To be honest, and I have the feeling I'll be crucified for this: I don't understand the love Diablo 2 has garnered over the years. The Diablo series managed to co-opt and narrow the term “ARPG” to mean an isometric, point-and-click game through its sheer popularity, and over twenty years later Diablo 2 is still considered the ARPG among many gamers. Blizzard gave Diablo 2 quite the tune up with Diablo II: Resurrected, but is the game still a “masterpiece” with a new paint job? TL;DR at end.
I got D2:R because I played Diablo IV's beta as a necromancer and enjoyed that a good bit. Necromancers are rarely offered as an option, so it felt fresh summoning an army out of recently-slain corpses. I figured D4's launch would suck (nailed it, though you don't have to be Nostradamus to know Blizzard has a failure streak to maintain) and I didn't want to pay $70 to wait for a game to be good. So I got D2:R (and 3, on sale as a combo) as I figured, “When people say “Diablo”, they mean Diablo 2. It's gotta be good.”
So, is it?
To sum up my thoughts: kind of, not really. Many games are important, defining moments of the medium and easily cement their place in history; the harder part is still remaining good – or even playable – years later. With the press of the 'G' key, the game immediately shifts over to the original audio/visuals and good lord, have things improved. More remasters need to offer this, if for nothing other than the five seconds you'll spend in the old graphics to know you were wise to buy the remaster.
I'd say Blizzard was able to breathe a lot of life into Diablo 2 thanks to hard work on the visuals, but it still plays like a very old game and I fail to see why this is considered one of the greats when most of it is a bland and repetitive snore. I'm pretty sure the only reason I had fun at all was because I played with a friend, but every game is improved with friends, so that's hardly a "pro" to me. Alone, D2:R is almost dreadful.
The story has excellently rendered cutscenes accompanying each of its five Acts, but you'll never care about what's going on. Diablo was an asshole but someone killed him, oh wait he's coming back to life, kill him again. That's the game. The world is a few varied landscapes depending on the Act but there's nothing to learn about it except through maybe “gossip” dialogue options of NPCs. That's fine for me: I don't need to know more, they already lost me and they're sure to lose you, too.
The visuals all look good with great textures and the animations clearly kept the “jerking” look of yore intentionally; all very solid. Again, you can go back and look at the old textures and sounds with one button press, then right back to the Resurrected look when you realize how awful that was.
The UI is pretty terrible and probably my least favorite part of the game's experience. Only two buttons are shown, your left and right mouse clicks, and you can look through a clunky menu or use the F-row of keys to swap between abilities. 'W' can be pressed to switch weapons instantly to a second set, which can have its own presets. I don't think there's any denying that this feels bizarrely limited and stiff to navigate. For some reason, the controller support is quite good, where they bump that number from two visible inputs to five, and you can hold a trigger down to see five more! This is huge!... but since I prefer playing on a mouse and keyboard, I'm stuck with the clunky shit, memorizing what each key from F1 through F8 does and whether its assigned to M1 or M2. Very disappointing. At least key remapping works well?
ARPGs, as now-defined by Diablo, never interested me much. I think they're pretty boring. Your abilities rarely change and while boss fights may be exciting changes of pace, the game is almost always going to be a grind. By design you're supposed to walk into a room and, through basically muscle memory, wipe the whole place out, probably without opening your eyes. You will then do this several hundred times with little to no variety. Because your inputs are so miserable, having to actually swap between abilities on the fly is a nuisance and the developers seem to know this, so it's walk in, slaughter, move on.
To overly simplify, as I see it, there's really only two styles of gameplay: direct and summoners. Barbarians, Amazons, etc. are direct: they'll attack each enemy directly with their melee or ranged weapon and aside from maybe your slave-- I mean “hired help”, you're doing all the damage on your own. Necromancers and druids are summoners: they spawn an army to do their bidding for them and are largely managerial, making sure their wolves or their skeletons are full in number. Occasionally, they chip in with melee or ranged attacks, too, but their power comes from their numbers.
