admirably janky and esoteric? contemporary blizzard's calculated & castrated style of development has increasingly irritated pretty much every type of person I know--storyheads are mad at the sloppiness that has become starcraft/warcraft lore, hardcoreheads are mad at the removal of the legitimate labyrinth and arcane knowledge and dedication required to compete at the higher level of their games, aestheticheads are mad at the pretty homogenous 3d cartoon style that has ran blizzard's art direction for a decade now. overwatch has flipped from a rally point of team fortress 3 to a common point of derision, only relevant in so far as to how quickly the character designs can send hornytime signals to the brain. all of this piled upon a really horrid culture of abuse (not just the sadistic misogyny of contemporary blizzard, but also the labor abuse of the blizzard of past--this game did have about a year and a half of crunch) has pretty much soiled blizzard's reputation, and deservedly so.

picking up D2 then with the context of all of that, I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and whimsical a mess of a game this is. as in, its actively encouraged to trick the game into believing you are playing with 8 players if you're doing a single-player run in order to get better gear. as in, you can and should abuse the town portal spell in combat to literally teleport in and out of boss fights to reup on health and mana potions to have effectively infinite HP&MP. as in, one of the main builds in this game is to teleport into a crowd of enemies, send out some comically small floating hammers, and then watch the corpses pile up. as in, one of the most important aspects of gear in this game, runewords, isn't mentioned at all in the actual game and requires players to look it up, but can turn your painfully average loot drops into gear that can last a whole playthrough.

and underneath all that outwardly goofy design and "is this intended?" mechanics is some really rather ingenious game design--there's this article that I was just reading that breaks down how D2 uses randomness and procgen in a way other ARPGs haven't replicated, and looking at how this game has had several "close, but not quite" imitators 21 years on, you cannot discredit that blizzard north had struck magic. this is blizzard (more accurately blizzard's former employees as most of the talent behind this game would leave the company) being calculated not in PR but in understanding the history of RPGs, of what Y2K PC players were expecting of level systems, of how to reroute the dopamine rush of action games to the frontal-lobe focused role playing genre. even if the status reveals I ultimately bounced off this for now, when this was clicking I felt like a B.F. Skinner rat giddily planning out my build paths and gear progression as I was dripfed items and levels I wanted. each 30 minute trek before teleporting back to base being like a small map of DOOM or a quick level of Mario, in that I progressed enough to have a marked difference an hour ago but not enough to truly feel accomplished, which strangely felt me wanting more instead of frustrated. its a progression loop few others replicated, and when I feel the urge to delve into this tome of weirdness again it'll have me just as captivated. except next time I won't pick such a heavy mouse 1 build like holy fire paladin, man that was starting to get boring.

= http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/RD_D2_2.html

A game that probably had a larger influence on things I like than I realized up to this point. It clearly made the way for a lot of ARPGs, looters, the slower pace of things like Dark Souls. The game comes with an everpresent feeling of dread, between it’s bleak atmosphere, the limited character movement, the fact that enemy models disappear if they’re outside of your character’s line of sight or the radius of a light source, not to mention the lack of map markers, meaning you’re always having to take it slow, venturing forth into the unknown, something that doesn’t go away on subsequent playthroughs since the maps and dungeons generate procedurally per each playthrough. The enemies as well can be brutally unforgiving. If you’re reckless they’ll chew you up and spit you out, but never do they feel unfair (except Duriel, fuck Duriel). It’s a game with a lot more patience and trust in the player than your average looter today, and I think despite a handful of dated little wrinkles in it’s design (much of which is smoothed out in Resurrected), it’s proven itself for the most part timeless.

there are two kinds of diablo 2 Enjoyers. folx who make a blizz sorc each ladder reset and rush through the entire thing to partake in the exciting activity of opening chests in LK or running Mephisto over&over so that they can finally get that epic green dunce cap that gives +2 to all skills (none of which are applicable IRL, sadly), all while proclaiming this is one of the bestest games ever. and then there are epic dudes (like me!) who play the likes of chargedin or berserker on HC and don't defile their baller plate armor with TAL & ETH, who know that the first game is better because Geglash has nothing on mah main man Farnham.

A supreme single player experience that eventually devolved into a completely bastardized online shitshow. Act rushing, Baal running, item duping, "forum gold", trade scamming - it's these things make up the core of the absolutely soulless collective memory of D2, fossilized into place by people who got hopelessly addicted to a game that exhausted itself ages ago, increasingly trying to find ways to not actually play the game and instead just optimize their dopamine hits through whatever means necessary. No wonder nobody has managed to quite get it right again - in one way or another, almost every ARPG has been trying to copy the parts that went horribly wrong.

