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 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.

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.