The excellence of Diablo lies in the atmosphere of the game. I think it is one of the best games in terms of the overall atmosphere and that general feel of play. All the pieces work perfectly together to deliver this unique sensation while playing the game.
Especially the music. Matt Ulemen has created a masterpiece soundtrack!
PS. It is very funny that reading this pitch document I haven't noticed any of that ephemeral things that build this unique atmosphere. Funny how such pitches are evaluated only on the sole raw description the gameplay and nothing else...
Yeah, Diablo had an very well realized atmosphere and solidified tone. The soundtrack played a big part of that. I can still remember how great it felt simply walking around the town and being absorbed by the world.
In the Diablo postmortem last week at GDC, David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder) said[1] that Matt Ulemen bugged them until they gave him the job.
Interestingly that guy was working on Marvel Heroes until recently, having been hired after the initial launch went sour to help rework the game.
Its an online only ARPG where everyone can play a number of heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel universe (the in game justification is that a very powerful artifact is screwing up reality, allowing multiple variants of the characters to exist at the same time).
The cool thing is that David Brevik didn't just work at Gazillion on Marvel Heroes, he actually played it. And he still does.
He and his wife stream on twitch and play every week as they've done for years now. Every now and again he'll talk about game dev type stuff, few weeks (maybe months now I forget) he talked about the tile generation in Diablo. He also still plays Everquest 1 of all things.
Yeah i think that quite a number of people in the game production business are basically not gamers. They are storytellers, they are animators, they are artists of various stripes, but they are just not gamers.
Thus there is a big risk that they will concoct schemes that will drive a gamer up the wall.
There was supposed to be a cutscene [1] which played when you opened the door (similar to when you first encounter Lazarus), but it was apparently disabled. The video file was still left on the game disc.
And having the cutscene there would perhaps not have been as effective, as it would have removed the player from the "world" if only for a split second.
I somewhat have to disagree in that the popularity of Diablo is similar to that of WoW - the underpinnings in pure addiction. Random positive reinforcers are really, really powerful.
I would agree with you in the case of Diablo 2 (and probably 3, though I haven't played that one). But the first Diablo holds a special place in my heart precisely because of the atmosphere.
Gameplay-wise it was actually pretty broken. Gold takes up space in your inventory, and there was no concept of a stash, so you'd just dump your gold on the ground in town. The best strategy was to fight through the dungeon until your inventory fills up, then go back to town, sell off everything, buy the best stuff you can see, rinse and repeat.
Online multiplayer wasn't much better, mostly because of the "duping" bug which allowed players to easily duplicate items.
That said, it's still a fun game to play through, because of the atmosphere of it. Multiplayer is also great with friends so long as you don't break the game. And you can set challenges for yourself to make it more fun (e.g. "Ironman" mode, where you can't buy items or go back to town without dying).
Diablo 2 and 3 are great games in their own way, but as you say, they rely on that addictive random loot-fest, which I never really liked.
Yeah and it doesn't seem that knowing about them makes any difference. I actively know that Diablo and other similar games are doing this and yet I find that I like it. The games do lose replay value over time a bit (I'm worn out on D3) but if you wait a while and go back it's fun again. For now, I'm playing similar games (Path of Exile, Grim Dawn) and finding I'm enjoying the different styles of art, even though it's essentially the same exact gameplay.
Maybe what I think is fun is more addiction than fun? Hard to tell. Obtaining random loot sure is addictive.
There's a hymn in the ancient Rigveda scriptures, known as "Gambler's Lament."
> The trembling hazelnut eardrops of the great tree, born in a hurricane, intoxicate me as they roll on the furrowed board. The dice seem to me like a drink of Soma from Mount Mujavant, keeping me awake and excited.
> [...]
> The dice goad like hooks and sting like whips; they enslave, deceive, and torment. They give presents as children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey - an irresistible power over the gambler.
I only played the 1st half way but I think you're right. It had a very tangible aesthetic that I rarely felt in other games. I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much.
>I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much.
I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3.
The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now.
I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.
For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination.
I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover.
What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful.
The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
I agree movies can rely less on CGI and since the camera/acting hasn't made dramatic leaps like game tech it doesn't really matter that much.
I think you are misunderstanding me with HL comment - I'm not saying you need to have the best graphics in the generation to be a good game - I'm saying every generation raises the bar for "tolerable" on multiple value scales (both graphics, gameplay, story, sound/voice acting).
HL had good graphics for it's era, and as someone else mentioned you can pull a lot of weight if you have a style that works with what you have. For example Fallout games have/had crap graphics compared to contemporary shooters - for example Bioshock was much better graphically and stylistically - but it's good enough to be passable so you can focus on gameplay/story/world.
