The Diablo Quest

[SixOfSpades]

What's great about Baldur's Gate: Excellent roleplay.

What's great about Diablo: True randomness.

 

Can they be combined?

 

Maybe.....

 

Inspired by the "If Trigger(1) then RESPONSE...." code chunk posted by Idobek (now look what you've done!) in the Melicamp thread, here comes a great big quest idea, basically a shameless ripoff that ports the entire game of Diablo 1 into BG2. It would take years to complete, of course, that much is obvious. But what I'm really asking here is can it be done?

 

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Info site: http://diablo.calcon.net/

 

The 2nd time you enter the City Gates, a messenger named Gillian is created next to the Amnish Guards and walks up to you as soon as you enter her sight range. She explains that her home village of Tristram has been overrun with evil creatures, and she has journeyed to Athkatla as quickly as possible to call out a garrison of the militia, or perhaps the Radiant Heart, but unfortunately all mobilized divisions have been sent off to quell the uprising in Sythsill. Therefore, she needs mercenaries, and she needs them NOW. Your conversation has three basic paths:

• "No, I won't." Gillian is in a fantastic hurry, so she storms off in search of somebody with some guts. You may direct her to the Copper Coronet, and if you do, she can be found there for 1 hour. After that hour is up, she and her quest disappear forever.
  
• "Tell me more." Gillian spins a tale of how the local king, Leoric, went insane after his son disappeared, and then placed a horrible curse on the town just before he died. The town's Temple of Mystra suddenly became a source of evil, with Undead and other monsters swarming in its crypts. Lazarus, the Priest of Mystra, led a contingent of townsfolk into the Temple to exterminate the monsters, but nobody returned. Gillian and the rest of the townspeople have sealed the monsters within the Temple, but the barrier will not hold for long.
  If you ask Gillian about a reward for saving Tristram, she will tell you that Griswold, the local blacksmith, is forging a powerful sword to be given to anyone who clears the Temple's catacombs of the monsters.
  
• "Yes, I will." Since I'm not sure editing the World Map is even possible (Weimer didn't do it for his Ritual quest), Gillian will not update your Map, but rather teleport you to the edge of Tristram (Travel Time: 16 hours). Once you leave Tristram for the rest of Amn, you cannot return.
  

The people of Tristram:

Cain--the town elder, an aging Bard. Does nothing but provide advice and Identify stuff for you.

Pepin--local Priest of Ilmater, provides healing at very low rates.

Griswold--town blacksmith (Fighter/Cleric/Mage), sells some decent gear.

Ogden--proprietor (Bard) of the Rising Sun Tavern, and offers up his best rooms (Merchant) for only 1 gold for the (with any luck) future Heroes of Tristram.

Gillian--the barmaid of the Rising Sun, useless apart from a little conversation.

Farnham--a drunken sot, can be recruited into your party, although he won't leave Tristram. Level 8 Human Fighter, 16/11/18/8/6/11. Takes a while for the Intoxication to wear off, and every time you enter the Rising Sun, he deducts 4D8 gold from the party and gets Intoxicated again.

Adria--a witch (Enchantress?), lives at the edge of town and sells some obscure magical items.

Wirt--a juvenile delinquent (Thief) who hides behind a tree and charges you $ just to look at his obscenely priced items--which are flagged as being Shoplifted, and of which he only stocks 1 at a time.

 

The dungeon:

It is 4 floors deep, with each floor looking completely different: Crypt, Catacombs, Caves, Hell. However, the essence of Diablo is randomness, so there will actually be a total of 16 dungeon areas: 4 possible maps for each level. When the party first enters Tristram, the levels of the dungeon that will actually be accessible are randomly selected, for a total of 4*4*4*4 = 256 possible maps for the entire dungeon. Griswold will reward you with "Griswold's Edge" after killing King Leoric (the boss of the 2nd level), since the condition of the reward was "clearing the Temple catacombs," regardless of the fact that there is more evil to be destroyed.

Level 1: Crypt. Boss: The Butcher (Half-Ogre)

Level 2: Catacombs. Boss: King Leoric (Skeleton Warrior)

Level 3: Caves. Boss: Chaos Howler (Vampiric Wolf)

Level 4: Hell. Boss: Diablo (Balor)

 

The enemies:

Each floor of the dungeon relies heavily on random-spawns for its monster brood. RE-spawn will be absolutely nil. The monsters here are about 25-50% more difficult than a party of the same levels could expect to find randomly spawned in someplace like the Temple Ruins. The monsters will have the same names as their counterparts in the original Diablo, and be as close in terms of appearance and abilities as is feasible. For example, Chaos Howler is a Vampiric Wolf who (along with his brood) has a nasty rapid-fire spitting attack (same animation as Ankheg spit) that does Acid and Poison damage. Some monster placement will not be random, such as putting the boss of each level near the stairs to the next level down, or ensuring that there's a Lich in Level 4, etc.

 

The items:

Dropped gear will OF COURSE be toned down to the BG scale. For example, consider the Diablo item of a perfect Diamond Ring of the Zodiac: It grants +60% Magic Resistance, and a +20 bonus to all attribute scores (or, if you want to get picky, just STR, DEX, CON, and INT). It goes without saying that nothing even remotely close to that uber will be dropped. In terms of power, the gear found here (and available for sale in town) will be in accordance for what would be appropriate for a Level 12-15 party in Chapter 3. All items will be based on actual Diablo items, whether Magical (e.g., Snake's Amulet of Accuracy) or Unique (e.g., Wizardspike).

