was nice but a bit difficult to understand. :) Yes, it seems I completely forgot about names. My true name, of course, is Martin Reich (yes as in "Das Reich" but I can assure you I have no interests in any Nazi stuff - I wear long hair and was extremely bored by WW2 in history lessons). My friends call me Sven, which originates in me having worn multiple clothes with the printing "Sven Olson sportswear" for quite some time in school. Funny how nicknames are created. :) BTW, Varaya is called "Yidler" by us (hehe, got you again :) ). Maybe he'll tell you where that comes from...

How did you two meet? What started the partnership you share?

Khan: We went to the same school, and while not in the same grade we shared an interest in computer games. Since all of our other friends said "ah, Diablo, well I played it through. Nice game, but lets do something else," we were the only Diablo-fanatics left and had to do something about the best game beginning to lose challenge.

Varaya: Oh yes, school. :-) I do not remember exactly how it started, but I think that a friend of mine, in my grade, knew somebody from Martin's grade who knew Martin and thus everybody met because we wanted to have a game of pen&paper RPG. Other things, like pub-tours, holidays, etc. followed. This went on for years - when school was finished, some dropped off because they moved somewhere else, but we and one or two others still live here and meet more or less regularly. The main point why we meet so often is that of all these people, only we two really are into computer games.

Khan: Ah, right, pen&paper RPGs were first of course. And we still would be doing that if our lame friends would just not be that lazy. :) What is better than a good Middle Earth (MERS) P&P RPG with some bottles of beer (or better Met) and some heroic deeds...

Can you explain how you got your names?

Khan: At the time Khan was created, we mostly had names with themes (such as the ranks: Ritter, Lord, Imperator) and I thought of something like this and of popular persons. So I came to think of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, with that famous scene where Kirk is left behind on that desolate moon by his evil arch-enemy Khan, Noonien Singh. Kirk makes this incredible scream: "KHAAAAAAAN!!!" and I thought "yes, that guy is cool enough." Since this was then the name of my main char in Diablo (Classic, that is :) ), and since it was short and easily recognizable, I used it throughout the net as my alias.

Varaya: As probably everybody knows, the most difficult and annoying thing about creating a new Diablo character is finding a name. It is pretty difficult to find a name for your macho driver in Need for Speed; but, choosing a name for a Diablo character which you probably will play for weeks or months is even more challenging. When we used to play pen&paper RPGs, a friend of mine always used some dice for word games (the kind with letters on all sides) to get some material to build a name from, but he always ended up with names like "Modbroxl" or "Olondriit", which were not that satisfying. :-) So what I (and Khan) do quite often is to use books. Recently these were Tolkien books most of the time, but when Diablo was brand new, we used a book about symbols and mythology I have here. When we created characters for one of our first multiplayer games, Khan chose a warrior (I don't even know anymore which name that character had), and I chose a rogue to be 'different' from him (back then, I thought mages to be too difficult to play...). I could not think of a name, so I took the book and searched for a female name - and somewhere in there, the word "Varaya" stood, I think somewhere in the Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu corner. I thought "sounds good, lots of 'a's in there", and that's it. Since this was before I started posting on the DSF, I had not chosen a permanent name. When I put my first post there, I chose - without much thinking - the name of the character I played with just before, and some weeks later there was no turning back. I suppose I will choose a different permanent name for D2, since I would like to use a male sounding one. Maybe I will start something like you, with your "bolt" names, that is a pretty neat idea.

How did you come to play Diablo and how did you find your way into the DSF?

Khan: It was Varaya who, once upon a time, showed me a game called Diablo. He said, "Hey, take a look at this, it seems nice," and I said, "Ah, well hmm...okay I'll go fetch a copy too, maybe that game is worth some weeks of playing." Well, what shall I say? In the following days, weeks and months I totally plunged into the world of Diablo. I don't think I played something else for that time and I had at least an hour of Diablo-playing a day then. At first I couldn't visit B.net myself since I wasn't online myself. I had some online-games with two modems at Varaya's place and I surfed the Net including the DSF at the university's computers. Well, now the DSF is my starting page. :) Although most posts now are quite boring ("please eval my weeny char," or "hoow shall I kill the butcher") there are some worth reading and I have learned much from those rare real strategy posts (about blocking, attack-speed, hidden modifiers etc). I think I heard from Jarulf's Guide first on the DSF and it's just plain fun talking away with the actual people at the DSF meetings.