But if Fallout 3/4 had HL1 graphics and design constraints I doubt I or many other people would play it.
> The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that.
It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
To follow up on agumonkey's additions, to me at the time, all the elements combined to give a sense of presence (in the VR sense) that I'd never really felt in a game.
Characters talking to you in-game, banal everyday moments and a believable world (ex elements caused by "the accident"), seeing your hands, a reactive environment (remember, for you youngsters, boxes shattering and random items on desks being movable was novel!).
All the little details added up to just make the world feel different than other games I'd played.
Yet that's what all the reviews are about. Resolution centerfolds. And I get that, I was much into this as a teen, software stack and video cards that would allow for shinier. But it doesn't really last, especially when people spend too much efforts justifying a new game on this rather than making an actual game that is funny, surprising or inspiring.
Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too.
Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
One interesting bit about early Nintendo was that the recently departed CEO was a self taught programmer on the Commodore 64.
At the time Nintendo made card games and such, and he basically brought the C64 over, and demoed various stuff.
Give it a few years and the guy is running the company that may well have rebooted the gaming console market.
Thing about those early consoles was that there was basically no firmware or OS. Every game had full run of the hardware, much like any software had on the early microcomputers.
Even funnier, the 'games' were as much software than hardware extension. The main system was often designed to have an external loop to hook in optional chips in the cartridge.
Yep. As i recall this was the case for both NES and SNES, with SNES making a bigger marketing fuss about it (SuperFX mostly). I think they stepped away from direct bundling with the N64 and dropped the concept when moving to discs with the Gamecube.
Yep, having the extended opening where you are simply some lab assistant on your first day was very fresh. Most often than not the justification for the gameplay was given as a short bit of text, or completely absent before that.
Similarly, when i play most MMORPGs i rarely stop to consider the story given by each quest. But i recently picked up Elder Scrolls Online, and there every minor NPC is voiced (most of the lines are read by the same small pool of voice actors). It makes the quests that much more interesting even though most of them are the same old fetch/kill kind.
One quest i got particularly fond of began with me picking up a disembodied skull that ask me to assemble his skeleton. And it make various comments throughout the quest.
I know a lot of people have this and I am happy I do not. When I played games in 70s and 80s I made up everything in my head. Even complete 3D; playing the first Metal Gear it felt like the 3d version that would come many years later. I even told people how I saw the enemies and how I felt the betrayel of big boss and drew the different buildings in 3d for them as my mind made them. When I play modern games I do not have to do that anymore and it feels like a loss. So I play both old and new when I have time to play. But better graphics do not do much for me. In films either: I am thinking stories around the story while watching and add things that I think should have been there. I (and luckily my wife has that too) do not mind watching a very low quality version of series and movies as long as the sound is clear. I find it far more disturbing that storylines are so uninspired more often than not and that for instance 'people' seem to enjoy garbage that is just a soap opera with aliens vs hardcore scifi or horror. That beats bad cgi any day for me. But yes to recognize it even is bad cgi I need to switch off my internal augmented reality show.
Edit: that is something I noticed: those 4k+ bigscreen TVs make material not specially made for it (which is most for now) look far worse than on my crap TV. It is far too detailed so I have a continues uncanny valley feeling even with the latest productions.
I'm very much passionated about all this. I remember when technology wasn't really at the center. I would never bother with the quality of VHS tapes. Watching Star Wars on a bad CRT TV didn't really matter.
The run for tech and visual is natural. I'm sure all generations had this. When it's gone you're left with timeless principles. What I'd call the 'classics'. Good thins have a good deal of it. And this classical features are related to the tech used to implement. More to how our minds find joy.
When I watch old movies I see them without the glow of the era they were born in. I see the framework behind, and how theatrical they were. How they faked most of things, with moving pictures instead of actors on a scene. But the rules are still there. Surprise, tension, suspense, exageration, timing, aesthetic, oddity, rhythm.
I still find Blake's 7 one of the best shows ever made while a lot of people cannot watch the styrofoam and other crap effects. I never saw those then and I still do not (we do some marathons of the old with friends, some are 20something), the storytelling and less than actionpactness is part of the dystopian and lost feeling. The absense of 16 year old (looking) unrealistic starry-eyed teens helps as well giving this brutal Federation world it's atmosphere.
I find it a crying shame a lot of people cannot appreciate these shows, movies or games. They are not that different...
I don't know Blake's 7. But 'crappy' effects reminds me of Clash of the Titan, the 81 version. The stop motion was crap, but magical at the time. Still is. Bah... people are so misguided.
