My dad introduced me to Diablo series back in late 90s when he bought the game. Game got stuck in my head since early childhood. The atmosphere of the game is just fantastic in my opinion. I love how perfectly the game was put together with creepy cinematics, amazing moody music, realistic art style and graphics, all the blood and gore and torture and satanism etc.
In my opinion the way everything is put together in Diablo, makes the best depiction of hell in any movie or game.
Not to mention the story, the quests, the monsters. The dark fantasy setting and the cursed Tristram town.
So needless to say I loved the game and still do. I haven't played much Diablo 2. Played D2 for a week maybe 15 years ago so I barely remember anything. D2 just didn't intrigue me as much, because of the "open world" setting, instead of revolving around 1 evil, claustrophobic cathedral.
My experience with Belzebub mod:
So I wanted to play Diablo at modern resolutions and I found this mod and I quite liked it.
I've been hearing that this mod takes some gameplay features of Diablo2 and I'm quite fond of some them. I like the ability to highlight items I can pick up and overall improved UI. I liked some of the quests and was surprised there was original voice acting for so much cut content. But some of the quests felt more like Diablo2 instead of the vanilla for obvious reasons. I think Horizon's sanctum quest the one in space looking map was weird one for a Diablo1 game.
But overall I really enjoyed this mod up until I encountered Diablo boss.
I made 2 characters. At first I played Assassin. She is level 16 but I gave up on her cause she seemed dull to play. When encountering many enemies I always had to use cheese tactics such as having enemies get stuck on a doorway and then hope I don't run out of potions by the time the group is dead. I couldn't figure out what kind of if any AOE damage to do with assassin. Maybe it's hit and run one by one with her. I also tried to abuse stealth skill a lot. But I couldn't figure out why sometimes it worked other times it broke stealth. Couldn't figure that one out.
So I got tired of Assassin and created Barbarian. Realised I can't level up magic and quickly deleted him.
Then finally created warrior hoping for more of the original Diablo gameplay.
Warrior was more basic for me, more manageable to play. I didn't really get stuck with warrior too much at any point of the game until the ending. Now I felt like I'm enjoying Diablo for it's atmosphere, music and familiar gameplay with some improvements. I cleared all of the levels, collected every single item in every single level, completed all of the quests with the warrior.
I had a mixed bag of nice gear, some from the quests some from drops and 1Mil gold reduced to 900k after I died from Diablo many times.
My warrior is level 28 with 198 DPS. I'm not having too much trouble with him provided I don't do reckless stuff. I managed to kill all of the 4 bosses except for Diablo. It seems that I just get one shotted sometimes. Probably because of his minions and him dealing damage to me at the same time. I don't know what tactics to use against him. With warrior I just stood against the wall and tanked him, spamming potions and valiant strike. I tried to do my best conserving potions without spamming them mindlessly. I got him to 50% health on my best try, ran out of potions and died. Died several times, lost 100k gold and got concerned that either my gear is not good enough, or I'm too low level to have a fighting chance, or my character attributes are distributed terribly. I've seen people using golems but my golem spell is only level 1.
So my biggest concern with Belzebub is that maybe it borrows something from Diablo 2 called grinding and farming. I didn't play enough of D2 to reach that point, never finished it.
Vanilla Diablo1 experience for me was natural progression, enjoying the story, the quests, the amazing music and atmosphere and a bit of challenge. By natural progression I mean you play the game, do the quests, kill the mini bosses and get suitable gear for future encounters.
If I have to mindlessly grind and farm to progress through the game then it's not for me personally and it's not Diablo experience.
It kills the game for me when my concern is no longer to survive the dungeon and go deeper but to mindlessly click for hours, days, maybe weeks to get better stats and gear. I enjoy finding good loot. But I don't personally find it enjoyable to endlessly reset dungeons and hope the gods of RNG give me something good from drops or containers.
Grinding is for MMOs where companies make people chase a digital carrot on a stick for months, even years so they keep paying the montly subscription. In my opinion it has no place in single player games. One of the reasons I don't play mmos.
I understand it's different strokes for different folks and everyone has their own tastes in what they like. But IMO grinding and farming was never how Diablo 1 originally played.
Sorry for the rant
Some questions:
0. What am I supposed to do with "The Map of Stars"? After I bring it to Cain the elder it's still in my inventory. Do I need to bring it to domain of terror and have it in inventory when fighting diablo? Do I need to redo the quest every time I restart my game process? What is even the gameplay purpose of the map other than prophecy stuff?
1. How does stealth skill work with assassin? Why does stealth sometimes break and sometimes doesn't? I understand you get to scout ahead, hide and deal extra damage but when it doesn't work or breaks I don't.
2. What is the maximum cap for attributes?
3. Is it possible to continiously start new game and complete quests to get +5 attribute points?
4. What are character dependant weapons? Can I get two handed sword from quests on higher difficulties as warrior or is that exclusive to barbarian?
5. Can barbarian get +3 attribute points to magic from quest rewards?
6. Are there any cheats or exploits to level up? I'd rather cheat then spend 1 week grinding and farming same level over and over again. Grinding is the worst digital torture for me
Also here a screenshot of my warrior stats and inventory setup that I usually use.
Also I'm running Belzebub in Wine on Arch. It runs flawlessly and I don't have to reboot to play it.
Also I found this https://archive.org/details/Diablo_1996_Blizzard
Guy claims that Diablo1 is abandonware and it being on internet archive of all places seem to suggest it might be true. Maybe Belzebub developers can include diabdat.mhq file and just distribute it that way
