On his PlayStation 1, a player played a Diablo clone and then left the genre in 2001. Now he has started with Diablo 4 and discovered: This is exactly the game he has been searching for all these years.
Which Diablo clone did he play? In a Reddit thread, the user Elegant-Impression38 shares that he played Darkstone on PS1 back then. After that, he was done with action RPGs. Darkstone is a medieval role-playing game in the style of Diablo. It was developed by Delphine Software, released in 1999 for PC and in 2001 for PlayStation. The game along with trailers and screenshots can also be found on Steam.
In Darkstone, there is a cooperative mode, eight characters, and four classes. You level up your character stats, enhance your equipment, and hack through four areas with increasing difficulty. There is magic, dungeons, and skills like Stealing, Disarming Traps, and Repairing Items.
This is what he says about Diablo 4: Now the player has finally dared to try “the real Diablo” and is thrilled. “Who would have thought that I have actually been searching for Diablo my whole life? This game is simply incredibly good,” he raves.
Without a point of reference, he feels the game is quite solid, he adds in the comments. He also reveals that he is currently playing a Barbarian and is already looking forward to trying the next class.
Diablo 4 is now 2 years old:
What do other players think about it? In the Reddit thread, several users write that they still remember Darkstone well. New-Rate-5524, for example, mentions that he had put a ring on his character that inflicted damage. However, he couldn’t take it off.
The user Gasmaskdude27 comments that he misses Darkstone: “I wish someone would make a new game with some of these mechanics.” Elegant-Impression38 replies that for him, Diablo is exactly that new game. “I haven’t tried the Huntress yet, but in the PC version of Darkstone, the bow was useless because it could only shoot at 45-degree angles,” he remembers.
Others give the fresh Diablo fan a well-meant piece of advice: he should not let negative threads or comments in the Diablo 4 subreddit ruin his fun. For instance, gatorfan8898 writes: “It’s a great game. There are valid criticisms, but I just love it.”
There is always discussion and debate about Diablo 4 on Reddit. Some even say: Anyone who likes Diablo 4 gets backlash from the fans – and have direct evidence of it.
That new players are still starting with Diablo 4 today is actually not that unusual. And then there are the returnees, so players who have dropped out after a certain season or have first tried other ARPGs. Some have realized after the final release of Last Epoch that they actually prefer a few things in Diablo 4. You can read about what that was here: Some players return to Diablo 4 after hundreds of hours in Last Epoch: This is what they say