Varaya: I saw the game for the first time when I visited a friend. It looked good, and I bought it myself some days later. The single player part, which I played first, was not that satisfying, but I was hooked by the idea of playing it on the LAN together with some friends. This was back in February or March '97. I played around a bit on Battle.net, but back then internet play was still pretty expensive and the constant cheating annoyed me. Khan joined and we played on the LAN most of the time. I had seen the DSF already, but did not visit it regularly. Later on, must have been in April or May, interesting threads started to appear and I also wanted to know a bit more about the inner workings of the game, since many things (e.g. "godly") seemed a bit strange. I did not post that much, but I absorbed a lot. :) The real starter was more or less when somebody posted that "speed" and "haste" seemed pretty similar. I had also noticed this, since my KSOS and Khan's KSOH seemed to have the same swing rate. I think I posted something like "somebody should do an experiment", and later that evening (it was a weekend and I thus was not at home) I thought "hm, maybe _I_ could do this experiment," and when I got up the next morning, I hoped that nobody had already done it. I went to the DSF, but apparently nobody had posted results, so I did some very crude experimenting which nevertheless showed that speed and haste indeed had the same speed, that readiness does nothing and that bow speed does also not increase with speed increasing suffixes. Since the responses were very encouraging, I decided to participate a bit more, and I think from that time on I really became a 'regular'. There was a time (for one or two months) when I took a break from Diablo, and I also did not post for a while after a little clash with somebody who absolutely did not like mods (regs will remember), but I still pay the DSF a visit nearly every day. I do not post much anymore, since nearly everything has been said, but I think this will change when D2 is out. :-)

The mod movement of Diablo has grown quite large nowadays, with dozens of Diablo and Hellfire mods in existence. But your V&K mod was the first. How did it all begin? When did you first start considering the possibility of a modification?

Khan: That's the question I was waiting for. :) It began with Jarulf (of course). I don't remember exactly when this was, but I think the Guide was not in existence yet. He mailed something about bosses in Diablo that were on the wrong dungeon level in order to exist, but which were perfectly there in the game (The Azure Drake boss, "Lord of the Pit," and the Soulburner boss, "Fleshdancer," etc). He even told us where this was to be found in the EXE-file...I don't have it right here, maybe Varaya can find this ancient mail. We read this and thought "weeeelll, why don't we just activate them; it's a simple change with a hex editor and it adds some really new and unique features." After some correspondence with Jarulf, we ended up with a whole bunch of knowledge of where the data is located in the game (monsters, bosses, pre/suffixes) and thus we began to add level 35 monsters (in fact level 31 monsters whose boss would be 35 and thus could drop a "legit" holy plate!), modified the pre/suffixes, and ended up with something like a protomod. This whole thing was, of course, only for our use and we never thought it could be of any interest to someone else. By that time our friends began to give us that strange look reserved for absolute fanatics or weird animals from the deep sea. But we continued to alter the game and add things we wanted to hunt for. Actually, we never found any of those super items ourselves, since each time the mod was "completed" and we started to play it, we found out something else to modify - and that hasn't really changed. :)

Then followed Hellfire (which really needed changes), and after we got bored by that one, the Diablo V1.07 mod and after that the long planned Middle Earth mod.

Varaya: Mhm, this pretty much sums it up. The main "starter" for the mods was that post by Jarulf about "hidden" bosses. He described in detail that there were bytes which determined where bosses could appear, but only if the base monsters also could appear on that level, etc., but he and all the regulars who answered posted remarks like "it really is weird", "why did Blizzard do something like this", and *nobody* apparently had the idea of *fixing* it :-) So, we mailed Jarulf until he finally gave in and sent us hints where to look for the monster data. We put in the hidden bosses (as Khan said, this was really intended only for our own enjoyment, and up to some time later we never really intended to "publish" the mod), but since we basically had the rest of the monster data also on our screen, we tried to figure out what the rest of the numbers meant. Hit points, AC, etc. were already known, but most of the other numbers, like the frames, attack type, and the rest of the "not-that-obvious" numbers were still largely unknown. I cannot remember when we first put the mod on our page for everybody to download, but I think it must have been not that long after this point.

Can you give a short (or long) history of your V&K mod, and now your newer Middle Earth mod?

