Diablo II

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 MonstersThere are many foes here. Revisional Differences SkillsIncluding cut skills and alternate graphics for existing skills. Unused ObjectsUnused objects and items. Unused TextText 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.

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 and Fallout 2 as a talking head.

Cursors#

Normal#

Spell#

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).

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.

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.

Other Images#

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.