Architects of Terror: How Blizzard North Designed the Ultimate Final Boss in Diablo and Diablo 2
The following chapter comes from Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I, now available along with Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II as part of StoryBundle’s “Boss Battle” Game Bundle. The promotion features 10 DRM-free digital books for $15 and runs through the end of April; a portion of all proceeds will go toward Doctors Without Borders to aid medical professionals as they battle the novel coronavirus. This portion of the excerpt shows how Blizzard North’s small team created the atmosphere of the levels and demons leading up to the encounter against the Dark Lord, Diablo itself.
After navigating through four cathedral levels, players followed the next stairwell down and emerged in the catacombs — four levels of earthen walls, winding corridors, and huge chambers. “The catacombs were more a [process of generating] random mazes,” said Erich Schaefer, co-founder of Blizzard North and the artist who designed all the tiles that make up Diablo’s dungeons. “A passage would just wind around, trying to interconnect itself.”
Like the cathedral floors above, light flooded every inch of the catacombs. Five months into development, Dave and Erich hit on a way to darken Diablo’s mood.
“The lighting in the game was done on a grid basis,” explained David “Dave” Brevik, co-founder of Blizzard North and lead programmer on Diablo. “As you moved between squares, the lighting changed. So you click one square over and the lighting wouldn’t change until you stepped into the next square. That was the easiest way to write the code, but Doron [Gartner] wrote an algorithm so that the game changed the lighting when your character moved a couple of pixels instead of once per square. He found a faster way to calculate lighting so we could update it more regularly, and that made a huge improvement to the game’s atmosphere.”
Dave and Erich expanded on how Diablo’s lightning system affected gameplay as well as atmosphere. “The way we organized the [color] palette was 256 colors in bands of 16 colors,” Dave explained. “You had a bunch of red hues, a bunch of blue hues, gray hues, et cetera. [Coloring] went from the brightest down to the darkest, so that when we were drawing something, you could take a pixel and have it say, ‘How bright am I to start with, and how bright am I going be in the end?’ We’d just shift that pixel down the palette so it got darker and darker when we drew an area. To do this lighting scheme, where the edge of the dungeon was black, and then as you got closer your character’s light radius lit up the surroundings, was something nobody else had.”
“The light radius had an interesting effect,” Erich added. “Your light radius determined when monsters woke up. So you could see more with a bigger light radius, but you’d wake up monsters sooner. It was something we knew while developing it, and then people in the forums caught on later and thought it was good. There were [items] that reduced light radius, and that was actually pretty handy, especially for lower levels where you wanted to scare up as few monsters as possible.”
Players who survived four levels of winding mazes and increasingly dangerous encounters progressed to the caves, open space divided by wandering rivers of lava. Gone were the narrow corridors and doorways where players could bunker down and fight enemies one at a time. Four floors down, players emerged in the final set of dungeons and Erich’s ominous, atypical take on a Hell setting. Instead of clichéd lakes of fire, Erich fashioned walls made from bone, glowing veins of blood threaded through the walls, and skewered nude corpses on spikes.
“I didn’t think Hell had the best layouts. Those levels were just kind of weird symmetrical patterns,” Erich admitted. “I did like the graphics, though. I got a lot of the ideas from [Antoni] Gaudí’s* architecture. I had a book of his stuff and just kind of put together a lot of his walls to form those areas. I liked the graphics more than I liked the layouts. That worked out because Hell became more [about the] chaos of gameplay. It wasn’t as much about exploring a few halls, so we amped up fights in open areas.”
Michio Okamura, the artist responsible for establishing the visual direction for most of the game’s monsters, thought Erich was too hard on himself. “I think Erich did a solid job [on Diablo’s backgrounds], especially because we had such a limited color palette at the time. We had a very limited amount of colors: this was how much we could use for backgrounds; this was how much we could use for the characters. Considering what we had, I think he did an amazing job. It took forever to render those backgrounds. He would queue it up before he left, basically come in the next morning and it would still be rendering.”
Fittingly, the four levels of Hell that stood between players and their ultimate target harbored the game’s most dangerous monsters. Possessed knights roamed the halls. Vipers slithered around upright, brandishing swords. Evil magi cast fire and lightning. And succubuses swayed toward heroes too busy gawking at their bared breasts to notice the blasts of magic forming in their hands.
“When a creature died, it had to fit in a certain space,” explained Kelly Johnson, artist. “That’s why a lot of the death animations in Diablo involve disintegration: the body just disappears because after a while we couldn’t come up with different ways to do [death animations] in one spot. You had to collapse the bodies. So the succubus’s death was done so that her body would fit in the tile. You know, the whole bending over, getting in that doggy style position. The animation was very suggestive, and I was like, ‘I kind of like that.’ With the way she was dressed as a seductress, it fit her character. And the guys liked it, so it stayed.”
