I developed/run a private server for the game that many members of the Diablo team made after Diablo II (Hellgate: London) and the same technique is used for random dungeon generation, but using 3D assets and 2d flat floormap shapes to make the combinations. In fact, it's even called the same thing, DRLG!<p>Sometimes the game tries a few thousand combinations when a player enters a dungeon before being satisfied by the results (there are configurable constraint sets).
The random dungeon generation was, for me, absolutely the top killer feature of the game and was the main thing that kept me coming back through so many replays.<p>For some reason, not a single other similar game I've played has had the same effect on me. Maybe there's bias going on (obviously I was younger then), but I've played a huge number of games since, and not a single one quite scratched the same itch. I will be saving this article.
I don't think I've heard Diablo called a roguelike before. It's got the dungeon crawling and procedural generation, but the permanent death seems to be one of the most quintessential features of the genre. Diablo does not have that.
I don't think any of this was mentioned in Brevik's postmortem.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc</a>
As a kid I never thought about it's level design, but retroactively I have huge respect for the developers (and to the author of the article for bring it to me).<p>I wonder if such things are taught in today's game design courses.