The Diablo games are milestones in their genre. But the story was probably not that important to the developers at Blizzard at the beginning – because they had “forgotten” to write it down.
Think what you like about the story of Blizzard games, but at least Blizzard is known for meticulously preserving the story. The games company even has its own “lore historians” who archive all the details of a game world and regularly refresh the details in presentations and seminars.
Blizzard is now notorious for even having its own “vault”, a kind of treasury, in which there are many concept drawings and also story ideas and background materials that a player will probably never see. Blizzard even hired “Lorewalkers” to keep all of the story.
But that was not always so. In the first two Diablo titles, Blizzard had apparently “forgotten” the need to capture the details of the game world – and that led to a rather lengthy and, in retrospect, almost absurd work.
Because Jean Copeland, a senior manager at Blizzard, explained in an interview with PCGamer that a lot of hard work had to be made up for Diablo (via gamesradar.com):
Before 2005, Blizzard hardly cared about capturing its own story. Therefore, a future “lore guru” had to manually transcribe all spoken words in order to then add them to the archives.
Or to put it another way: Up to and including the expansion “Lord of Destruction” for Diablo II, the words spoken in the game were not permanently recorded anywhere in order to be able to create new things based on them.
Story and Blizzard – An eternal reason for criticism
Some people may smile cynically at “Story” and “Blizzard”, because some fans repeatedly criticize that the story would be changed afterwards. Such “retcons” are often seen critically and for some are proof that Blizzard does not take the actual story seriously. Also in the Diablo series there were such deliberate retcons that sometimes become necessary as the game world grows and becomes more complex. Copeland said:
What I’ve found is that when it comes to creative sessions, the word “no” or a “lore police” often doesn’t help creativity. We want to make sure we give our writers the cues to make their stories work, because at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to tell cool stories.
The fact that such story changes are often seen critically is also a bit ironic – because for many fans it was above all the interesting stories of the game worlds that tied them to Blizzard’s title.