In the background, the fruits of composer Matt Uelmen’s labor complemented Erich’s hellish visuals: a low drone punctured the bubble of silence and rose in pitch while drums boomed and crashed.
“I think you always want to take at least 20 seconds to establish a new environment when you’re writing [music] for a game interior,” Uelmen said. “Of course, that experience works because the flow of the monsters is really well-designed in terms of seeming easy at first, then quickly becoming a little more overwhelming, and I can’t take credit for that.”
On level 15, players faced off against the Archbishop Lazarus, Diablo’s chief henchman, before stepping through a blood-red portal that warped them to the Lord of Terror’s lair. Unlike previous levels, the lair was pre-built and populated with a series of switches heroes had to throw in order to reveal the final boss.
“I kind of knew what feelings I wanted to get from Diablo,” recalled Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik, “but really it was Michio who pretty much nailed it right away. We knew we wanted a demon-like figure, and he nailed it pretty quickly. I thought his model and design were just excellent.”
“I did an initial version of Diablo very early on when we were pitching the idea, so I had almost the entire project to figure out what I wanted to do with the last boss,” added Michio. “For Diablo, I did the concept art, the model, and the mapping. By then, we had Ben Haas and Pat Tougas, who took over animations when they came on board.”
The Lord of Terror made his presence known far before he came into view on the screen. Red flames erupted from the ground beneath players as they fought their way to his chamber. Once in range, Diablo was a towering monstrosity of red scales and curled spikes, by far the largest monster in the game. Up close, he put aside spell-casting to unleash devastating swipes and blows with his clawed hands.
“As I concepted [the Diablo boss character] I wrote out ‘Diabolous Tyrannicus Rex,’” said Michio. “Usually when I draw things I make up a story, give them titles and names. I came up with a Latin name for Diablo, and ‘rex’ means emperor or king. We had some ideas about doing the spell and demon names in Latin — or at least [making them] Latin-sounding — at the beginning of Diablo’s development.”
“When Diablo was finally put into the game, he was hard,” said Karin Colenzo, office manager at Blizzard North. “They hadn’t fully balanced him yet, and he was hard. Holy crap. We were dying left and right, but it was fun trying, and seeing him on-screen: ‘This is him. This is Diablo.’ Every time somebody would get to Diablo, everybody would congregate and check him out and see how they were doing.”
The following chapter comes from Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, now available along with Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I as part of StoryBundle’s “Boss Battle” Game Bundle. The promotion features 10 DRM-free digital books for $15 and runs through the end of April; a portion of all proceeds will go toward Doctors Without Borders to aid medical professionals as they battle the novel coronavirus. This portion of the excerpt shows how Blizzard North went all-in on the encounter against the Lord of Terror in Diablo 2.
Amazon, Paladin, Sorceress, Necromancer, and Barbarian.
No matter which of the five heroes players choose, their journey through pastures, deserts, jungles, and hell brings them to the Chaos Sanctuary, an edifice forged from black and red stone, and host to the deadliest enemies in the game.
A few areas in Diablo were made from presets, maps with no procedurally generated elements. King Leoric’s lair, the sixteenth and final level, and the Chamber of Bone, for instance. Diablo II had more presets — twenty-eight total, thirty-four with the addition of the expansion set — one of which was the Chaos Sanctuary.
“I came up with the idea for the level and how it would fit together; the general shape,” said Dave Glenn, environment artist. “Then, Rick figured out how to make that work with what his idea was, called spawns.”
In the center of the Sanctuary, a pentagram stretches over a pit of fire. To confront the Lord of Terror, players must summon him by activating five seals.
“That was a brainstorming kind of session. Like, how do we introduce each boss?” Glenn remembered.
Although Diablo II’s four Acts were made in more or less linear fashion, with programmers and artists doubling back to fine-tune elements, production on the game’s final boss started much earlier.
“Apparently, from what I hear, for Diablo in the first game, the guys had worked straight through from the beginning until the end,” said Mike Dashow, character artist. “They got to the end of and it were like, ‘Whoops, we’re out of time! We need to get Diablo in here!’ We didn’t want to have him be this throwaway boss at the end of Diablo II, so Rick and I started well in advance.”
“Toward the end of Diablo II, people were grinding,” said Rick Seis, senior programmer at Blizzard North. “One of the brighter spots in my last chunk of days was working with Dashow to try and make Diablo awesome.”
