Got this game on a sale for the Nintendo switch. After I started it I looked the very impressive intro which get this game a half star. After that I was forced to connect my Nintendo account with blizzard and a needed internet connection (Really?). After 5 minutes trying to login to blizzard I get a code to my mail and it doesn't work. I waited 10 minutes to let the code expire and after I get a new code it also doesn't worked. After that I closed the game and deleted it. I'm so angry that I wanted to say a lot of things, but I do not because I don't want to get banned from this platform. Cool cool cool...
tesão de video game
O melhor Diablo. Plot, personagens, Design, armas e segredos muito bem feitos e muito criativos.
Why are most of the enemies damage sponges it makes no sense
Undoubtedly one of the most influential games ever made, and arguably the originator of the "endless co-op" genre that would later consume everybody's life with the rise of the Service Game. In a list of "top 10 most historically important games", this would sit somewhere in the middle.
It's also probably the worst Diablo game. I'm very nostalgic for it, and there's a lot that's good about it, but there's so many vestigial appendages (like Stamina, the potion belt, and binding abilities to your function keys) that aged like shit. There's a charm to that, though, and I still have a deep and abiding love for this game despite hindsight constantly showing me its flaws.
Definitely worth playing if you've never done so. But if you want an endless grinder to mulch through enemies in, 3 or 4 are better suited for your needs.
It's also probably the worst Diablo game. I'm very nostalgic for it, and there's a lot that's good about it, but there's so many vestigial appendages (like Stamina, the potion belt, and binding abilities to your function keys) that aged like shit. There's a charm to that, though, and I still have a deep and abiding love for this game despite hindsight constantly showing me its flaws.
Definitely worth playing if you've never done so. But if you want an endless grinder to mulch through enemies in, 3 or 4 are better suited for your needs.
Fuck you blizzard.
Беспощадная сингл-гриндилка. Нужно фармить, но геймплей интереса не вызвал. Очередная необходимость перепроходить данж приводит только к глубокой прострации. Игра своего времени. Сейчас не вижу в ней смысла при наличии более проработанных аналогов.
So cool. Has an enthusiasm for the devil that rivals the best of Romero, and this renovation Vicarious Visions died for looks tasteful and stylish. That said, I'm a wet-brained idiot who likes it when the monsters explode so the Diablo for mouth-breathers (3) will always be the one for me.
Bored asf 💀
要不是因为能一键切回原版粗糙的画面，我会觉得这就是我小时候玩到的那款游戏。人类脑补的能力真是强大。
I played for about 3 hours and it seems to be a clunky game with no smoothness and always spamming the same buttons in combat. The game only looks visually remastered, the gameplay mechanics still feel 25 years old. It doesn't have enough motivation or gripping to keep me going any further. In short, I didn't find a purpose in the game worth pursuing.
The original Diablo was a formative experience for me and a game I admire tremendously from a design perspective. I remember getting very excited when the sequel came out, but got stuck with a bad character build in Act II and subsequently gave it up. Seeing as it remains very popular I wanted to check it off on my bucket list of classic games, but unfortunately I was really disillusioned by the experience and kind of wish I hadn't gone to the trouble to revisit it.
Maybe it's sacrilege to say this, but I think this is a terrible sequel and almost like a Eurojank knock-off of Diablo. Like in the first game, you zip through procedural levels going through a mindnumbing repetitive loop of killing/looting a series of monsters and then town portaling back to the base. Sell, restock, repeat. But things get cranked up several notches too many. Everything is super smooth and zoned in on this core loop to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing leads to discomfort for the player. Vendors are strategically placed for minimum travel distance after the town portal. Hirelings smash enemies without you needing to lift a finger. If they die they can be resurrected within seconds at a negligible gold cost.
The game is dark and bloody, but the ambience of the first Diablo seems almost completely gone. NPCs are not fleshed out or humanized in any meaningful way. Quests are threadbare and often nonsensical, somehow becoming worse the more you progress in the game. The dialogue is basic madlib with the various triggers and game objects the player must interact with to progress ("This {Darkness} must be the work of {Claw Vipers}! Go to their {Nest} and kill them").
What seems to have preoccupied the designers are two equally odious pillars constituting the core gameplay loop: 1) a nested system of slot machines for random gear and upgrades that the player can collect, 2) a ridiculously over-engineered skill tree promising gameplay variety, but in reality offering only a few combinations that give the player a viable chance of completing the game.
The success of your character is defined almost exclusively by your build and your gear. As the gear is randomly generated through the aforementioned slot machines, the only skill involved lies in properly setting up your character. This is where the design runs into trouble. As I discovered in my first outing with the game, there is no real way for the player to predict what kind of abilities they will need later on. What works very well in one part of the game can suddenly drop off in usefulness without warning. Respeccing opportunities are exceedingly rare - only once per twenty-hour plus run - but the game does not inform you of this beforehand. Worse still, this chance is provided at the very start of the run, when you are the least likely to make good use of it. Spreading your skill points out to experiment with the various abilities does nothing but hurt you, the path to success is instead to cram almost all points into one thing.
This time I decided I didn't have time to screw around with a bad build and followed an online guide instead. As I followed the guide, I was disappointed by the sheer number of immersion-breaking things I had to do, things that would have been close to impossible for me to discover organically as a player taking the game's fiction and premise in good faith. The distribution of points was exceedingly lopsided and non-intuitive. I had to reload constantly to reset vendor stocks, farmed an early game boss for runes, had to make extensive use of the Horadric Cube (another slot machine) for item transmutations, the list goes on and on. Almost all skill points were fed into a single aura that was almost game-breakingly powerful - that is, until the final act, where it became almost useless.
