A supreme single player experience that eventually devolved into a completely bastardized online shitshow. Act rushing, Baal running, item duping, "forum gold", trade scamming - it's these things make up the core of the absolutely soulless collective memory of D2, fossilized into place by people who got hopelessly addicted to a game that exhausted itself ages ago, increasingly trying to find ways to not actually play the game and instead just optimize their dopamine hits through whatever means necessary. No wonder nobody has managed to quite get it right again - in one way or another, almost every ARPG has been trying to copy the parts that went horribly wrong.

If you're playing through it for the first time today, or at least for the first time in some 20 years, tho? Still unmatched.


"Sisters... there was no other way."

A game that has no fucking idea what it wants to be, or even how it wants to be whatever it is that it wants to be. The only constant trend is how it seems to be satisfied in letting a bunch of questionable gameplay systems ripe for exploiting fester in the open, rewarding boring and degenerate play over attempting to engage the game on fair terms at a reasonable pace.

A shame, because the premise is fantastic. No other roguelike has such a strong sense of place, with the ruins that dot the overworld, the mysterious Sultan cults, even the hilariously bizarre random village fetch quests - Qud really feels like something that is much, much bigger than you and whatever your current adventure might be. In a lot of ways it is the Morrowind of roguelikes, with all the good and the bad that that entails.

If these days I'm much more likely to play any other, inferior roguelike than to ever play a single Crawl run again, it's just because I might have grown irreversibly jaded, having long accomplished basically every goal I set to myself over the ten years or so I spent with it - but there are very few other games this expansive that are so relentlessly committed to good design (one could even say it's radically committed, with the occasional, unforgiving removal of lingering jank that some people might have grown inexplicably attached to), and none that have done so continuously for so long. And it just keeps getting better.

Slogging through endless repetitions of what most of the time amounts to a fighting minigame while you're trying to go from here to there (plus an assortment of other, on average, very mediocre minigames, if you're so inclined) to be eventually rewarded with interminable cutscenes that only made me wish I was watching an actual movie instead isn't exactly my definition of a good time. Sometimes it jolts into action and gives you a longer, more elaborate combat sequence, or a boss fight that actually tests you, and it just makes me wish that the good stuff wasn't always tucked away behind a few hours of simply wasting my time.

Dumb, pointless, even grating story for about 95% of the game, and then it dares to make you care with that all-timer of a final stage before the last boss, and goddamn if it doesn't succeed. Yes, some of the QTEs suck no matter what, and putting one of the best boss fights in history behind that terrible, agonizingly long Space Harrier section is a crime against humanity, but the highs are so many and so incredibly high, and on top of everything, it's a game that has absolutely no shame about being fun.

Do people who complain about "lack of directions" have a right to breathable air? And how does such a staggering concentration of stupidity not cause their brain to collapse into itself? The universe is truly full of mysteries.

Anyway. I could complain about how the disconnect between the grand scale of the story and the toy model scale of the solar system and its planets never stops being a bit jarring, constantly reminding you that you're "just" playing a game; or about how you can only really play it once, since completion almost necessarily implies solving all of its mysteries; but these aren't really issues, these are necessities of its design, every detail in the game being so meticulously crafted, everything being at the same time so completely open-ended yet with each new path being discovered at a pace so smooth that it's only after you've finished it that you can fully appreciate the effort that went into setting up how the game reveals itself. Will inevitably be lumped into some generic, grossly inadequate "puzzle" category because of how it requires mental effort over reflexes or dexterity, but there aren't any real puzzles in it - there are problems to be solved. How do I reach that place? How do I get past this obstacle? The answers aren't in some arbitrary minigame that creates a bridge from point A to point B for you to walk through, point B was always available from the start and you just needed the correct pieces of knowledge to figure that out - and as you make progress you start to notice just how far from each other these points can be, and yet how within reach they are, and that's the beauty of it. The universe is truly full of mysteries.

Absolute insanity, lightning fast pace and for the most part completely unpredictable - "boss" attacks have their sets of patterns but even then you're still reacting to everything on the spot, and at that point it's often not unlike playing two games at once layered on top of each other. Somewhat lenient with small mistakes, but also demands a very high standard of play and deep understanding of its mechanics for you to even have a chance, and while "perfect dodging" is a pipe dream in a game this chaotic the later stages will expect you to pull off some truly ridiculous shit here and there. Easily one of the most exhilarating games I have ever played.