Once again, Michio Okamura concepted the titular character.
“We were brainstorming for Diablo II, the final boss, and we weren’t really getting [a design] that we were happy with,” Michio said. “I basically came up with my version, I got the green light, and I went ahead and created a 3D statue.”
For the first game, Michio had modeled Diablo as a humanoid demon: Bipedal, fiery red, and covered in spikes, he towers over players. For Diablo II, Michio envisioned the demon lord as more monstrous and feral. He was wider, broader, with a long tail and a body lined with horns and spines. Though he stood upright to attack, he could charge on all fours.
“I kind of liked the idea of a Tyrannosaurus dinosaur-slash-dragon-lord with intelligence. It basically looks like Diablo on steroids. I wanted to give him savagery, but a certain intelligence: Diabolous Tyrannicus Rex.”
With Diablo’s design nailed down, Dashow and Rick put their heads together to devise his attacks. Slashes that tore free chunks of the player’s health were a must. Another invention, and the enemy’s most infamous offense, was a wave of crackling, rippling lightning able to drain the player’s health in seconds. Players who throw down a Town Portal to escape to the Pandemonium Fortress where they can repair equipment and restock on healing potions are in for a surprise when, more often than not, they return to find their portal surrounded by a bone cage. To escape, they must waste precious seconds destroying the prison while Diablo batters them with attacks.
“The character artists were given about four attack slots for every monster, and no one used [all] of them,” Mike said. “But Diablo maxed out every slot that we could possibly use. We used everything for Diablo. He had the cages that came out of the ground, shooting the lightning…”
“Mike and I would go back and forth,” Rick said. “He would tell me something about Diablo and I’d try to make it happen in code. I’d tell him, ‘I can’t do this. Can you give me that?’”
The duo thought up more than attacks and devilish traps. Diablo would not leave the grand hall where his pentagram was kept. Players could take advantage of that by sprinting away to collect themselves and then return to the fight. There was a technical reason for Diablo’s reticence to step out of his comfort zone. “The reason why is, if you remember, there are two paths going up to his big circle,” Rick explained. “If Diablo gets out onto those paths, he can’t maneuver very well because he’s so big and the paths are so small. The pathing’s terrible there. He’s just jerking around and you’re killing his ass while he’s trying to figure out what to do.”
Confining Diablo to his hall was a reasonable solution that introduced another problem. Players who realized Diablo wouldn’t leave the area could lure him to the edge of his pathing and then attack him from afar with impunity. Rick and Mike decided that when Diablo reached the outskirts of his zone, he would run back toward the pentagram and regenerate a small amount of health, just enough to discourage players from trying to exploit his limitations.
With the character conceptualized, Michio handed the Lord of Terror over to Mike Dashow and Rick Seis. Every monster has fourteen animation categories such as walk, attack 1, attack 2, and seldom-used categories such as block and run. Then there are special animations used only for unique circumstances. Diablo was the only monster to use every animation slot.
“We said, ‘Wait a second — we could save on memory if we just do one direction, not eight directions,’” Mike Dashow said. “‘Who cares about seeing Diablo’s back when he’s dying? I want to see the front view and we’ll make the duration of the animation eight times as long.’”
The Lord of Terror’s death animation befit the defeat of a final boss.
“I really went crazy with having his body decompose,” Dashow remembered. The in-game story, charging players with killing Diablo, recovering his Soulstone, and smashing it to prevent the Lord of Terror from resurrecting, informed the animation. “It’s like, ‘What is happening here? Well, his soul is getting sucked into his Soulstone so you can crush it.’ So, there’s a whole story of it keeping him alive and what happens to Diablo when he loses his soul and it gets sucked into a Soulstone? There was a lot of story feeding into that animation. There’s particles falling off his body and his body’s shriveling up and it’s getting darker and grayer as he claws in agony. Then I did this big, whole animated version of the soul getting sucked into the Soulstone and the glow effects on top of that. I really went all out on that. It’s the end-game boss! You’ve got to go all out!”
“The thing was, it reminded me a lot of Condor,” Rick said of his collaboration with Dashow. “Because he would go, ‘Diablo shouldn’t run away from people; he needs to do something Diablo-esque if he needs to get away.’ And then he’d go make beautiful art, and that was a lot of work for him. And then I’d do my part, and it was this great collaboration, which really worked well.”
Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I and Book II are available as part of StoryBundle’s “Boss Battle” Game Bundle. The promotion features 10 DRM-free digital books for $15 and runs through the end of April; a portion of all proceeds will go toward Doctors Without Borders to aid medical professionals as they battle the novel coronavirus.