Summoners are insanely strong. I played as a necromancer while my buddy played as a druid, and together we just ran through most of this game while our combined armies tore shit up. This made the game pretty boring, honestly. Only Diablo and his brother, Baal, forced us to actually try and play differently. Two boss fights across god knows how many hours, that's it. Most of this game played itself for us.
Direct fighters are laborious. I've played a few hours as an Amazon, and while it's nice to actually have a direct role in the death of my enemies, now it's all on me. Everything has slowed way down, and since I've beaten the game as a necromancer, I know exactly how much more I have to go and it seems like quite the painful endeavor without someone else there acting as a summoner. It's less “boring”, I suppose, but not in a very good way. I doubt I'll finish as my Amazon.
You ever have a friend recommend you a TV show with the addendum, “Oh, the first season sucks, you gotta get through it because the second is where it gets good!”? You're probably not watching that show, right? People do that with games, too, of course: “Final Fantasy XIII gets good twenty/thirty hours in.” Diablo 2 is the first time I've ever seen a game really start to get good only after you've beaten the entire thing and can go through again on Nightmare difficulty.
Once beaten, you can just start the whole thing over again immediately as your same character. You keep all your gear and whatever is in your storage box. In the starting zone for the second time, my buddy and I finally started getting good loot. Maybe it was because we didn't play as Ladder characters, but we rarely ever saw yellow gear on Normal, it was now on Nightmare that we finally got a bit more of a challenge (as summoners, mind you) and loot to accompany the added trouble.
I have the ball rolling on that slightly better Nightmare playthrough, but I'm not sure I'll finish. I feel comfortable reviewing the game here. Finishing that Amazon's playthrough is even less likely. How can I possibly recommend a game to someone when it takes an entire playthrough to start feeling something from it? Most of my first playthrough felt like I was atrophying and the game ran on autopilot.
Maybe the real Diablo was the sheer number of times we had to teleport back to base to sell all of our junk along the way.
TL;DR This game isn't very fun to me, regardless of your class's play style. I like the variety offered (necromancers, hell yeah), but really it boils down to just two styles and they both have issues. As far as “classics you need to try” go, this isn't one of them.
Also, it has been two years and yet if you don't cap your frame rate in the settings, D2:R will try to set your computer on fire. Why hasn't Blizzard patched this? Other than attempting to melt your hardware, this is a pretty good remaster of a boring game.
I got D2:R because I played Diablo IV's beta as a necromancer and enjoyed that a good bit. Necromancers are rarely offered as an option, so it felt fresh summoning an army out of recently-slain corpses. I figured D4's launch would suck (nailed it, though you don't have to be Nostradamus to know Blizzard has a failure streak to maintain) and I didn't want to pay $70 to wait for a game to be good. So I got D2:R (and 3, on sale as a combo) as I figured, “When people say “Diablo”, they mean Diablo 2. It's gotta be good.”
So, is it?
To sum up my thoughts: kind of, not really. Many games are important, defining moments of the medium and easily cement their place in history; the harder part is still remaining good – or even playable – years later. With the press of the 'G' key, the game immediately shifts over to the original audio/visuals and good lord, have things improved. More remasters need to offer this, if for nothing other than the five seconds you'll spend in the old graphics to know you were wise to buy the remaster.
I'd say Blizzard was able to breathe a lot of life into Diablo 2 thanks to hard work on the visuals, but it still plays like a very old game and I fail to see why this is considered one of the greats when most of it is a bland and repetitive snore. I'm pretty sure the only reason I had fun at all was because I played with a friend, but every game is improved with friends, so that's hardly a "pro" to me. Alone, D2:R is almost dreadful.
The story has excellently rendered cutscenes accompanying each of its five Acts, but you'll never care about what's going on. Diablo was an asshole but someone killed him, oh wait he's coming back to life, kill him again. That's the game. The world is a few varied landscapes depending on the Act but there's nothing to learn about it except through maybe “gossip” dialogue options of NPCs. That's fine for me: I don't need to know more, they already lost me and they're sure to lose you, too.
The visuals all look good with great textures and the animations clearly kept the “jerking” look of yore intentionally; all very solid. Again, you can go back and look at the old textures and sounds with one button press, then right back to the Resurrected look when you realize how awful that was.