 

The enemies will not actually *drop* anything--all their gear is undroppable. Instead, each enemy will cast a spell on death, resulting in a ladder of RESPONSE triggers.

 

Death: 70% chance of nothing happening, 30% of jumping to Death2.

Death2: (opening containers jumps directly to this RESPONSE) 25% chance of nothing happening, 40% chance of dropping gold (amount determined by dungeon level), 15% chance of dropping item (jump to Item), 10% chance of dropping scroll (jump to Scroll), 10% chance of dropping a potion (jump to Potion).

You can imagine the Scroll and Potion RESPONSE triggers for yourself, I won't bother with them here....

Item: 75% chance of mundane item (breaking off into separate Armor, Shield, Helm, Weapon triggers, quality determined by dungeon level), 22% chance of Magical item (uses the same RESPONSE trigger tree as mundane items, but with the additional step of determining number and quality of enchantments by dungeon level and a RESPONSE trigger), and 3% chance of a Unique item.

[khayman]

Well constructed post, congrats.

 

As I`m not sure about the implementation in BG2, I will post here my idea which I`ve been thinking of since two years now. Please accept my apologies if the response to an idea is yet another idea which has almost nothing to do with the Infinity Engine, but I didn`t want to make a separate thread. In fact I had it before NWN came out, while I was playing Diablo II and waiting for NWN which, at that time, promised to be the best RPG game ever made. Well, much to my dismay, it wasn`t, but that`s not relevant at the moment. I started working on this, but got scared of the complexity and work it would involve, considering the fact that I was intending to make the mod all by myself.

 

To put it short: Your idea, seeing Diablo ported to the NWN engine.

 

To put it long:

 

Mod story

Let`s see... The main point was to make Tristram and the Crypt for Neverwinter Nights, as it had a pretty good editor and I was certain that it can be done. I browsed the internet, downloaded 2GB worth of tools, scripts, helpfiles, tutorials, areas, monster models, additional scenery, textures, sounds etc. (this is how I usually start getting into modding). I have seen a mod which had done Tristram and two or three levels of the Crypt, including the Butcher, it seemed interesting, but was full of bugs. I have found randomizing scripts for item drops for monsters and containers, even ones to make totally random caves and dungeons, I`m sure they can be expanded to work for basically anything.

 

'Ah, exquisite', I thought to myself. On a dark and stormy night I sat down at my desk and started writing an outline of the Diablo I story; but the final product I was intending to start working on included: Diablo I, Diablo Hellfire, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction plus a fictive Diablo III (Recently Cam suggested dropping Hellfire and he

 

This doesn`t end here, however. I was planning lots of things, like expanding Tristram to be larger and adding a bunch of new quests, adding scripts for torches which would burn out after a certain time of usage, people would go to sleep at night, so no shopping except from the local Thieves` Guild (which was open 24/7, heh), randomized monsters and variations of monsters (just like in the Diablo games), a tremendous amount of extra dialog, a whole bunch of additional quests, a lot better character development, much improved henchman system than the one found in Diablo II, the leftover minor demons for the Diablo III part of the mod (Azmodan and Belial), maybe multiplayer and more!

 

And that, my friends, made my day.. Err night. Second day I quickly sat down and started to work on it, but, alas, I was quickly consumed by the amount of work it would involve. My computer isn`t the best either, so working in the toolset and switching to the game in real-time was a little bit slow. So it was quickly dropped, like many ideas which have an unreachably huge scope.

 

However I would gladly take part in starting such a project, I am POSITIVE that regardless of the negative criticism (I got enough of that, they also aided towards fullstop), lots of people would be interested in such an idea, especially if it were to contain a well-developed multiplayer system.

[Idobek]

A Tristram TC has just been started TeamBG. Here is the initial thread: http://www.teambg.net/forum/?showtopic=13225

 

There is also a forum but it is protected.

[SixOfSpades]

It's good that others have put some thought into this as well, but what I'm curious about is the ability of the Infinity Engine to handle randomness. Is it actually possible (feasible) to have a door that takes the party to, not just ONE specified map area, but 1 of 4 randomly determined map areas? Would it be possible (feasible) to have each creature's death run a script like the one I described above, running through a series of random events to finally drop one of a large number of pre-made ITM files?

[BigRob]

Treasures dropped by monsters can be made random as far as I know. I'm not sure about the doors.

[Ghreyfain]

About the random door question, yes, I think it could be done. An exit region is basically a trigger region like a trap or an info point, so the following action would work on it:

 

177 TriggerActivation(O:Object*,I:State*Boolean)

 

Just have a bit in the area script that does something like:

 

IF

RandomNum(4,1)

Global("J#AreaDestination1","GLOBAL",0)

THEN

RESPONSE #100

TriggerActivation("MyDoor1",TRUE) // Door1 is the script name of the particular travel region that sends you to area 1.

TriggerActivation("MyDoor2",FALSE)

TriggerActivation("MyDoor3",FALSE)

TriggerActivation("MyDoor4",FALSE)

SetGlobal("J#AreaDestination1","GLOBAL",1) // The variable makes this action only happen once.

END

 

And so on for the other possibilities. Possible? Yes. Lots of work? You better believe it.