Khan: The VKmod for Hellfire was quite extensive, since we changed the whole Crypt (which crippled the Hive) and added or altered many of the pre/suffixes. I think this was also the first of our mods which featured new base items. It wasn't long before we thought that Hellfire with its strange Griswold/Wirt selling behavior and it's sometimes buggy/weird new graphics was a bit lame, so we abandoned it (meaning we didn't apply any further changes and stopped playing it). We got back to Diablo (Version 1.07, featuring some bugfixes and finally bows with more speed). With the gathered knowledge at this time we created a mod that in my opinion was the best to date.

I played that one for the longest time and really liked it. It was, however, in a constant state of change, which caused morphing. People began to get annoyed from it, so we released a final version which itself was modified a last time again in the Final II :) After meeting an Online Middle Earth guild which also played Diablo (and the VKmod since it featured some Middle Earth items) who insured us that a) it was ok even to Tolkien fans to convert things in Diablo rather freely to fit the game and b) there were many people demanding such a mod, we did what we were talking about some time ago: A Mod for Diablo with the Middle Earth Theme.

This mod is a bit different since it is more of a total conversion than just a mod (which we thought primarily as an enhancement to the existing game - modifying bad things and leaving good things as they were). It may be irritating for someone who never read the Lord of the Rings or another Tolkien book, but for anyone who did so I think the MEmod is the best of all (our) mods.

Varaya: The main problem with the Hellfire mod was that while the mod was available for everybody to download, and with a lot of players who *had* downloaded the mod and *were* playing it with characters they valued, we were still experimenting around with the game, finding out new things, and putting in small "improvements" suggested by Crystalion. It was around this point of time that Crystalion first contacted us (I think he played the mod and suggested some small improvement), and for several months we had regular mail contact. He obviously liked Hellfire and the idea of modifying it. He spent a lot of time digging through the code, finding out how to fix bugs or small problems, but also inventing new things - the problem IMHO was, though, that he (and also we ourselves) at that point of time did not think that much about game balance. Also, Hellfire had some inherent problems, e.g. the routing for determining what Gris had to offer. The whole game was really "overpowered" - you could get Godly Full Plates from Wirt, but then the game would be too easy, so we made the monsters harder. But what if you did not get a Godly Plate from Wirt? The monsters still were hard, and so it was unplayable for you. The whole game became one big "shopping tour," because the best items were available for buying! After the first excitement of playing our own mod, it quickly became boring, and we were annoyed because of the many problems we ourselves had built into the mod, because we found out many "modmaking rules" only after we already had done it wrong and after many players already were playing the mod.

Initially, after the Hellfire mod, we were already in a "not again a new one" - phase, but the 1.07 patch brought some interesting changes to the original game, e.g. the bow swiftness. So we decided to do a new Diablo 1.07 mod and to thereby avoid the known problems, e.g. item morphing, weird monster distribution, etc. An added incentive was that we then would have a good mod without the Hellfire buying routine crap. I was not totally happy with the way the 1.07 mod ended up, though, because we once again fell into the "it can be done, so let's put it in" - routine. E.g. item restrictions (items can only be used by one class - it never worked properly, but it was in nevertheless), items with built-in abilities you could not see (because they did not show on screen, you had to read the readme to find out), monsters which were insanely hard, etc. In the end I nearly withdrew from participating in the modmaking - Khan had much more time to work on the mod than I had, so he did many things by himself, and I have to say that I really do not know what is in the latest versions of the 1.07 mod, because I never played it myself. :-) I thought it to be too hard, too restrictive on classes and I did not like some features.

So I thought the modmaking was over, and I took our site from Diabloii.net because there had not been any update for a long time - we intended to put the mods on a "download only, nothing else" page and to say "it was nice, but now it's over." That was exactly the time when a mail from the Valar guild reached us, asking for a Middle Earth based mod. We were immediately hooked, because we both like Tolkien and his works, so we agreed to do "one final mod before we quit". I think the Middle Earth mod is pretty good, especially because we knew exactly what we wanted to have in before we started, so it all fits together pretty well.

Would you say that Diablo is an easy game to modify? Exactly HOW modifiable is the game? Mods out there seem to do almost anything. Is there anything in it that CAN'T be changed?

Khan: Yes, I would say that. The data we changed is clearly structured and given in a way that you can easily change it without knowledge of the workings of the program. There are two levels of modification though:

What we do is just load the Diablo.exe in a hex editor, search for example for the monster data, and change the value for Hitpoints, or the number of its attack frames (making faster), or searching for the string of its name and renaming it then. This is called hex editing and it is easy.

