Diablo II

Diablo II
Developer: Blizzard North Publishers: Blizzard Entertainment (US), Havas Interactive (EU) Platforms: Windows, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X Released in US: June 29, 2000 Released in EU: June 30, 2000 This game has unused enemies. This game has unused modes / minigames. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused items. This game has unused abilities. This game has unused sounds. This game has unused text. This game has revisional differences. This game has a prototype article This game has a prerelease article

Apparently, Diablo didn't leave after being defeated by the warrior from Tristram, as he's back for another shot of world destruction. So, it's up to you to stop "The Mysterious Wanderer" in Diablo II.

Sub-Pages

Prototype Info

Prerelease Info

Skills Including cut skills and alternate graphics for existing skills.

Monsters There are many foes here.

Unused Objects Unused objects and items.

Unused Text Text from the game contains clues as to features cut during development.

Guilds

The game's Guild system was cut at some point during development. There is a lot of content still in the game regarding Guilds and also a fair bit of press information about them as well, which indicates that they were probably cut at the last minute to save time and never properly reintroduced in the game. They were originally intended to be a form of endgame progression. Everyone who completed the game could create a Guild (with a 3-character "tag" and a custom, colored banner identifying them) and have their friends join. There are five "guild levels", but it's unclear exactly how the progression would've worked.

There are cut levels present which were associated with the feature. There are also three objects related to guilds that can be spawned, but they crash the game when used. There's also a plethora of menu images for the Steeg Stone, banner creation, and other stuff.

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  Steeg Stone interface background.

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  Background for customizing Guild Emblem.

(Source: Prerelease Information regarding guilds - diabloii.net (Wayback Archive))

Arenas

A file, Arena.txt, is found and compiled by the game, but the code backing it doesn't seem to work properly. With a cheat engine, the arena "mode" can be set, and it logs the player's kills while active.

Arena	Suicide	PlayerKill	PlayerKillPercent	MonsterKill	PlayerDeath	PlayerDeathPercent	MonsterDeath
Deathmatch	-6	2	10	1	-2	-10	-1

"Arena" might have been one word for a gamemode type, since the game also includes a number of graphics for a Capture the Flag kind of mode.

In addition, there are cut levels which are used by the feature.

Unused Images

Character Portraits

Character portraits exist for Fara, Atma, and Warriv. These are different than the summon icons and perhaps suggest that they were originally going to be animated in a similar vein to Fallout as a talking head.

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  Atma

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  Fara

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  Warriv (Act 1)

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  Warriv (Act 2)

Cursors

Normal

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  The Diablo 1 cursor

Spell

The spell cursor icons from Diablo 1.

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  Convert

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  Exchange?

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  Another convert icon

Promotional Backgrounds

A copy of a few 800x600 promotional wallpaper backgrounds were included in the game archives, perhaps by mistake, or perhaps as a temporary placeholder. Curiously, they have their own palette which gets loaded by the game. Also, the original retail release wouldn't be able to render these in their full dimensions, since it is limited to 640x480. (It wouldn't be until the Expansion that an 800x600 resolution option was added).

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  Amazon

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  Paladin

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  Sorceress

Beta Images

At the end of the open beta, the player would be treated to a slideshow of promotional media. These go unused in the release version of the game.

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Shrine Images

In IconsFlat.dc6, there are unanimated, simpler versions of the shrine overhead graphics. There isn't an image for the Enirhs shrine, perhaps indicating that it might have been cut at this point in development.

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  Resist Fire

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  Combat

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  Resist Lightning

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  Resist Cold

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  Mana Recharge

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  Resist Poison

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  Skill

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  Armor

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  Stamina

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  Experience

Other Images

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  An unused scroll image that would've covered almost the whole screen.

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  A different scroll (recipescroll.dc6).

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  Early monster icons for the Automap, 15x15.

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  Early landmark icons for the Automap, 16x16.

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  Unknown menu thing (menupanel.dc6).

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  An early "OK" button.

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  An early "Cancel" button.

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  An extra frame accidentally inserted into the main HUD. It seems to show an altered layout, for a mini-automap that was shown in prerelease screenshots.

