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