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.
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.