The more I played, the more I came to hate the core systems of this game. Players are severely punished for experimentation and more or less forced to min-max with the aid of guides. Following the intuition you build up through normal gameplay never seems to lead you organically to good choices.
As I played through the game, the slot machine analogy stuck with me more and more. The soundscape is dominated by mid-range boosted sounds of rushing coins and gemstones. Minor dungeons end in seas of gold and purple sparkling chests. Bosses explode into fireworks of gold-colored loot. What I'm trying to say is that this game just feels like an online gambling app with a grimdark fantasy skin. As players mindlessly click-click-click their way through this procedural slop, are they really appreciably different from the rows of decrepit boomers in Vegas awaiting their final descent into oblivion?
In a world with the Soulsborne games and modern action rogue-likes, there is absolutely no need to play this. It's a bad sequel with nothing of what made the original Diablo good. It's more like the spiritual precursor to something like Raid: Shadow Legends - a hollow, insincere Skinner box that's just there to soak up your time without investing your actions with meaning or a vector for mental growth. Absolute detestable dreck. A cancer and a blight upon the history of games development. One star.
Maybe it's sacrilege to say this, but I think this is a terrible sequel and almost like a Eurojank knock-off of Diablo. Like in the first game, you zip through procedural levels going through a mindnumbing repetitive loop of killing/looting a series of monsters and then town portaling back to the base. Sell, restock, repeat. But things get cranked up several notches too many. Everything is super smooth and zoned in on this core loop to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing leads to discomfort for the player. Vendors are strategically placed for minimum travel distance after the town portal. Hirelings smash enemies without you needing to lift a finger. If they die they can be resurrected within seconds at a negligible gold cost.
The game is dark and bloody, but the ambience of the first Diablo seems almost completely gone. NPCs are not fleshed out or humanized in any meaningful way. Quests are threadbare and often nonsensical, somehow becoming worse the more you progress in the game. The dialogue is basic madlib with the various triggers and game objects the player must interact with to progress ("This {Darkness} must be the work of {Claw Vipers}! Go to their {Nest} and kill them").
What seems to have preoccupied the designers are two equally odious pillars constituting the core gameplay loop: 1) a nested system of slot machines for random gear and upgrades that the player can collect, 2) a ridiculously over-engineered skill tree promising gameplay variety, but in reality offering only a few combinations that give the player a viable chance of completing the game.
The success of your character is defined almost exclusively by your build and your gear. As the gear is randomly generated through the aforementioned slot machines, the only skill involved lies in properly setting up your character. This is where the design runs into trouble. As I discovered in my first outing with the game, there is no real way for the player to predict what kind of abilities they will need later on. What works very well in one part of the game can suddenly drop off in usefulness without warning. Respeccing opportunities are exceedingly rare - only once per twenty-hour plus run - but the game does not inform you of this beforehand. Worse still, this chance is provided at the very start of the run, when you are the least likely to make good use of it. Spreading your skill points out to experiment with the various abilities does nothing but hurt you, the path to success is instead to cram almost all points into one thing.
This time I decided I didn't have time to screw around with a bad build and followed an online guide instead. As I followed the guide, I was disappointed by the sheer number of immersion-breaking things I had to do, things that would have been close to impossible for me to discover organically as a player taking the game's fiction and premise in good faith. The distribution of points was exceedingly lopsided and non-intuitive. I had to reload constantly to reset vendor stocks, farmed an early game boss for runes, had to make extensive use of the Horadric Cube (another slot machine) for item transmutations, the list goes on and on. Almost all skill points were fed into a single aura that was almost game-breakingly powerful - that is, until the final act, where it became almost useless.
The more I played, the more I came to hate the core systems of this game. Players are severely punished for experimentation and more or less forced to min-max with the aid of guides. Following the intuition you build up through normal gameplay never seems to lead you organically to good choices.
As I played through the game, the slot machine analogy stuck with me more and more. The soundscape is dominated by mid-range boosted sounds of rushing coins and gemstones. Minor dungeons end in seas of gold and purple sparkling chests. Bosses explode into fireworks of gold-colored loot. What I'm trying to say is that this game just feels like an online gambling app with a grimdark fantasy skin. As players mindlessly click-click-click their way through this procedural slop, are they really appreciably different from the rows of decrepit boomers in Vegas awaiting their final descent into oblivion?
In a world with the Soulsborne games and modern action rogue-likes, there is absolutely no need to play this. It's a bad sequel with nothing of what made the original Diablo good. It's more like the spiritual precursor to something like Raid: Shadow Legends - a hollow, insincere Skinner box that's just there to soak up your time without investing your actions with meaning or a vector for mental growth. Absolute detestable dreck. A cancer and a blight upon the history of games development. One star.
i just want to say the ability to switch between 2021 and 2001 graphics on the go is crazy and cool as fuck
Bien bien naze comme jeu, je ne comprends pas l'aura qui l'entoure.
pretty much the og game but with few quality of life changes and graphics update.
online only drm which knocks it down a notch in my eyes.
online only drm which knocks it down a notch in my eyes.
An excellent remaster of an excellent game.
I played the original back.... when was it... 2000.
I have also played the first quite a bit. Diablo 2 was really good I recall, but when this remake came out I had no doubt that this was something I would like to play again even though I did not play the original more than maybe 3 characters and completed the story.
I knew by now that the game is meant to be played in a loop, to unlock better gear, use runes to create better gear etc.
When I was young I hated any type of grind, so the story was enough for me.
This time around, grinding is still not the best for me, but I have more patience for it.
