Diablo II Mysteries
Guild Icon Background
Called guildiconbckg.dc6, this page seems to show an option for players to select a guild tabard or banner for their guild. The coloring boxes indicate that the banners could have been colored differently by the players.
Sadly, this is just a background, and it appears Blizzard quickly scrapped their plans shortly after making this picture, for only one guild icon was ever finished, or is at least present in the game
It's very dark and not very clear. However looking at the backgrounds I really like most of the pictures. I think had they been implemented they would have worked very well in the Diablo setting. Although a few, like the Pentagram, would probably have been more popular than others
And notice the Cow banner option in the top right corner
Guild Bank
Called guildvault.dc6 in the game, the name leaves little guessing. Apparently plans were to implement a guild bank as well for guilds, something which is very common in many MMO's today.
What could the top area have been used for? Perhaps a log of what people had put in/removed? A message the guild leader could leave for his members?
And as some of you may notice, Blizzard's early philosophy of inventory space is maintained. The storage space is far from spacious, especially when considering that this would be for much more than a single person.
Bank
Simply called bank.dc6, this design seems to suggests that some sort of bank system was to be put into the game. However personally I think it more likely that this was an early design for the personal stash.
Once again, notice the storage space. Spacious to say the least :rolleyes:
Update: Apparently this is how the stash looked at release. I blame ten years for not remembering.
Trophies
trophycase.dc6 is an interesting picture. What exactly would trophies have been used for? Now some of you might be suggesting that this is where the Standard of Heroes is supposed to go, but keep in mind that these images all come from the Classic Diablo II files, and the Standard of Heroes was introduced in Patch 1.11, long after these plans and images had been scrapped.
What would trophies have been then? Perhaps an early version of what we generally call achievements these days? What do you think?
Update: spierce7 has pointed out that all of these Guild features were announced and subsequently dropped by Blizzard before Beta even began. The trophy hall was supposed to have been a guild feature, not a player feature. Read it here
Steegstone
This last picture is very ambiguous. It is simply called steegstonebckg.dc6 in the game, and that doesn't really say anything.
I'm theorizing that this is some form of profile page. The top left appears to be a place for a picture, most likely of the character class. The large box to the left could be for stats and the large to the right for skills and items. The right button also seems to be scrollable, suggesting a lot of info could go in there.
The field with the star indicates some sort of title. Is this where Slayer/Champion etc would have been displayed, or perhaps would a title earned in the aforementioned Trophy system be displayed here?
Update: T'hain Esh Kelch has suggested that this last picture might actually be how the guild chat would have looked. If you look closely, the black box in the left corner is the same size as the guild banner backgrounds shown earlier in this post. It would make sense for guilds to have a guild interface to interact with each other with.
Update 2: spierce7 pointed out that the steeg stone was a feature used to upgrade your guild. By adding gold, players could upgrade their guild to new levels, adding more functionality and features to it. Read it here
Lots of mysteries. Let the speculation begin
Blizzard has tons of images and dead code stored in their files that isn't used by anything. I'm no coder, and I don't claim to know how this works, but it could be that removing it could screw up the order of the files coming after the removed file, making it so that the game can't find what it needs.
I know that's how several .txt's work, like Monstats.txt, but I don't know if it also applies to mpq's ars well.
Incredible! I knew I couldn't possibly have been the first to have these images.
Well this clears up some thing. Like what the Steeg stone is. I definitely like what I see, upgrading your guild to higher levels would have been awesome. Imagine starting from hut to full-blown castle. You could even have NPC guards, extra rooms, and with the advent of much greater processing power in computers, perhaps eventually an arena as well.
And a trophy hall for the guild makes much more sense. That would actually serve a purpose. I mean, why would you want to include trophies if no one can see them?
Or, it could have to do with different guild levels. Guild 1 would be the first, Guild 2 the little hut with the stash etc.
Diablo 2 really lacks good MP features and still was a sucess. D2 would be so much better with all this Guilld features...