If you like dystopian scifi and do not mind the Queens English it is well worth the watch. I like anything from scifi to drama and even some musicals and recently one of my best friends who is a script rewriter got me into reading scripts instead. That's a whole different experience: it is quite nice for me as I have a vivid and graphical imagination. Very different from books. It however does make the average production seem even more cookie-cutter.
Edit: I do not think I watched or read Clash of the Titan '81 so I will.
The only english scifi that I know is ... red dwarf. I'll Blake's in mind in case I'm into 'new old'.
I guess there's a time for visual bliss but like many things it wears off if abused. Today is more about large scale SFX and not enough of the rest. Reading is low on visual and has to be high on the rest. I did read few pages of scripts and found it very interesting too, but maybe for historical purposes (seeing drafts of Terminator, Alien, etc)
If you like greek mythology and shiny metals you'll probably enjoy CotT. It's not Kubrick's mastery worth, but it has a glow of simple magical, fantasy, that I rarely, if ever, found again.
> The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now.
I have noticed that people don't care for CGI that much anymore. We see so much of it that we have become inured to it while it used to be a movie "feature". So inured that most of the CGI is actually pretty mediocre but people don't seem to care. It has made me appreciate the old (and more "mechanical") special effects much more.
What I appreciate about the old were from constraints imposed by the lack of CGI. Effects costed a lot and were used only when the ROI was huge. People used a patchwork of techniques to convey the idea. Famously, lots of Terminator 2 shots weren't CGI but giant puppet that looked like humanoid shredded metal.
The other part is 'live set'. Nowadays cameras are removed from the action, and are often on a plane, not moving through, near, close to actors. The first minute of Alien is telling, it walks through the ship, the steam, the wires. I felt more immersed than in Avatar with 3D glasses. Actors were framed closer, and felt a bit more connected too.
While this is the pitch they made while David was at Condor it was not the origin of the idea for the game. As David mentioned on Friday at the GDC Post-mortem, he had the original idea in Highschool for a more traditional turn-based, tile-based RPG. The music, art direction and many other elements that made Diablo an innovative game actually came organically and much later.
Catacombs music was scary as hell to me when I was a teenager especially when a horde of champion goatmen were hiding in a room ready to snipe me with their archers.
I really loved that atmosphere. Can you recommend another game that captures the same kind of feel and atmosphere? The dark, brooding mythology, idk how to even describe it.
At GDC last week there was a Diablo postmortem, which was the impetus for posting the design doc. The speaker (Blizzard North's co-founder) rhetorically asked the audience if they wanted to see the original doc.
I'm still surprised bands, authors etc don't have some sort of "honesty box" where people can make payments directly to them to thank them, compensate for piracy etc. Would cost nothing but benefit them if only a little in most cases. Perhaps their labels etc wouldn't like it if people routinely downloaded their stuff and paid them directly though.
I wonder if that could have unintended consequences. Would people feel better about pirating if such a thing existed?
It reminds me of the study in Freakonomics about day care centers and the problem of parents sometimes not picking up their kids on time. Which meant that employees would have to stay after closing. So they started charging parents a small fee for being late. The result was that parents were more late than ever, since it meant they no longer felt guilty. The fine removed the guilt associated with being late.
"Would people feel better about pirating if such a thing existed?"
You like an artist, you're honest and not poor. You can buy a cd for x, where some tiny percentage of x goes to the artists. Or you could download the cd and pay x to the artist.
the companies take a fee out of the "store" for every payment. This in turn means the payment has to be large enough to cover the fee and still allow profit.
The sum of said payment is likely to end up being above most people's "no worries" threshold. Never mind that now the card info is in yet another potentially hackable database.
I think from this draft, its quite hard to imagine how successfull diablo would become. It looks solid, but no revolution. The real magic of diablo is artwork, in music and design, the stories and chars. still amazing in 2016!
In Paris, 2008, there was the "Worldwide Invitational", a Blizzard convention much like BlizzCon but much smaller scale (About ~7k people in total went).
Many rumors were going around about the announcement of a new game. Even more rumors about "Diablo III", which had been said to be in the works for almost a decade. After the opening ceremony, Mike Morhaime gave his usual speech and started dropping hints, gave a long lead up to "Blizzard's newest game".
And without saying any name, a musician came on stage and started doing the Tristram riff. Everybody immediately understands what's going on. The lights go red. Everybody yelling and clapping - unbelievable excitement.
Cinematic starts. Chills. Still no name for that "new game". The cinematic starts cutting faster and faster, hinting more and more at Diablo until we see Diablo himself in a cut. And then... three fiery claws across the screen lead into the name: "Diablo III".