I set myself up with YT and forums, to make sure that I had access to every knowledge needed to get the best gear, and painted the roadmap for my char. Also had a mate that wanted in and we started up and went mad ape on the game to grind for runes and slotted drops so that we could make the stuff needed to do hard runs.
First time doing cow runs and everything. Oh I had a blast. I really like the game loop that this offers. So much fun. Also running Hardcore only as that just adds t othe tension while playing.
It is retired for now but I could easily pick it up again.
I am impressed that this old a game still can give me loads of fun. And is more fun than most modern games, sadly.
I have also played the first quite a bit. Diablo 2 was really good I recall, but when this remake came out I had no doubt that this was something I would like to play again even though I did not play the original more than maybe 3 characters and completed the story.
I knew by now that the game is meant to be played in a loop, to unlock better gear, use runes to create better gear etc.
When I was young I hated any type of grind, so the story was enough for me.
This time around, grinding is still not the best for me, but I have more patience for it.
I set myself up with YT and forums, to make sure that I had access to every knowledge needed to get the best gear, and painted the roadmap for my char. Also had a mate that wanted in and we started up and went mad ape on the game to grind for runes and slotted drops so that we could make the stuff needed to do hard runs.
First time doing cow runs and everything. Oh I had a blast. I really like the game loop that this offers. So much fun. Also running Hardcore only as that just adds t othe tension while playing.
It is retired for now but I could easily pick it up again.
I am impressed that this old a game still can give me loads of fun. And is more fun than most modern games, sadly.
A good remaster of the game that also retains the old shell. You can while away a couple of evenings or maybe even months.
Неплохой ремастер игры сохраняющий также старую оболочку. Пару вечеров скоротать можно а может и месяцев.
Неплохой ремастер игры сохраняющий также старую оболочку. Пару вечеров скоротать можно а может и месяцев.
Nostalgia glasses not included.
Diablo 2 Resurrected is a really good remaster, as far as remasters go. Faithful recreation of the original with very well done texture upgrades. A favorite streamer of mine was playing it and he said that the remaster made the game look like how he remembered it looking when he played the original as a kid. Obviously if you toggle the old version on by pressing 'g' you can see that it looks quite a bit different, but the game really does feel like how you remember it. Everything is moreorless the same as the original, including bugs and glitches. Diablo 2 is often regarded as the peak of the franchise but there are reasons why games are different in 2021 than they were in 2000 and the remaster brings back both the good and the bad of a two decade old game.
I played Diablo II sparingly as a kid. Mostly at my cousins house, because he was a big time Diablo fan. As a child far too young to be playing Diablo II, I always enjoyed my time with it as I clacked around a bit aimlessly through the overworld or occasional dungeon. Only just barely understanding the point of the game and only occasionally able to successfully make my way in and out of a dungeon. Still, I had been quite fond of my time with it and happy with the genre. My memories of the dungeon looter led me to playing games like Torchlight I & II and Path of Exile later in life. So with the remaster releasing I decided it was a perfect time to try and hop in and actually play through Diablo II as an adult capable of appreciating the game.
I beat Diablo II Resurrected playing with my wife on normal difficulty in a jaunt through the campaign. I didn't bother doing any higher difficulties or anything on the ladder or trying anything endgame-y. Though we did just about 100% clear the game on normal difficulty. Thus my review is from that perspective.
Remaster or not D2R is very much a game from 2000 in design and you can feel it. Gussied up though it may be, you can feel the antiquated game design readily from the start. Diablo's whole shtick back then and now was an appeal to a sweaty tryhard kind of gamer. A single player experience that encouraged players to really dig into the meat of the game and try to extract mechanical skill and character build efficiency for no reason other than to beat the game faster or to be better. Back in the age where you'd buy one new game every six months and you played the shit out of it. You played the game for the sake of playing the game. And playing it 'better' or more goodly was a goal all its own.
And Diablo II embraces all of that. Beating the game just once is hardly the game at all. There's an entire schema of exogenous gameplay that goes into playing Diablo II. There is no tutorial to the game. Hardly anything gets explained to you. Even just using your fairly basic skills and spells is something you kind of have to learn on your own. The game doesn't even really explain core attributes like Attack Rating. The game never defines its vocabulary when looking at gear stats. While most are self explanatory, some are not. The game obfuscates tons of information from you. How much healthy enemies have, what level enemies are, what elemental effects or resistances enemies have or use are also kept a secret. What does 7% lightning resist actually mean? 7% reduction of lightning damage, or a 7% lower likelihood of suffering lightning status effects or a 7% decrease in all damage taken from lightning elemental bosses or a 7% chance to resist any damage from a lightning attack? Who knows! The game won't tell you.
That's because part of playing Diablo II is learning all of this on your own through some trial and error and exposure to the mechanics. You learn a little every time you die. Or at least you should be trying to. You should equip five different weapons and armor sets and rerun the same couple early game dungeons a few times to see how much damage you do and how much damage you take and how quickly you clear it. That way you can learn a little about the right gear combination. You get experience points to level up every single time you clear this content, so rerunning it repeatedly isn't exactly a 'waste' of your time. And this is all very engaging in an old video game way. Back when speedrunning Zelda was about the only thing that you could do for fun when you waited so long between video game releases. It doesn't hold up as well in 2021, though.
This sort of trial and error gameplay where you have to uncover the way the game works by experiencing it is only cute for so long. Especially for how punishing Diablo II can be. Respeccing is free one time, otherwise it takes a ton of effort to do and is quite time consuming. If you put the wrong attribute points into the wrong stats and skills you can find yourself with a character that is seriously hamstrung. Requiring you to significantly overlevel or cheese fights to beat them. D2R never really tells you what might be a good idea or a bad idea when building your character. And while the game is very wide in what can work there's also plenty of stuff that cannot work. And you usually can't tell what won't work until you're in a fight that you're just not going to be able to win. Once you hit that point you have no choice but to powerlevel to beat the fight or you can try and figure out how best to cheese the fight or you can spin up a new character and level all the way back to it.