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  Image for the health orb, being purple. Normally the health orb is only red or green.

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  Options for dealing with NPCs. Notable is the misspelled "Indentify", and the option called "Pray" (perhaps used to restore health and mana?). In the final release it is a simple textual display.

Cut Levels

Expansion Content

The game's d2data.mpq includes a great deal of in-development Expansion content which never saw the light of day. Some of this is actually used by the game when the expansion is installed, hence the need to swap to the Play disk when installing the expansion. There are six levels in total listed in Levels.txt. They cannot be accessed at all, even with a cheat engine, because the game doesn't allow the player to go past Act 4. Technically the Expansion levels are on Act 5 (if starting from 0), the sixth Act. Also, they use an unavailable palette which would cause the graphics to glitch anyway.

The following is a rough idea of how the levels might look, based on the data that is present in Levels.txt:

• Expansion Town: Probably became Harrogath later on. Uses a unique level type whose tiles aren't present in the game. Levels.txt specifies this area as being 64x64 tiles.
• Siege 1: The only level present with objects that randomly spawn. Levels.txt indicates that this would've been randomly generated. The objects that spawn would've been blue patches of flames (similar to the waypoint graphics) and smoke. Skeletons, Misshapen, Carvers, and Ghosts would've spawned here. Levels.txt specifies this area as being 80x128 tiles. Uses a unique Sub-Level type called "Snow".
• Siege 2: Like Siege 1, only it doesn't have any objects and it also spawns Marauders and Ghouls. Levels.txt does not specify the size of this area.
• Siege 3: Uses the same level (and sublevel) type as the other Siege areas and is randomly generated, but doesn't spawn any objects or monsters and has no size. The entry image label skips from A5L3 to A5L5 here, indicating that a cave or something might have been in between Siege 2 and Siege 3 at one point.
• Siege 4: The same as Siege 3.
• Expansion Test: A preset, 64x64 area that uses the same level type as the Siege sets, but does not spawn the Snow sub-level type. The entry image labels again skip from A5L6 all the way to A5L11.

Guilds

To do: Render the files.

There are a total of five "guild levels" which are mentioned in Levels.txt. They all use the same palette as the Expansion, and the tiles and map information are actually available and viewable in mod-creating tools, but the palette is missing and colors are distorted. The closest palette is the Act 1 palette. They are all identical in terms of size, and curiously have the "Beta" flag ticked, indicating that they would be accessible from the open beta. While they use the same palette as the expansion, they are technically located on Act 4 (if counting from zero), the fifth Act. They are not accessible as the player cannot go past the fourth Act.

While there's five different "guild levels", there are actually nine presets in the files: Guild/cottages/guild1.ds1, Guild/house1/guild1.ds1, Guild/house1/guild2.ds1, Guild/house1/guild3.ds1, Guild/house1/guild4.ds1, Guild/house1/guild4b.ds1, Guild/house1/guild5.ds1, Guild/house1/guild5b.ds1, Guild/house2/guild2.ds1, and Guild/house2/guild3.ds1. Not all of them can be loaded correctly with modmaker tools.

Arenas

To do: Render the files.

Like with Guilds, there are a few cut Arena levels as well. There are three in all: two tomb levels (which have preset files DM2.ds1 and DM3.ds1) and one called Arena Travincal which references a missing file (Trav1.ds1).

Oddities

If an area has a reference to a string (.tbl file) that doesn't exist as its name, the displayed name will be the string reference appended with "--not xlated call ken". However, if it's anything aside from a level (a monster, an item, etc) it will display (by default) as "an evil force". Diablo's Bone Prison "monster" that blocks town portals shows up as "an evil force" by referencing the default string directly.

The game's life and mana are stored in 256th fractional units, so when the game displays 2 life, it is actually stored internally as being anywhere from 256-512 life, rounded up for the display. There are a number of glitches in the game which result from the developers not accounting for this properly, but the most notable is that Mana Burn enemies will do 256x as much mana drain as they're actually supposed to do, and on Hell difficulty, the Mana Burn also erroneously multiplies the amount of elemental damage a monster does. As a result, Act 5 on Hell mode is nightmarishly difficult with monsters that shoot bugged instant-killing projectiles, but the actual end boss is a walk in the park comparatively because he does not use elemental effects.

