Mirado the Warrior is now level 9 and slogging his way through the upper 4 levels of the dungeons below the old church in Tristam. I spent a good deal of time getting sucked into the loot rewards, just one more fight to level, and the OH SHIT RUN of it all. I don't feel overwhelmed but I sure as hell feel a little nervous with every door I open and every corner I turn.
I played D3 for a little bit a while back, the demo anyway . . . and I wasn't enjoying it. I felt like I was just clicking and hoping. It looked good, but I didn't feel that existential fear of my guy getting popped like in Diablo 1. I felt like I couldn't beat the Skeleton King, but not like I was afraid of losing my guy or like I had any real stakes other than some time. I could have gotten the upgraded D2, or installed D2 and the expansion from my disks . . . but it was Diablo itself that seemed like a great way to spend some time. Much simpler - Warrior, Rogue, Sorcerer - and less worry about skill tree builds.
I played this game so damn much back in the day. I think I capped out at level 48 with one of my guys - Cthulbert - and played with my lamented lost buddy Ed, Don, my coworker Jesus (not Hey-soos, rather Gee-Zus), and a few others here and there. Fun stuff.
If anyone knows a way to get rid of the need for the CD, that would be nice, as my main play machine doesn't have a CD-ROM. If you've done it, let me know what worked - I tried searching for all sorts of methods and tried them to no avail, so don't drop me a link unless it's described what you had work for you. Thanks guys, and see you in Hell! (Aka levels 13-16)
D1 is discless and kept working by gog. $10 US. https://www.gog.com/en/game/diablo
ReplyDeleteYeah, but I own it already, so I don't feel like paying $10 to have someone make it work slightly better.
DeleteThere are only two ways I know of to run Diablo without the disk: one is to run a cracked copy* (which I understand the methods and where to look but never have†) or to buy it on GOG:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.gog.com/en/game/diablo
It's a tener right now, but if that's too much (it was for me, I picked it up for 80% off a few years back) just wait for sale, they crop up here and there. I can confirm the GOG version runs smoother as butter without the cd, and without needing to be installed on a thumbdrive.
* If you're interested, fire me an email ([username]@gmail.com and I can dig into this route for you. As far as my morals are concerned, you clearly own the game, you just need to overcome a small measure of "DRM" to make playing it more enjoyable.
† I've always owned it and never had an issue with needing the cd back in the day, still don't - I still have a cd drive (and am running Win7). But I do prefer playing it without risking my old cds. I have it now in four editions: OG Diablo, Diablo + Hellfire Battlechest, Diablo+Hellfire for PS1‡, and Diablo GOG edition. Man, the old Blizzard games were good enough to buy more once, they should go back to doing what they used to do...
‡ My second ex wanted a Playstation game (before there was a PS2) we'd both play, she had a PS but I'm a PC Master Race gamer, so she got Diablo for PS so we could play together. When we split up, she didn't want the game... so I have a PS1 game with no PS1 console. Which is fine, I've thought about selling it a few times, but honestly that takes more energy than just packing it up with all my old games whenever I move...
Thanks . . . I don't want to deal with cracked stuff.
DeleteBut I agree - Warcraft and II, Diablo and Diablo II, and Starcraft were amazing, genre-changing games. Worth every penny I paid for each one.
Okay, so no crack and no GOG... while you might be looking into the ISO loader route or the diabloweb route... theoretically you already have a 'diskless' copy, since you installed the 1.0.9 patch which is supposed to make it diskless (but doesn't seem to work for everyone).
DeleteThis reddit thread has a few suggestions, and two them weren't even mentioned in our replies here!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo1/comments/88i9zy/diablo1_without_the_cd/
However the 'just use the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel' suggestion will not work for you, that tool only works for Win7 and earlier, it won't run in Win10 or 11.
But, if you're willing to get into using github, there is a NoCD patch offered here with excellent, simple instructions:
https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper/wiki/Diablo
I'll take a look and see what works. At the moment, I'm fine with the disk-based on my backup laptop. But I'll see what I can do to make it fully portable. It's fun trying to make it work better since it's already working well enough.
DeleteRegarding playing without a CD:
ReplyDeleteYou can rip the CD to an ISO file and then "mount" the ISO with your OS.
More simply, you can get the game on Good Old Games: https://www.gog.com/en/game/diablo
And finally, I'm pretty sure that as long as you have DIABLO.MPQ, there are several modernized engines that will run the game on modern platforms as long as you supply that file. One of the more unique ways is in your browser: https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/
I'll give that a try, thanks.
DeleteYou can just buy it digitally cheap and DRM free on GOG.com now.
ReplyDelete