It's punishing in a way that a lot of games used to be. Go back and play Banjo-Kazooie or Crash Bandicoot and you'll remember how much harder video games used to be. And while that challenge can be welcomed, in a world with so much video gaming choice it is far easier to find games that tailor to you instead of playing games that force you to tailor to it. Diablo demands your time. If you're new to the series and to the game it is much like a MOBA or an MMO in that you're going to need to play a nontrivial number of hours to even begin to really figure it out. But unlike a MOBA or an MMO, you can dump thirty hours into Diablo only to find yourself in a situation where you should probably restart from scratch. Let's get specific.
We began with a plan. My wife was going to choose an assassin assuming it was a shifty but squishy high DPS character. I was going to tank for us, with maybe light healing utility (knowing of course that Diablo relies heavily on using potions). I chose druid with the intent of being a Werebear tank that could summon the Oak Sage or Carrion Vine for a little extra life. Early into the game we run into problems. There are some glitches related to melee attacks and server ticks as well as the difficulty of optimizing a werebear that made this an unideal starting point. Many melee attacks miss. They just do. But sometimes they also miss because of a sort of disconnect between when you begin your swing, when the add moves and when the server tries to communicate all of this information. At one point in a dungeon I had my mostly full vitality+strength build werebear swinging on a group of enemies just missing every single swing. Not hitting a single one. And while I was fairly tanky, it didn't matter if I couldn't kill the enemies. I found myself being useless in most fights as I could provide literally no damage.
I took to the internet for help since there is nothing in-game to give me any clue what is wrong. This is where I learned attack rating determines the accuracy of your attacks along some sort of mathematic formula. Attack rating only scales with dexterity. Not a useful attribute for me but if I can't hit anything...well gotta do something. My choices were to farm the same few dungeons endlessly to hope I get drops that give + Attack Rating. Preferably on rings or sockets. Or I could just start levelling into dex. I did the latter. And things only got mildly better. After a few level ups I was now missing 75-80% of my attacks instead of 90-100% of them. Of course I was sacrificing anything that I would otherwise be putting into vitality. Meanwhile my wife started to roll more points into vitality of her own so she could stand up to some enemies. Eventually I respecc'd and became a casting druid relying on fire and ice spells. I took a bunch of points out of vitality and started adding them mostly to energy with some split between dexterity and strength.
This was better but also stupid. My wife ended up with a shadow spell where she could create a clone of herself. She also ended up with nearly double my health pool. Her shadow did the tanking for us while I rained fire from afar. This generally worked but I was insanely squishy. By the end of the game I would die in a single attack from a Night Lord. I relied heavily on a few summons like the poison vine and the oak sage, but nearly every important boss in the game instagibs summons. Making them useless even though they were essential to my build. D2R never gave me any inclination what I was doing was going to be stupid and didn't give me any reasonable ways to fix it. Story progression and level is of course attached per character. If I wanted to fix this I would have to roll something entirely new and redo the previous twenty hours. And what an absolute pain in the ass that is.
We persisted. Eventually beating the normal campaign. Fights against Diablo and Baal consisted of us popping town portals and abusing the shit out of our ability to return to town for free heals and back to the bossfight against a boss who hadn't lost any health. Just juggling constantly between the two slowly ticking their health away minimal amounts by minimal amounts until we won. And we did. We'd conquered Diablo 2 with absolutely terrible character builds and ten levels underleveled for the final fight. An achievement. A satisfying and downright frustrating achievement. But an achievement nonetheless.
And that's because Diablo 2 is fun. It's just a relic. The game wants you to be bad at it until you're not bad at it anymore. You get there by investing a lot of time and willpower into it. You grind endlessly against the same sets of dungeons and bosses for very minimal gear upgrades. You do this over and over and over because that's why it is supposed to be fun. And it is. Kind of. The number of hours the game asks you to invest only for you to potentially realize you've screwed up very badly is really high. The lack of a tutorial or any in game information at all as to how to avoid such fatal mistakes is also painful. You cannot try and preplan what it is you want to do without looking up third party materials. Unless you want to spend fifty hours figuring out a competent build.
The gameplay loop is still fun. Killing hordes of enemies. Picking up loot. Swapping out gear. The cinematics are phenomenal and the story is very interesting even with how minimal it is. But the game just demands a lot of a player who, in 2021, has lots of other things they could be doing than smashing their head against a dungeon for four hours hoping to get mildly better gear with slightly better stat rolls. And we're not talking like MMO grindy. In MMOs you do this in the end game after you've beaten everything. In Diablo 2, you do this in the middle of the game just to prepare for the next quest. Most MMOs you race to the end so you can start your grind. In Diablo 2, grind is all you get. I would've had no less fun if I chopped ten hours off our run time to beat the game the first time. And that sort of Windows 95 gameplay design is left in the past for a reason.
Diablo 2 Resurrected is a really good remaster, as far as remasters go. Faithful recreation of the original with very well done texture upgrades. A favorite streamer of mine was playing it and he said that the remaster made the game look like how he remembered it looking when he played the original as a kid. Obviously if you toggle the old version on by pressing 'g' you can see that it looks quite a bit different, but the game really does feel like how you remember it. Everything is moreorless the same as the original, including bugs and glitches. Diablo 2 is often regarded as the peak of the franchise but there are reasons why games are different in 2021 than they were in 2000 and the remaster brings back both the good and the bad of a two decade old game.