The UI is pretty terrible and probably my least favorite part of the game's experience. Only two buttons are shown, your left and right mouse clicks, and you can look through a clunky menu or use the F-row of keys to swap between abilities. 'W' can be pressed to switch weapons instantly to a second set, which can have its own presets. I don't think there's any denying that this feels bizarrely limited and stiff to navigate. For some reason, the controller support is quite good, where they bump that number from two visible inputs to five, and you can hold a trigger down to see five more! This is huge!... but since I prefer playing on a mouse and keyboard, I'm stuck with the clunky shit, memorizing what each key from F1 through F8 does and whether its assigned to M1 or M2. Very disappointing. At least key remapping works well?
ARPGs, as now-defined by Diablo, never interested me much. I think they're pretty boring. Your abilities rarely change and while boss fights may be exciting changes of pace, the game is almost always going to be a grind. By design you're supposed to walk into a room and, through basically muscle memory, wipe the whole place out, probably without opening your eyes. You will then do this several hundred times with little to no variety. Because your inputs are so miserable, having to actually swap between abilities on the fly is a nuisance and the developers seem to know this, so it's walk in, slaughter, move on.
To overly simplify, as I see it, there's really only two styles of gameplay: direct and summoners. Barbarians, Amazons, etc. are direct: they'll attack each enemy directly with their melee or ranged weapon and aside from maybe your slave-- I mean “hired help”, you're doing all the damage on your own. Necromancers and druids are summoners: they spawn an army to do their bidding for them and are largely managerial, making sure their wolves or their skeletons are full in number. Occasionally, they chip in with melee or ranged attacks, too, but their power comes from their numbers.
Summoners are insanely strong. I played as a necromancer while my buddy played as a druid, and together we just ran through most of this game while our combined armies tore shit up. This made the game pretty boring, honestly. Only Diablo and his brother, Baal, forced us to actually try and play differently. Two boss fights across god knows how many hours, that's it. Most of this game played itself for us.
Direct fighters are laborious. I've played a few hours as an Amazon, and while it's nice to actually have a direct role in the death of my enemies, now it's all on me. Everything has slowed way down, and since I've beaten the game as a necromancer, I know exactly how much more I have to go and it seems like quite the painful endeavor without someone else there acting as a summoner. It's less “boring”, I suppose, but not in a very good way. I doubt I'll finish as my Amazon.
You ever have a friend recommend you a TV show with the addendum, “Oh, the first season sucks, you gotta get through it because the second is where it gets good!”? You're probably not watching that show, right? People do that with games, too, of course: “Final Fantasy XIII gets good twenty/thirty hours in.” Diablo 2 is the first time I've ever seen a game really start to get good only after you've beaten the entire thing and can go through again on Nightmare difficulty.
Once beaten, you can just start the whole thing over again immediately as your same character. You keep all your gear and whatever is in your storage box. In the starting zone for the second time, my buddy and I finally started getting good loot. Maybe it was because we didn't play as Ladder characters, but we rarely ever saw yellow gear on Normal, it was now on Nightmare that we finally got a bit more of a challenge (as summoners, mind you) and loot to accompany the added trouble.
I have the ball rolling on that slightly better Nightmare playthrough, but I'm not sure I'll finish. I feel comfortable reviewing the game here. Finishing that Amazon's playthrough is even less likely. How can I possibly recommend a game to someone when it takes an entire playthrough to start feeling something from it? Most of my first playthrough felt like I was atrophying and the game ran on autopilot.
Maybe the real Diablo was the sheer number of times we had to teleport back to base to sell all of our junk along the way.
TL;DR This game isn't very fun to me, regardless of your class's play style. I like the variety offered (necromancers, hell yeah), but really it boils down to just two styles and they both have issues. As far as “classics you need to try” go, this isn't one of them.
Also, it has been two years and yet if you don't cap your frame rate in the settings, D2:R will try to set your computer on fire. Why hasn't Blizzard patched this? Other than attempting to melt your hardware, this is a pretty good remaster of a boring game.