The Diablo games are milestones in their genre. But the story was apparently not so important to the developers at Blizzard at first – because they “forgot” to write it down.
One can think what one wants about the story of Blizzard games, but Blizzard is at least known for meticulously preserving the lore. The game company even has its own “lore historians” who archive all details of a game world and occasionally refresh presentations and seminars with details.
Blizzard is now infamous for even having its own “Vault,” a kind of treasure chamber, where many concept drawings and also story ideas and background materials lie that probably no player will ever see. Blizzard has even hired “Lorewalkers” to preserve all the story.
But that wasn’t always the case. In the first two Diablo titles, Blizzard had apparently “forgotten” that they needed to document the details of the game world – which led to rather enduring and, in retrospect, almost absurd efforts.
Because Jean Copeland, a senior manager at Blizzard, explained in an interview with PCGamer that they had to do a significant amount of diligence for Diablo (via gamesradar.com):
Before 2005, Blizzard hardly cared about documenting its own story. As a result, a future “lore guru” had to manually transcribe all spoken words to add them to the archives.
In other words: Up to and including the expansion “Lord of Destruction” for Diablo II, the words spoken in the game were not permanently documented anywhere, to create new things based on them.
Story and Blizzard – An Eternal Reason for Criticism
Some may smile cynically at “story” and “Blizzard,” as there is constant criticism from some fans that the story is changed retroactively. Such “retcons” are often seen critically and are for some the proof that Blizzard does not take the actual story seriously. There have also been such deliberate retcons in the Diablo series, which sometimes become necessary as the game world grows and becomes more complex. Copeland said:
What I have found is that when it comes to creative sessions, the word “no” or a “lore police” does not usually help creativity. We want to make sure that we give our writers the cues they need to make their stories work, because in the end we are all just trying to tell cool stories.
It is also a bit ironic that such story changes are often viewed critically – because it was mainly the interesting stories of the game worlds that kept many fans hooked on Blizzard’s titles.