I played Diablo II sparingly as a kid. Mostly at my cousins house, because he was a big time Diablo fan. As a child far too young to be playing Diablo II, I always enjoyed my time with it as I clacked around a bit aimlessly through the overworld or occasional dungeon. Only just barely understanding the point of the game and only occasionally able to successfully make my way in and out of a dungeon. Still, I had been quite fond of my time with it and happy with the genre. My memories of the dungeon looter led me to playing games like Torchlight I & II and Path of Exile later in life. So with the remaster releasing I decided it was a perfect time to try and hop in and actually play through Diablo II as an adult capable of appreciating the game.
I beat Diablo II Resurrected playing with my wife on normal difficulty in a jaunt through the campaign. I didn't bother doing any higher difficulties or anything on the ladder or trying anything endgame-y. Though we did just about 100% clear the game on normal difficulty. Thus my review is from that perspective.
Remaster or not D2R is very much a game from 2000 in design and you can feel it. Gussied up though it may be, you can feel the antiquated game design readily from the start. Diablo's whole shtick back then and now was an appeal to a sweaty tryhard kind of gamer. A single player experience that encouraged players to really dig into the meat of the game and try to extract mechanical skill and character build efficiency for no reason other than to beat the game faster or to be better. Back in the age where you'd buy one new game every six months and you played the shit out of it. You played the game for the sake of playing the game. And playing it 'better' or more goodly was a goal all its own.
And Diablo II embraces all of that. Beating the game just once is hardly the game at all. There's an entire schema of exogenous gameplay that goes into playing Diablo II. There is no tutorial to the game. Hardly anything gets explained to you. Even just using your fairly basic skills and spells is something you kind of have to learn on your own. The game doesn't even really explain core attributes like Attack Rating. The game never defines its vocabulary when looking at gear stats. While most are self explanatory, some are not. The game obfuscates tons of information from you. How much healthy enemies have, what level enemies are, what elemental effects or resistances enemies have or use are also kept a secret. What does 7% lightning resist actually mean? 7% reduction of lightning damage, or a 7% lower likelihood of suffering lightning status effects or a 7% decrease in all damage taken from lightning elemental bosses or a 7% chance to resist any damage from a lightning attack? Who knows! The game won't tell you.
That's because part of playing Diablo II is learning all of this on your own through some trial and error and exposure to the mechanics. You learn a little every time you die. Or at least you should be trying to. You should equip five different weapons and armor sets and rerun the same couple early game dungeons a few times to see how much damage you do and how much damage you take and how quickly you clear it. That way you can learn a little about the right gear combination. You get experience points to level up every single time you clear this content, so rerunning it repeatedly isn't exactly a 'waste' of your time. And this is all very engaging in an old video game way. Back when speedrunning Zelda was about the only thing that you could do for fun when you waited so long between video game releases. It doesn't hold up as well in 2021, though.
This sort of trial and error gameplay where you have to uncover the way the game works by experiencing it is only cute for so long. Especially for how punishing Diablo II can be. Respeccing is free one time, otherwise it takes a ton of effort to do and is quite time consuming. If you put the wrong attribute points into the wrong stats and skills you can find yourself with a character that is seriously hamstrung. Requiring you to significantly overlevel or cheese fights to beat them. D2R never really tells you what might be a good idea or a bad idea when building your character. And while the game is very wide in what can work there's also plenty of stuff that cannot work. And you usually can't tell what won't work until you're in a fight that you're just not going to be able to win. Once you hit that point you have no choice but to powerlevel to beat the fight or you can try and figure out how best to cheese the fight or you can spin up a new character and level all the way back to it.
It's punishing in a way that a lot of games used to be. Go back and play Banjo-Kazooie or Crash Bandicoot and you'll remember how much harder video games used to be. And while that challenge can be welcomed, in a world with so much video gaming choice it is far easier to find games that tailor to you instead of playing games that force you to tailor to it. Diablo demands your time. If you're new to the series and to the game it is much like a MOBA or an MMO in that you're going to need to play a nontrivial number of hours to even begin to really figure it out. But unlike a MOBA or an MMO, you can dump thirty hours into Diablo only to find yourself in a situation where you should probably restart from scratch. Let's get specific.
We began with a plan. My wife was going to choose an assassin assuming it was a shifty but squishy high DPS character. I was going to tank for us, with maybe light healing utility (knowing of course that Diablo relies heavily on using potions). I chose druid with the intent of being a Werebear tank that could summon the Oak Sage or Carrion Vine for a little extra life. Early into the game we run into problems. There are some glitches related to melee attacks and server ticks as well as the difficulty of optimizing a werebear that made this an unideal starting point. Many melee attacks miss. They just do. But sometimes they also miss because of a sort of disconnect between when you begin your swing, when the add moves and when the server tries to communicate all of this information. At one point in a dungeon I had my mostly full vitality+strength build werebear swinging on a group of enemies just missing every single swing. Not hitting a single one. And while I was fairly tanky, it didn't matter if I couldn't kill the enemies. I found myself being useless in most fights as I could provide literally no damage.
I took to the internet for help since there is nothing in-game to give me any clue what is wrong. This is where I learned attack rating determines the accuracy of your attacks along some sort of mathematic formula. Attack rating only scales with dexterity. Not a useful attribute for me but if I can't hit anything...well gotta do something. My choices were to farm the same few dungeons endlessly to hope I get drops that give + Attack Rating. Preferably on rings or sockets. Or I could just start levelling into dex. I did the latter. And things only got mildly better. After a few level ups I was now missing 75-80% of my attacks instead of 90-100% of them. Of course I was sacrificing anything that I would otherwise be putting into vitality. Meanwhile my wife started to roll more points into vitality of her own so she could stand up to some enemies. Eventually I respecc'd and became a casting druid relying on fire and ice spells. I took a bunch of points out of vitality and started adding them mostly to energy with some split between dexterity and strength.