I hope they can dev. D3 with better time management. No matter how much they say "It's done when it's done", this simple don't exist. Every company works based at time otimization, the exceptions are a failure and blizz aren't a failure.
Apparently they did have bigger plans for PVP :/.
Since there is a time for every release, even when talking about Blizzard, taking more time wasn't an option. And apparently they sought to focus their efforts on other features. What they were is not exactly clear, but essentially everything in D2 as it is today.
I'm thinking the absurd development cycles Blizzard employs nowadays is partly because many of the the developers themselves feel that they too wanted all of these features to be implemented. They too want their games to be at the very top, and with the reputation and money as well as reputation Blizzard has, they can afford to take some of those chances to make their games like they want them to be.
Yeah, PvP was as we all know included at the last minute. It's interesting however that there were plans for it so early in development though.
Thats the time management problem i was talking about.
I've watched blizzard's creation process with D2 and WC3 and i think the reason of why they lack so much time management skill is the fact that they are very greedy about the amount of features in their games. Usually they plan and partially develop ALOT of stuff that, in the end, don't make into the game. The problem is that those stuff cost time :/
Maybe if they had more rigid general lanes of development they would have to test less stuff and have more time to implement more features.
Though this problem was only really destructive in D2. If you look close, D2 is really a game that was released unfinished. And whats even worse is that Lord of Destruction are a *very* small expansion keeping the game the sensation of unfished product.
Why would anyone assume that they actually want to release this game and compete with a cashcow like WoW with their own product?
Which part of "a billion a year in revenue" and "a decade since D2's release" is hard to understand?
the arena was actually the part they worked on the most, was about 85% complete, and up till 1.11, the code behind it was actively scoring pvp & pvm kills/deaths(its stored along with the party stuff, so I assume it was to be displayed on the party screen), there is also a few arena maps stashed away in the mpq files. the code was probably chopped out to try reduce server load...
i agree. i dont think we'll get any of these in 1.13, wishful thinkin tho. would be tight
EA could, but they don't. They just abuse the market and make as much money as possible with games that certainly have none of their elements reconsidered, they are just thrown around with good graphics and as fast as possible.
Its sad really. I'm just glad that, since Blizzard -can- afford it, they do it. And it'll pay off in the end, I'm sure.
So, before WoW's release, when they would have a major release every year with less than a fifth of the current development staff and less than a tenth of the current revenue - what was that? Did games like Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Brood War, Lord of Destruction suck? :confused:
Your point?
More people and more revenue = faster game?
You know the market is more demanding these days as well, right?
You don't have a point, you're just throwing shit around.
Well we can only guess, but I'm thinking unbalanced features, like skills balance and Nightmare/Hell difficulties were more pressing issues than features few people actually knew anything about.
And yeah, I figured it would have been mentioned. I did a (very) quick search, and all that turned up was kingpin over at the ol' keep mentioning steegstone wasn't used by anything. Besides, plently of people, me included, we're unaware of all this
So they did actually work on it? Too bad that didn't make the final game.
You think, or you know? :rolleyes:
Milking the WoW cow is exactly why they have no interest in releasing it. You would think people would see through the iteration line, but I guess love and faith are blind. The only thing being "iterated" is the counting of WoW subscription cash.
That's ridiculous. They make three million bucks each and every day in revenue from WoW, and most of that is profit. Another fantasy title (with psuedo-MMO features) would absolutely cut into that, and the math just doesn't work when you consider the idea of replacing even a small fraction of that subscription revenue with a one-time box sale. A Science Fiction RTS doesn't compete with WoW directly, which is why you will see SC2 soon.
They aren't losing a thing - but they are keeping the fanbase in suspense and, more importantly, warehousing some of the best developers in the industry without having to compete with them at another studio.
EDIT: The topic has nothing to do with Diablo 3. It specifically deals with Diablo II, and if features like this are likely to appear. NOT if Diablo II will be released or not. I'm not warning again.
I respectfully disagree - isn't "Why don't they want to release this game?" the biggest mystery of all? (Though certainly not a hard one to solve.)