If you're playing through it for the first time today, or at least for the first time in some 20 years, tho? Still unmatched.


"Sisters... there was no other way."

One of the most difficult things for any Diablo II fan to do is accurately describe what about this game makes it stand out. Not necessarily from its contemporaries, that seems fairly obvious now (mostly tone, atmosphere, music and the ever elusive feel), but from the games that have after it, particularly its own sequel and all the other pretenders to the throne.

After more than 20 years, I think I've finally nailed it down: it's the illusion of difficulty. The feeling this game gives you of being truly lost in the wilderness, alone and surrounded on all sides by nefarious creatures and evil entities. Even if, in the end, it's not as mechanically complex or brutally difficult, even when compared directly to the Baldur's Gates and Icewind Dales of the world, it's a game that manages to perfectly walk that tight rope between hedonistic power fantasy and ruthless difficulty, with a perfectly sized inventory and the ability to return to town at the click of a button making sure that few treks ever take more than 30-45 minutes and you can return to the warm light of a tavern before things get too rough out there.

This push-pull, specifically adventurous spirit is what separates Diablo II from both its sequel and the various copycats that have come since, it's tough enough to take seriously but not so vicious and unforgiving as to be less fun. Throw in that dark tone, those perfectly designed sound effects, a classic Gothic art style and that stupendously good soundtrack and D2 is simply one of the best games ever made, a perfect alchemical concoction coming along exactly when it needed to, from a Blizzard that still had something to prove, the crown jewel of one of the great developer hot streaks of all time, and perhaps the most winsome and aesthetically captivating game I have ever played.

It's good, it's a classic, it holds up.

But, I dunno--what I loved about the original Diablo was feeling like a doomed adventurer delving deeper and deeper down into a hostile hell far from the safety of the surface.

The impersonal art style and isometric camera, the chunky echoey sound design and tension-building music, the nervous NPCs back in town and the horrible gore and demons waiting underneath them; everything worked together to build a fantasy horror that grew from gloom to the creeps to pandemonium the further down we went.

Diablo II still does a lot of that. And I appreciate the grimdark theme of evil being something which can't really be beaten, only delayed, as previous people and places from the first game reappear as ruins of themselves. And sure, there's lots of cool new characters and items and spells and stuff, and the soundtrack still slaps.

But Diablo 2 is where randomized loot and item sets and painstakingly fishing through guides for crafting recipes to complete required optimal builds started overshadowing the rest of the experience. That skinner box design shift bled out into the rest of the industry, and not for the better.

It's like: the games industry is the Dark Wanderer, and the diablo soulstone sticking out of its head is marketing departments using the term "RPG elements" when what they mean is 90% of the experience will be sorting through vendor trash. You know what I'm saying?

Anyway, Diablo 2 is still pretty good I guess. Sure hope they don't add a bunch of stupid retcons and noxious online requirements to its sequel or something, haha.

Stay a while and listen...

I played DIablo II from Act I to IV with the same group of five that interchanged and it remains one of my greatest gaming experiences. D2 still to this day has one of the most enjoyable gameplay loops and gives you the tools to keep coming back with a bunch of exciting and unique classes. I was an Amazon main in my first run through, yet loved experimenting with characters like Paladin and Barbarian because they were so varied and interesting.

Music and tone are two other phenomenal aspects of this game that lend to its agelessness. The score of D2 is impeccable and players until time's end will remember the chilling sound of "Tristram" from the time they loaded into Act I. The dark and sullen tone of D2 that continues all the way through LoD is a great accent on the dark nature of the story and enemies you fight.

Diablo II is a great culmination of all things in ARPGs and is certainly the height of the genre, even better it still holds up to this day.

In terms of production value, it is extremely good- everything, from the enemy design, to music, skills and environments has a lot of care. The pre-rendered graphics give it a visual identity that not even the new games can match. The amount of ways to build the characters are great, but the absurd amount of inventory management takes you away both from the action and the ambience, as you keep teleporting to sell junk and upgrade. Its also extremely annoying that you can only reset skills a single time, so you can't try different builds, thus the game ends up getting repetitive by the third act as you can only do the same strategy for everything. Even though relatively short, I had to force myself to complete the expansion.

And the variety of locations as opposed to a single dungeon are cool I guess, but I miss the sense of progression and more focused design Diablo 1 had. Since the enemies respawn every time you load a save and most quests are extremely straightforward I had no desire to explore whatsoever. And for all the time you spend returning to villages, they all feel very superficial too.

Still, if you want to feel like a powerful necromancer and send an army of skeletons kill everything there is probably no better game.