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.
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.