There's no way I can do that story justice, but this was one of the most incredible announcement Blizzard has done - and since WWI doesn't get as much coverage as BlizzCon, not many people got to hear about it. Here's two videos:
Sadly I didn't find that D3 lived up to D2 and D1 atmosphere-wise. The ending of the first chapter put me off the game entirely -- I guess they were trying to shift the focus of the story to other characters for a new audience.
I can't put my finger on it, but somehow D3 felt less connected to D1 and D2 than D2 did to D1.
Haven't played Diablo in probably 15 years, but damn did that music flash me back. The atmosphere in Diablo was just fantastic...the music really brings back the feeling of getting lost in that world.
1st page sounds like it's describing every/any rogue like. end goal/boss, random generated levels, lots of race / class combos, turn based gridded movement, increasing danger with depth, improving characters, magic treasures to improve player capabilities.
Maybe I only played DII+, but that doesn't sound like much like diablo that I remember. esp turn based?
So glad they dumped the turn based stuff! I've played through both I/II (prefer I) and it has some of these features. If I recall correctly the movement is somewhat grid based (but enables the player to move in more than 4 [8?] directions).
I read somewhere else about the move from turn based. If I recall correctly (sorry, no citation), the game was feeling a bit static, pretty much as you described. Somebody built a prototype live mode and that was when the game started feeling good.
As a kid I loved the original Diablo game for how far they went into creating a dark, satanic atmosphere. The music still gives me chills! So I was worried this document would be over-corporate and spoil it.
But those illustrations look like they came straight from The Goetia!
It is interesting that the original marketing plan pitched micro-expansions that look a lot like the DLC of today.
The expansions seem to serve as a marketing tool and collectors item rather than a cash grab, but I do wonder why there was no followthrough.
Possibly because this posed the expansions as floppy disks costing $4.95 – by the time Diablo was released it was on CD, and presumably the art required for expansions was much larger than a CD, and CDs were not as cheap as a single floppy disk.
Even though I sometimes wished for a deeper dungeon or perma-death like when I played Angband and ZAngband; but I do remember enjoying the atmosphere and story of Diablo and Diablo II and having a lot of fun playing multiplayer with friends. Even with more advanced games out, I remember getting together with some high school friends when home on a college break to setup a LAN and play Diablo II---five years old and still lots of fun!
Interesting to see what they pitched vs what they delivered, a turn based RPG with a real life collector card game is not what Diablo turned out to be.
The document says 1994 and diablo was released 31st of December 1996(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29). So it was very delayed. I guess that the game underwent some huge changes to justify this delay.
> Our company was saying, "We're going to take on this developer, Condor, and we're going to publish their game. It's called Diablo." And for a couple of months we were working on it not knowing that it was turn-based. When it came out that it was turn-based, we said, "No, that sucks."
> We actually took a vote. They said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were turn-based." I think two people raised their hands. Then they said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were real-time." Everybody raised their hands. Allen went in and called Dave Brevik and said, "Look, you've got to make this real-time."
Does anyone know more about the history of Condor and it's original team?
Wiki says Condor was bought by Blizzard nine months before Diablo launched. Then, after Diablo II the team split into two separate companies?
Also, I'm guessing this pitch document was to investors for initial funding. I'm curious to know how much they raised and who from. This doc looks like it came from experienced game devs.
Condor became "Blizzard North" after Blizzard acquired them. They were put in charge of the Diablo series, after Blizzard made a lot of adjustments to it (including the move from turn-based, which we see in this draft, to ARPG).
They were shut down after they failed to produce any progress on Diablo III for years (like I said in another post, Diablo III had been expected for almost a decade before its announcement).
I was very interested to see that the team they pitched included only 11 people, including designers and illustrators. Only three programmers ('One chief programmer and two junior programmers').
Am I correct in thinking that a team this size would be considered closer to an indy game in 2016? I am not a game developer but this seems like a very stark comparison to the current landscape / size of software teams (not just limited to games).
My startup now has about 25 coders doing what 2-3 of us did for a few years. I'm still not sure what everyone does. We are actually moving quite a bit slower these days.
For the time, that was a pretty good sized team. Id did most of their early games with Carmack, Romero, Abrash, and a few different artists/level designers.
Though I doubt they started working immediately after pitch. I was also very interested in this point since my SO is a project manager and it rubs off.
So for all we know it could have been pitched in Q4 1994 and finished in Q1 1996.
The way they talk about their Dynamic Random Level Generation suggests they probably already somewhat developed it (and probably other aspects of the game) as a proof of concept.