The second level of altering is loading the Diablo.exe in a Debugger and looking up the code. To do that you must know the machine-oriented language Assembler. With this knowledge you can try to track down how the game works and change, for example, attack routines, spells, formulas for item creation, etc. If you are very deeply into it (as Dr. Zed, Crystalion or Jarulf are), I'd say you can do about anything to the game.

Unfortunately neither Varaya nor me ever found the time and the "guts" to learn this crap, so all our nice little code-changes are work from the above mentioned Assembly-gurus.

Varaya: Hmm, yes, that's true. :-) It is pretty easy to modify nearly all parameters for monsters and items, but if you want more, you have to know Assembler pretty well and spend a lot of time figuring out what is done where in the program. We both never spent much time learning that - you learn a little bit at school; I learned IBM 370 Assembler and x86 Assembler when I studied, but that is sadly only enough to read the code when someone hands you a printout and says "look, this is the routine for determining the monster hit points". So understanding the code is no real problem once you know where it is. And that is exactly the problem, figuring out where to look for the thing you want to modify. I guess you could fire up some debugger and do a step by step while letting some Pukerat hammer your first level warrior to figure out where, for example, the game determines when you are hit, but it is simply more convenient to ask Jarulf "hey, you know how to modify this-and-that? We would like to change the autohit." :-) So, no - we are no hardcore "game hackers", we are more "designers". But Diablo is pretty easy to modify, there are not that many restrictions on what you can change - only when it comes to introducing new level graphics and new monster/item graphics does it get pretty hard, because you need to actually have those graphics. In the Middle Earth mod, we put in some monster graphics from Hellfire - that was easy, but creating our own graphics would be somewhat difficult. :-)

What do you think of the large amount of game art, data, voices, etc that exist on the Diablo and Hellfire CDs but aren't used by the game? Can you give an explanation as to why Blizzard and Sierra left them out of the game but kept them on the cds?

Khan: Well, we never talked to any official (as Blizzard is very reluctant to fan-contact), so I don't think we know anything new here. They probably were in kind of a hurry to release the game (unlike Diablo 2, where they know they have guaranteed success whenever it will be released) so they left out some quests, monster types, or items to get the game ready. It may also be that they reviewed some of these things and thought them to be too bad to be in the game. If they were in a hurry they of course didn't have time to erase all the stuff from the CD and we should be happy they didn't. :) Personally I would really have liked to see the quest for the Lightforge with the Priest Tremaine, or the hunt for Shadowfang and the battle against the Hellian Fleshdoom, or the madman Horazon. Maybe we'll see some of these in D2, just like Andariel.

Varaya: I think it's pretty easy to explain why they left those graphics in. They most likely created tons and tons of those graphics for the initial game (which, as I remember, should have been a turn-based game, much like Rogue). Then Blizzard came around and said "nice, but do it differently, please." However, the graphics were still there, and simply nobody bothered to remove them. Later on, they thought about some quests, but those, even though they were nearly done, did not make it because Mr. Boss did not like them. But the files remained, because nobody remembered that there was that one non-used .wav file. Maybe if the CD had been too full to put the readme files onto it, then they would have removed some superfluous files, but only then. :-)

In a way, Sierra's Hellfire can be considered a professional mod. Do you try to emulate the job they did with the expansion?

Khan: Ehm, I am sure Sierra wouldn't like what I'll say now, but in fact I think that with Hellfire they did a pretty bad job. The graphics are comiclike, unfitting, and in some instances badly drawn (the Liches for example are very badly colored; you can see each pixel, whereas the original Diablo graphics are very smooth - with 8bit, mind you!). Hellfire features even more bugs than original Diablo. It may sound a bit arrogant but I think we and many other modmakers would have created a better add-on, if given the knowledge of the programs inner workings. But since we all were starving for some new features in Diablo, I can also say the money we spent on Hellfire was more than worth it :)

Varaya: Hehe, yes, Hellfire was pretty bad. Some of the monsters are pretty laughable (I mean, an army of hunchback gravediggers - that's pretty weird even for a fantasy game, isn't it?) and some of the features look as if one of the designers had thought "nobody plays that game through more than once, so let's make it as easy as possible for them so that they really can buy at least one Godly Plate when they play."