This was better but also stupid. My wife ended up with a shadow spell where she could create a clone of herself. She also ended up with nearly double my health pool. Her shadow did the tanking for us while I rained fire from afar. This generally worked but I was insanely squishy. By the end of the game I would die in a single attack from a Night Lord. I relied heavily on a few summons like the poison vine and the oak sage, but nearly every important boss in the game instagibs summons. Making them useless even though they were essential to my build. D2R never gave me any inclination what I was doing was going to be stupid and didn't give me any reasonable ways to fix it. Story progression and level is of course attached per character. If I wanted to fix this I would have to roll something entirely new and redo the previous twenty hours. And what an absolute pain in the ass that is.
We persisted. Eventually beating the normal campaign. Fights against Diablo and Baal consisted of us popping town portals and abusing the shit out of our ability to return to town for free heals and back to the bossfight against a boss who hadn't lost any health. Just juggling constantly between the two slowly ticking their health away minimal amounts by minimal amounts until we won. And we did. We'd conquered Diablo 2 with absolutely terrible character builds and ten levels underleveled for the final fight. An achievement. A satisfying and downright frustrating achievement. But an achievement nonetheless.
And that's because Diablo 2 is fun. It's just a relic. The game wants you to be bad at it until you're not bad at it anymore. You get there by investing a lot of time and willpower into it. You grind endlessly against the same sets of dungeons and bosses for very minimal gear upgrades. You do this over and over and over because that's why it is supposed to be fun. And it is. Kind of. The number of hours the game asks you to invest only for you to potentially realize you've screwed up very badly is really high. The lack of a tutorial or any in game information at all as to how to avoid such fatal mistakes is also painful. You cannot try and preplan what it is you want to do without looking up third party materials. Unless you want to spend fifty hours figuring out a competent build.
The gameplay loop is still fun. Killing hordes of enemies. Picking up loot. Swapping out gear. The cinematics are phenomenal and the story is very interesting even with how minimal it is. But the game just demands a lot of a player who, in 2021, has lots of other things they could be doing than smashing their head against a dungeon for four hours hoping to get mildly better gear with slightly better stat rolls. And we're not talking like MMO grindy. In MMOs you do this in the end game after you've beaten everything. In Diablo 2, you do this in the middle of the game just to prepare for the next quest. Most MMOs you race to the end so you can start your grind. In Diablo 2, grind is all you get. I would've had no less fun if I chopped ten hours off our run time to beat the game the first time. And that sort of Windows 95 gameplay design is left in the past for a reason.
idk, man, it's Diablo 2, what do you want from me. one of the greatest to ever do it. hang Diablo 2's jersey from the rafters. frame it and put it in the louvre. let it retire to a peaceful life in the countryside.
A few years ago I reinstalled Diablo 2 from my battlechest disks and tried playing it and, man, all the quality of life type stuff that all the other ARPGs of the last twenty years is really nice and having zero of that in Diablo 2 was kinda rough because I am a big baby. But also it turns out Act 1 on Normal also just kinda sucks (at least for the classes I tend to play). You level up pretty slowly and it takes so long to really get going. So back in the day that made me put the game down pretty quickly. But not this time! I persevered and also they added just enough nice little QoL things that I truly do not mind the ways in which the game didn't get "updated".
I played all the way through on the updated graphics and they are, largely, fine but they really make me glad there's a quick toggle to swap back to the old graphics because it's so easy to see how artistically inferior the new shit is. Yeah, sure, it's all 3d rendered and got nicer lighting and particle effects and whatever but the vibe is wildly different. The darkness isn't as consuming and oppressive. There is so much more gray and brown. If you are interested in Diablo 2 as a Game To Click On Things then it doesn't really matter much but if you care about Diablo 2 as Art then it extremely matters!!
It's kinda wild to me that they've made balance changes and even added new items and runewords and shit! Somewhere there are people hiding in a basement hoping that the bean counters don't find out about them and ask "wait, you're spending how much time on this? for a game with no battlepass? or microtransactions? from how many years ago?" and I love that for them. It's cool to see it get items with some new mechanics and also they fixed Summoner Druid to be Actually Viable and I appreciate that a lot because I love all my killer puppies and big bear friend and weird forest spirit tentacle creature.
Act 2 was always my favorite act as a stupid teenager. But oh my god duuuude the fucking Maggot Lair!! All-timer for Worst Dungeon. Gotta be one of the worst. Trying to just move around is bad enough but then having to fight shit, too?? And good fuckin' luck if you're a dope like me who likes to play summoning classes. The rest of it is pretty alright. Just gotta watch out for those stupid lightning beetles, y'know.
Diablo 2 Nightmare Difficulty is still the sweetest sweet spot. You've got solid gear and you've got quite a few skills leveled up. You can actually kill shit and not immediately fucking die. It feels so good to play. It's the best part of the game. And then you get to Hell Difficulty. And it is so aptly named. You really gotta do a lot of extra farming for more levels and more loot and it's so miserable. I am simply past my "spending all day farming stuff" days. I got better shit to do. Apologies to socketed items and runewords and high-tier set items, I am simply in a different part of my life now.
Act 3 isn't good and it was never good. Annoying-ass maps with annoying-ass enemies, fuck Durance of Hate, fuck Mephisto, fuck Act 3, all my homies hate Act 3.