I think the "randomness" is Diablo games is what makes it really addictive. I remember playing Diablo 1 and I couldn't stop playing because I couldn't wait for the next item to drop.
Also, a low-end machine could run it!
Diablo II, still the same thing - it was basically a better Diablo I.
Diablo III on the other hand came out with an Auction House - which basically killed it. I played in the early parts of DIII, it was okay but not as fun as DI and DII. However, things are very different now. There have been lots of updates in Diablo III and Blizzard killed the Auction House - So can't say how it feels now. But I'm pretty sure the "randomness" is still there - which basically what drives the game.
Does anybody know how big the seed is for Diablo's RNG? I'm guessing it would have to be 1 value for the environment (to ensure saving/reloading into the same world) but would that 1 value determine all pseudo-randomness (AI aside) in the game (e.g. item drops and their stats).
The seed is a 32-bit signed integer [1]. Diablo 1 was using the Borland C/C++ pseudo-random number generator algorithm, with a multiplier of 0x15A4E35 and an increment of 1 [2,3]. A Go implementation of the PRNG used in Diablo 1 is located at [4].
So I guess there are 2^31-1 unique dungeons per level. Storing, rather than dynamically generating, these dungeons would require a huge amount of disk space. For each level, a 112x112 two-dimensional array of 32-bit integers is used to store the piece IDs which make up each tile (a tile consists of four pieces) [5], and a 40x40 two-dimensional array of 8-bit integers is used to store the tile IDs [6]. Thus, a total of 51776 bytes (roughly 50 KB) is required to store the contents of each generated dungeon.
In total, more than 100 TB would be required to store the contents of each unique procedurally generated dungeon per level. The game contains 17 levels, so to store each unique dungeon for each level, a storage capacity of about 1.7 PB would be required. This might be possible today, but was definitely a challenge back in 1996.
What is remarkable to me about Diablo is how little it has changed. Dungeons and environments are more sophisticated, but at its heart it remains the game described in that doc, just better.
"Diablo is a role playing game wherein a player creates a single character and guides him..."
Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process.
Note that in Diablo 1 (1996) and Diablo 2 (2000), the gender of each class was fixed (with more male than female options), but in Diablo 3 (2012) gender choices became available for each class.
I think this should be considered a victory for feminism, and a real sign of progress taken over these past ~20 years.
>
Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process.
It's standard in English to use the male pronoun in cases where you would refer to both or either gender.
The Wikipedia article for "singular they" [0] notes that, politics aside, it was a common recommendation. However, there was never a consensus that this was correct, and accordingly it was never standard. It has examples from the 1800s of famous authors using singular they. Plus bonus quotations of Chaucer and Shakespeare!
There are also some good counterexamples of this making any amount of sense. My favorite is a reader letter to the New York Times from 1985:
"""The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work. As he shaves or blow-dries his hair or pulls on his panty-hose, he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day."
— C. Badendyck [sic], New York Times (1985)"""
All that being said, it was definitely still taught in the 90s, because I learned that it was correct when I was in grade school, and unlearned it later. I would believe that the authors of this document were using the gender neutral pronoun. I would also easily believe that they were making a game for men, where the protagonists were all men.
> The Wikipedia article for "singular they" [0] notes that, politics aside, it was a common recommendation.
I think you meant to say it 'has' become a common recommendation, historically the singular masculine pronoun for the gender neutral was much more prevalent.
Even here on HN we see mixed gender pronouns all the time. In fact I see it more than just seeing 'he did' etc. This world view fits the facts just fine thanks.
But wait - it's only a game. If you think this is important, you are free to start a competing company, create gender balanced games, and eat their lunch.
Well,there's no longer such a need, since Diablo 3 is completely gender balanced (at least concerning the hero classes).
I don't know what influenced this, but apparently change can also be made from within a company.
Yeah, I don't understand why people connect your current gender and the one you play as. I quite enjoy playing the female characters in games, even as a male.
The only thing that bothers me is when the world is inconsistent about how it applies its rules. But all of that is far less important than the gameplay itself.
Because I like to play games as if it were me in that characters shoes, and make decisions that I would make in that situation (I always end up being some kind of neutral character as a result).
I find this much easier when choosing male characters. I'll still play as female characters without issue in games where you're supposed to beplaying as a particular character with a backstory and such, like Mirror's Edge or Tomb Raider or something.
Especially the music. Matt Ulemen has created a masterpiece soundtrack!
PS. It is very funny that reading this pitch document I haven't noticed any of that ephemeral things that build this unique atmosphere. Funny how such pitches are evaluated only on the sole raw description the gameplay and nothing else...