And yes, some of the graphics have a weird dithering problem, e.g. the shots of those "flying eyes." And the new classes are not correctly balanced. And there are bugs, e.g. vanishing parts of the "torn note." They did not really understand the "feeling" of the Diablo world and they wanted to create a game for Joe Random Player who does not want to play the same character over and over again for months. I guess what one famous DSF regular said is pretty true: Hellfire is Diablo with integrated cheating.

You've been getting some deep "hands-on" experience with developing a game, so to speak. Everyone (myself included) has given you input on what they think would make your mods better. So, you're starting to feel how a game developer feels. How do you handle the avalanche of user input for the mods you make?

Khan: Well, many of the suggestion are pretty direct, like "give item X ability Y", or "make Balrogs tougher/weaker." To be honest, most posts and emails suggest things which we plainly can't do, so dealing with them is rather easy. I think the input from the people who actually play it is about the most important thing for us (and even more important for a real game developer). The only problem is to know what opinion is a sole one and which is shared by the many. Generally I would say one should gather suggestions and remarks for some time (for something like a mod a month should be sufficient) and then separate the ones that are either not shared or undoable.

BTW, I wouldn't call it an avalanche; it's pretty much a few posts/mails per day - I wouldn't like to have to answer the questions/suggestions/mails/posts Blizzard gets...well in fact I would but you get the idea. :)

Varaya: This was one of the problems we had with the early mods: we took every request seriously, immediately. When two players mailed us that monster X was too hard, we modified it - but we did not think that were other players, far more, who were satisfied with that monster and did not bother to mail us, simply because it was OK. And of course those famous requests for not really possible modifications... :-) "I want more dungeon levels," "can you put in the 'plate of Diablo' with +255 all?", "I want six new character classes for Diablo 1.07," etc., etc.

Yes, I would say we have learned how to deal with "fan" e-mail. Early on, I answered each mail with a lengthy explanation on what is possible and what isn't, with exact explanations on how this-and-that works. When you get more mail, you have to write shorter replies, even if it annoys some players. A short link to our workshop pages, a short "not possible, sorry", etc. I think I can understand why Blizzard answers e-mails VERY rarely :-)

Khan: Hey, we COULD make a Diablo's plate with +255 to all. Hehe, and I want more dungeon levels too. :)

Do you have any advice to current and future mod makers out there? Or, any advice to Blizzard for Diablo II to curb cheating?

Khan: The one thing a modmaker should keep in mind is balance. That is pretty difficult, since Diablo Classic is itself balanced quite well; but, if you enhance the monster's toughness greatly (which is about the first thing any modmaker does), there should also be items to be findable/buyable with which you can use to survive in Hell/Hell.

Blizzard is doing a lot to prevent cheating in D2. While I like the idea of legitness and the secure feeling you would get if cheating was impossible, I don't appreciate Blizzard's approach to encrypting the exe or splitting the B.net community to do so. Since it is nearly impossible to prevent hacking altogether, you will have to enter password protected games with your friends in D2 again to get perfect protection from cheaters.

The idea of closed characters (realm characters) may sound nice, but if you can't afford to be online indefinitely or want to backup your char yourself, it doesn't sound that good anymore. I would have liked it more if they had built in a kick button for the creator of a game so that he can decide to remove an annoying player (be it a PK, a cheater, or just a plain idiot).

Varaya: Balance. Yes, balance is the most important thing. Not too hard for low-level chars (i.e. no general "+60" to monster to hit, even though it might work for hell difficulty monsters), to too easy for high level chars (i.e. no super-powerful unique items, even though they are fun the first time you find them). We tried to make it interesting for players who play a char often. Thus, many of the very good items are hard to find. Also important is that the game is about the same difficulty for all classes. While quadruple immune monsters are not that annoying for warriors, they are game stoppers for mages, so not that many of those, please.

What I am somewhat worried about is, as Khan explained, that Blizzard obviously sees Internet gaming from the "American" point of view. Yes, legit playing must be supported and cheating prevented, but Internet play is not really possible all of the time for the rest of the world.

I, of course, want to have a high lvl D2 char, one that I play all of the time. While I have a (relatively expensive) flatrate and theoretically could play on the Net pretty often, Khan for example cannot. Also, it would be pretty useless to play over the Net, with lag and all those problems (open games, PKs; I will not further explain those known problems here - suffice it to say we would play pw-protected games most of the time - and what if I wanted to play with some of you from the US ? Realm problems ...) when we can play on the LAN here at my home, too. But a LAN game is not possible with closed chars, so most likely the character I play most often with will be an open char, with the "scent" of non-legitness, simply because Blizzard decided that "real" chars are B.net only. But, hey, I cannot come up with any better idea for fighting cheating, because everything you store on your machine (or that runs only on your machine) can be hacked. Nevertheless, it is annoying. Ah, kick button. Good idea. Would like to see that, too :-)

As for suggestions to Blizzard: I have seen Nox. I have seen D2 gameplay movies. DON'T make that game super-fast. D1 had the right speed, I would hate to see a game which is centered around super-fast click-click-click twitch action.