Playing this with someone who played the game once many years ago (long enough that this was essentially a fresh experience) was an absolute treat because so much of this game is deeply burned into my brain. Hearing reactions to story beats that I basically didn't remember because I was a hardcore ladder girly who didn't care about the story was fun. The first time we hit some beetles in Act 2 and got wrecked by lightning, they made some noises that were somewhere between a shriek and squeal and it was a delight. I highly recommend this extremely specific experience of playing the game.
The end of Act 4 is so fucking funny, dude. Like, imagine getting Diablo 2 before the expansion and the game just fucking ends there. Modern games could never. Extremely funny.
There's a new thing with "Terrorized" zones and I have no idea what's going on there? Like, the affected area has all the enemies made to be your level +2, so you can use areas you wouldn't normally be revisiting to get level-appropriate XP and loot but I don't fully understand if that's better than just your classic Baal runs or whatever-the-fuck.
Act 5 sure is Some Shit, huh. This time around I really noticed the small changes in things here. How, even back in 2001 or whatever, they were iterating and pushing on what was possible in the game.
I still haven't ever gotten to level 99. Or fought an Uber Diablo. Or gotten and Annihilus or Hellfire Torch. And I probably never will. And that's okay! But if I ever somehow get that desire, then this is a very solid version of the game to do it in!
In an industry that is so obsessed with franchises and selling you the same shit over and over and loves to do "remakes" that fundamentally change important aspects of games, this is one of the absolute least egregious examples of modern remake-thinking.
A few years ago I reinstalled Diablo 2 from my battlechest disks and tried playing it and, man, all the quality of life type stuff that all the other ARPGs of the last twenty years is really nice and having zero of that in Diablo 2 was kinda rough because I am a big baby. But also it turns out Act 1 on Normal also just kinda sucks (at least for the classes I tend to play). You level up pretty slowly and it takes so long to really get going. So back in the day that made me put the game down pretty quickly. But not this time! I persevered and also they added just enough nice little QoL things that I truly do not mind the ways in which the game didn't get "updated".
I played all the way through on the updated graphics and they are, largely, fine but they really make me glad there's a quick toggle to swap back to the old graphics because it's so easy to see how artistically inferior the new shit is. Yeah, sure, it's all 3d rendered and got nicer lighting and particle effects and whatever but the vibe is wildly different. The darkness isn't as consuming and oppressive. There is so much more gray and brown. If you are interested in Diablo 2 as a Game To Click On Things then it doesn't really matter much but if you care about Diablo 2 as Art then it extremely matters!!
It's kinda wild to me that they've made balance changes and even added new items and runewords and shit! Somewhere there are people hiding in a basement hoping that the bean counters don't find out about them and ask "wait, you're spending how much time on this? for a game with no battlepass? or microtransactions? from how many years ago?" and I love that for them. It's cool to see it get items with some new mechanics and also they fixed Summoner Druid to be Actually Viable and I appreciate that a lot because I love all my killer puppies and big bear friend and weird forest spirit tentacle creature.
Act 2 was always my favorite act as a stupid teenager. But oh my god duuuude the fucking Maggot Lair!! All-timer for Worst Dungeon. Gotta be one of the worst. Trying to just move around is bad enough but then having to fight shit, too?? And good fuckin' luck if you're a dope like me who likes to play summoning classes. The rest of it is pretty alright. Just gotta watch out for those stupid lightning beetles, y'know.
Diablo 2 Nightmare Difficulty is still the sweetest sweet spot. You've got solid gear and you've got quite a few skills leveled up. You can actually kill shit and not immediately fucking die. It feels so good to play. It's the best part of the game. And then you get to Hell Difficulty. And it is so aptly named. You really gotta do a lot of extra farming for more levels and more loot and it's so miserable. I am simply past my "spending all day farming stuff" days. I got better shit to do. Apologies to socketed items and runewords and high-tier set items, I am simply in a different part of my life now.
Act 3 isn't good and it was never good. Annoying-ass maps with annoying-ass enemies, fuck Durance of Hate, fuck Mephisto, fuck Act 3, all my homies hate Act 3.
Playing this with someone who played the game once many years ago (long enough that this was essentially a fresh experience) was an absolute treat because so much of this game is deeply burned into my brain. Hearing reactions to story beats that I basically didn't remember because I was a hardcore ladder girly who didn't care about the story was fun. The first time we hit some beetles in Act 2 and got wrecked by lightning, they made some noises that were somewhere between a shriek and squeal and it was a delight. I highly recommend this extremely specific experience of playing the game.
The end of Act 4 is so fucking funny, dude. Like, imagine getting Diablo 2 before the expansion and the game just fucking ends there. Modern games could never. Extremely funny.
There's a new thing with "Terrorized" zones and I have no idea what's going on there? Like, the affected area has all the enemies made to be your level +2, so you can use areas you wouldn't normally be revisiting to get level-appropriate XP and loot but I don't fully understand if that's better than just your classic Baal runs or whatever-the-fuck.
Act 5 sure is Some Shit, huh. This time around I really noticed the small changes in things here. How, even back in 2001 or whatever, they were iterating and pushing on what was possible in the game.
I still haven't ever gotten to level 99. Or fought an Uber Diablo. Or gotten and Annihilus or Hellfire Torch. And I probably never will. And that's okay! But if I ever somehow get that desire, then this is a very solid version of the game to do it in!
In an industry that is so obsessed with franchises and selling you the same shit over and over and loves to do "remakes" that fundamentally change important aspects of games, this is one of the absolute least egregious examples of modern remake-thinking.