While there are a number of cut monsters, there are several monsters who very rarely make an appearance because the areas they spawn in only very rarely spawn enemies. Notably, very few monsters spawn in the Monastery Gate, Inner Cloister and Kurast Causeway.

The Super-Unique Lord de Seis originally had a unique effect modifier known as Thieving. The effect causes a random potion from the player's belt to fall onto the floor. The effect was tweaked several times and later removed because it tended to crash the game when a Barbarian used their Leap ability at the same time when Lord de Seis's effect took place. It can be re-enabled, bugs and all, for other super-unique monsters (including Lord de Seis) with trivial file editing.

Willowisp Ritual

Standing still near exactly four Willowisp monsters for long enough will cause them to bounce lightning off of each other to form "letters."

While this is happening, the player's Magic Find is raised temporarily by 400%.

This has existed since the very first release of the game and continues to exist in the Resurrected version of the game.

Revisional Differences

Version 1.01

Released (three days before launch) on June 27, 2000, this patch fixes bugs such as crashing when pressing Alt-Tab during a cinematic, crashing during the final quest countdown of Act IV if waypoints were used, and a bug preventing item sets from getting their full bonuses, while improving multiplayer servers.

Version 1.02

Released on July 10, 2000, this patch fixes bugs such as erroneously deleting a single-player character when a Realm character of the same name is deleted, and separate bugs that occur when ejecting the Play CD. This patch also fixed bugs that caused high memory usage.

Version 1.03

Version 1.03 fixes bugs such as the game crashing when using 64MB video cards and a rare bug that would mark a character unable to join in multiplayer.

Version 1.04/1.04b

Version 1.04 fixes bugs such as a dead but alive bug, various loophole closings, and compatibility with Delta CD drives. 1.04b fixes problems with accessing the Play CD on startup and various crashes for the Video Tester on Windows NT and 2000 systems.

Version 1.05/1.05b

Version 1.05 fixes copy-protection for various CD, DVD, and CD-R drives, a bug that prevented deleting some characters, and gameplay oversights that were created by Version 1.04. 1.05b fixed several Battle.Net glitches.

Version 1.06/1.06b

Version 1.06 updates Battle.Net's Terms of Service and License Agreement as well as optimize server to client communication. 1.06b further updates the Terms of Service.

Version 1.07

Released to prepare for the Lord of Destruction expansion pack in Summer 2001, Version 1.07 mainly balances skills to fit the new classes introduced in the above-mentioned expansion and improves gameplay mechanics in the process.

In this patch, a super-unique Quill Rat enemy named Flamespike the Crawler was removed from the Act 1 Level, Inner Cloister. This was probably because said enemy was coded to spawn right next to the waypoint for that area.

Version 1.08

Released on June 29, 2001, the same day as Lord of Destruction, Version 1.08 further modifies skill balances, as well as modify what can be done in towns.

Version 1.09

Released on August 20, 2001, Version 1.09 also modifies skill balances. For Lord of Destruction users, many parts of gameplay and bugs were changed and fixed respectively.

Version 1.10

Released on October 28, 2003, Version 1.10 adds new content to the game and fixes various bugs.

Version 1.11

Released on August 8, 2005, Version 1.11 increases boss difficulty on Hell mode, adds new rune items, enhances hirelings, and patches game exploits.

Version 1.12

Released on June 17, 2008, Version 1.12 adds the ability to play the game without the CD (given the user copies all the .MPQ files to the hard drive) and fixes Mac issues.

Version 1.13

Released on March 23, 2010, Version 1.13 adds features to "respec" a character to the game.

Version 1.14

Released on March 11, 2016. It added support for Windows 7 and newer, an OS X installer and support for OS X 10.10 and 10.11. The current version of the game is Version 1.14d, which was released on June 7, 2016.