Khan: Nox, uargh - "innovative and thrilling multiplayer experience," oh how we laughed. :))

What do you think of the controversial aspect of mods? Do you think Blizzard minds that they are played over Battle.Net? Battle.Net support was one of the key features of mods that led to their explosion in popularity.

Khan: As I said before, Blizzard is very reluctant in regards of direct fan contact. They have made an official stance on hacks and the use of their material, but that pretty much leaves anything open to discussion. I THINK they like mods (since they don't say anything against it and it keeps the game going - and it doesn't even cost them anything :) ), but they won't ever declare that. I regret that and if I were Blizzard I would, in fact, encourage the use and creation of mods, maybe even supporting the more popular ones with an official channel and the like. They should at least more openly support Jarulf's Guide but well, I am not Blizzard. :)

Varaya: Well, from Jarulf, I know that at least once, a Blizz person has visited our mod pages (he used the "Jarulf's Guide" link from our link section to get to his page). So, I can say that they certainly DO know about mods, and they have never mailed us that they wanted us to stop doing them. So they certainly "accept" mods, as long as they do not disturb general B.net play. Also, as Khan said, they added somewhat to the longevity of Diablo 1 (I sure know that I would have stopped playing D1 at least a year ago if not for the mods), and I really cannot understand that they do not support mods more openly, e.g. by a link saying "go here for mods, but they are not supported by Blizzard in any way, use at your own risk."

Khan: Well, right now I think they are a bit blind on the Diablo 1-eye, as they are extremely fixed on Diablo II and are neglecting D1 a bit. *shrug*

Got any plans for Diablo II mods? Blizzard doesn't seem to be making it easy for modifications, unlike other games such as the Quake series. Would you like to see a mod maker utility for Diablo II?

Khan: I definitely want to do something like this for Diablo 2, but as you say it might well be impossible for a mere hex editor. I don't really understand why they should want to discourage the creation of mods, but it probably has to do with cheating-prevention. I would say, let us wait for Diablo II to be released, then let's play it for about half a year and then we'll see whether or not mods are possible. But if they are, we will create another Middle Earth mod at least. :)

Varaya: Want to do a mod? Yes, of course. Being able to do a mod? Probably not, unless somebody figures out an easy way to "lay open" the data. Khan and I talked about this some time ago, and we both fear that some hacking genius without any idea about how to create a well-balanced mod might figure out how to modify the game data, keep the information for himself, and then create the world's worst mod, and nobody can create a better one, so we would have to play it. :-)

Khan: *shiver* Brrr, what an awful imagination!

Varaya: So if it really should be possible for us to make a mod (let's see, maybe it is not that hard to do after all), we definitely will do one - of course after having played the game through a hundred times with all classes... :-)

So, to wrap up, what is it with Diablo that makes the game so universally appealing and long lasting? One could conjecture that with enough mods, you could find interest in the game eternally. If there was ONE single thing you could change in Diablo for all players of the game, what would it be?

Khan: The longevity of the game simply comes from the randomness of levels, monsters, and most of all items. Randomness is the heart and soul of Diablo, as it will be for Diablo 2. Of course, the game has other extraordinary qualities, too.

Graphics - no game has been able to use 8bit (or even 16bit!) colors so realistically. The world and characters are so smoothly fitting, they move in the most realistic way, and have the correct proportions. There is no floating and shifting of the movable objects, no visible pixels or weird colors (well in Diablo v1.07, at least :) ). I am really astonished that there are no graphical engineers in the whole games industry who were capable of doing something similar (Revenant is awful and childish, Nox has incorrect perspective, and you can count the pixels from 10 meters distance - and these were the best clones!).

Sound - the sound is most fitting and not unnerving. They have been able to create sounds that won't annoy you even after you have slain the 200th Blood Knight, and, most importantly, you hear what happens. Audio feedback is very important in Diablo. You must be able to hear when you should target a new monster, or when to flee, or when you are stunlocked, or of course when there is a "PLING!" :) This point is again only true for Diablo, not for Hellfire, where most monsters just don't have a solid death- or getting-hit-sound.