PERDI O SAVE, não consegui terminar 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹
Benim yaşlarımda olanlar muhakkak çocukluğunda Diablo ismini en az bir kere duymuştur. İsmini duymak ne söz, yaşça büyüklerimizden beylik beylik Diablo ve Blizzard övgüleri ile gözümüz en az bir kere boyanmıştır. Diablo için anasını kesenler mi dersiniz, Blizzarddan babası çıksa yiyecek olanlar mı neleer neler. Çocukluğumda bir pc sahibi olmadığım ve tüm oyunlarımı zavallı modchipli eski bir PS2 ile oynadığım için resmen koca bir çocukluk bu laflar yüzünde Diablonun hayalini kurmakla geçti(oysa baya şanslıymışım) Eee neymiş bu Diablo denen oyun. Diablo tüm oyun boyunca koridorlardan koridorlara dolanıp durduğunuz, oldukları yerde duran mobları kesip biçtiğiniz, karşılığında ise daha güçlü silah ve ekipman topladığınız akılsız bir loot oyunu. Hikayesi ise... ne yalan söyleyeyim beş bölümden oluşan oyunun ilk üç parçasını oynadım. Hikaye namına duyacağınız tek şey: Kahramanımız yeni bir bölgeye gider, köyün ağası size köye musallat olmuş kötülüğü anlatır, siz de bölümün sonunda büyük kötüyü yenersiniz ve bir sonraki bölgeye geçilir. Oyunda anlatılanlar büyük oranda bundan ibaret, Ha Diablo sıkıcı bir oyun mudur derseniz aslında pek sayılmaz, oyun döngüsü öyle bir ince ayar çekilerek hazırlanmış ki, tam sıkılıp bunalacağınız anda size yeni ve daha güçlü ekipmanlar verip bir sonraki objektife yönlendiriyor, bu sayede bayılmasanız da bir parça bağımlısı haline getirmeyi başarıyor. Müzikler ve atmosferini de başarılı buldum, ayrıca pre-rendered ara sahneler de fevkaladeler. Diyeceğim odur ki Diablo sizin için o hayallerinizi kurduğunuz büyük RPG başyapıtı olmayabilir, aksine büyük hayal kırıklıkları yaşatabilir, fakat aradığınız basit bir looter aksiyon oyunu ise deneyebilirsiniz.
Noah Caldwell Gervais I'm begging you stop making me want to play through franchises.
Good game though.
Good game though.
i installed this hotnew 60 fps patch for PlugY but for some reason there was way less treasured BootY for me to admire&grab no matter how much i edited the droprates so i wouldnot recommend it..!
eu matei o diabo com fogo
Finished 1st chapter. Really fun to play knowing more about the series from 3
This might be a very controversial opinion but I think Diablo II aged just a tiny bit better than the original, and I started to even hate the gameplay of it by the end.
Diablo II was the game that pretty much streamlined what an ARPG can be, and upgraded upon everything from the original. It has a wide class selection, big maps, many monsters and demons to slay, good loot and the list goes on.
However, every change was mostly good for it's own time, and today, the game itself is just tedious to play, starting from the very limited customization (you can build your character differently, but some builds just not worth it at all), the geniusly boring dungeon designs and the bosses that are just so damn powerful, that if you do not build your character in a certain way, they will kill you in seconds.
This results in a brutal frustration where the player tries to enjoy the gameplay loop, but the game constantly reminds the player of it's age, despite the remastered graphics, and becomes this nightmare to enjoy. The remaster is gorgeous, it looks really good, but it is literally the old game, with a new coat of paint.
This game needed a remake, not a remaster, as the foundations are great, and for it's time, it was a masterpiece, but you cannot enjoy it today without nostalgia goggles, and sadly, I do not have those when I need them the most.
Diablo II was the game that pretty much streamlined what an ARPG can be, and upgraded upon everything from the original. It has a wide class selection, big maps, many monsters and demons to slay, good loot and the list goes on.
However, every change was mostly good for it's own time, and today, the game itself is just tedious to play, starting from the very limited customization (you can build your character differently, but some builds just not worth it at all), the geniusly boring dungeon designs and the bosses that are just so damn powerful, that if you do not build your character in a certain way, they will kill you in seconds.
This results in a brutal frustration where the player tries to enjoy the gameplay loop, but the game constantly reminds the player of it's age, despite the remastered graphics, and becomes this nightmare to enjoy. The remaster is gorgeous, it looks really good, but it is literally the old game, with a new coat of paint.
This game needed a remake, not a remaster, as the foundations are great, and for it's time, it was a masterpiece, but you cannot enjoy it today without nostalgia goggles, and sadly, I do not have those when I need them the most.
Great remaster of a classic. Still wish you could experiment more in the game as I feel like 3 respecs in total per character can be a bit harsh especially if you make a build that isn't viable at first. Would recommend following a levelling guide the first time so you know what traps of levelling to look out for.
Phenomenal game and something I'll be playing the rest of my life. One thing I will add though is the PC version has fewer skill slots (similarly to the original) than the console version.
I've played so many games inspired by Diablo so coming back to the game that invoked those comparisons was partially an archeological exploration and mostly an enjoyable experience. I hadn't realized just how faithful Diablo II: Resurrected is to the original game, so wrestling with some of the dated game design elements did initially put me off from the game, but by the end of the campaign I found myself quite enjoying the loop. Diablo II felt so good whenever I was exploring a new area or dungeon, with a solid sense of genuine discovery. It does lack several modern day conveniences, like the ability to respec your character more than a single time (meaning I was stuck with some bad choices I made early on). This hindered my ability to experiment more with my build which certainly felt constricting. As dated as this game is, it definitely still holds up and I can see why it's been such an inspiration to so many games.