But again, if these were in Diablo and it had a fixed storyline and fixed levels, then the game would have lasted for a year at the best. The hunt for the ultimate Obs/Zod or the best possible KSoH (and once upon a time the hunt for the GPoW, hehe) is what keeps you playing, isn't it?

A final remark: I have seen and tested quite some "foreign" mods but there is some feeling of helplessness with this. Once you have made your own mod, you will always think while playing, "hey I would like to change this or that." If it's your own mod, you can just go on and do it, but if you have to wait for someone else to do it or not... well to sum it up I can only thank all the players out there who kept us going and live with the hope that their suggestion will be implemented. :)

Varaya: I can, of course, not speak for everybody, but I know what makes the game so interesting for me. It is a combination of several things, and apparently something a lot of game designers who wanted to "copy" the Diablo success did not really understand. Not that important, but nevertheless something I really enjoy when playing Diablo, are the graphics and the sound. Diablo is all about slaughtering monsters and grabbing items and boy, does it deliver. The warrior wearing a plate mail does really look like an adult male in metal armor, with realistic body proportions and well-used metal plate. The colors are realistic, not fancy and comic-like. The rogue (in leather armor) really looks like a woman I would like to meet in Ogden's (the building, not the forum :) ). Now just compare this with Darkstone or Nox - two games which tried, but failed. Darkstone tried 3D graphics, a commendable but doomed effort. The characters there look like a mess of polygons, far too colorful, and the fact that you see the polygons and the blockiness is really annoying. The 3D view makes "targeting" with the mouse cursor very hard. Nox at least avoided the polygons, but the graphics are too comic-like and they failed with their "wrong" isometric view. And don't give me those Japanese 12 year old large-eyed Final Fantasy heroes of some other games. :) I want blood and steel, no Sailor Moon. The sound and music in Diablo is really great - in fact, the first time I saw Diablo at a friend's house (only for one or two minutes, we wanted to play some other game and he was playing Diablo when I came in, and he quit as soon as I sat down), I was totally fascinated by the town music. Actually, when I ordered another game a week later, I saw "Diablo" mentioned in that shop's ad and I thought "hey, that was that game with that great music, and it's about fantasy, let's buy it", so the music was the main incentive to buy the game :-)

Another nice thing about Diablo is the possibility of playing coop games. Is it so hard for game designers to understand that there are many people out there who do not want to play deathmatch games? Nox could have been nice, but in multiplayer it is "humans against humans in arenas" only. Sorry, that is a real show stopper for me. Other games did not even go that far; they are single player only. Nice once or twice, but the games you play most often are the ones you can play together with other human players, at least for me - I play very rarely when I am alone.

Well, and the main thing Diablo lives for so long is obviously the randomness. You want to improve your character, for that you need good items, and it is more or less random which items (and monsters) you will get in each game session. This is apparently really hard to grasp for game designers. I have seen so many games which were announced as "Diablo killers", but they all failed because they had a fixed story and no random dungeon levels. Baldur's Gate is a very good game - nice graphics, excellent sound, cooperative multiplay is possible (even with the complete storyline !), but it is not random. So you play it only once or twice (or four or five times, in the case of Khan :) ), but then you know every single quest by heart, every hidden bonus item, etc. Some random quests like "find npc <insert name> and do <insert action> to him to get item <insert magic item>" and one or two really random dungeons would have helped make it a long-lasting game.

So what makes Diablo that good? Good graphics/sound combined with the addictive "build your character" combined with cooperative multiplay and random dungeons/items.

What I would change? That is pretty hard to answer. :-) There are, of course, many things you could improve, but they are only minor things (like e.g. make the dungeon layouts a bit more random, improve the monster variety a bit or increase the number of dungeon levels). What I really would like to see in the game, and I hope it will be in D2, would be random quests you could solve together in multiplayer. So even if you had played through the whole game, you could still open up a game together with a friend or two and say "let's see what the quest of the day is!" Then you would walk up to Cain or whoever, and he would roll the dice and create something random for you to do (in addition to the standard "storyline", if you can call it like this in D1), so that you had a real goal in addition to the basic monster killing and looting. Oh yes, and more different character graphics depending on the items you wear and the level you have would also be really nice.

Thanks for being such great interviewees, V&K!