The original Diablo was a formative experience for me and a game I admire tremendously from a design perspective. I remember getting very excited when the sequel came out, but got stuck with a bad character build in Act II and subsequently gave it up. Seeing as it remains very popular I wanted to check it off on my bucket list of classic games, but unfortunately I was really disillusioned by the experience and kind of wish I hadn't gone to the trouble to revisit it.
Maybe it's sacrilege to say this, but I think this is a terrible sequel and almost like a Eurojank knock-off of Diablo. Like in the first game, you zip through procedural levels going through a mindnumbing repetitive loop of killing/looting a series of monsters and then town portaling back to the base. Sell, restock, repeat. But things get cranked up several notches too many. Everything is super smooth and zoned in on this core loop to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing leads to discomfort for the player. Vendors are strategically placed for minimum travel distance after the town portal. Hirelings smash enemies without you needing to lift a finger. If they die they can be resurrected within seconds at a negligible gold cost.
The game is dark and bloody, but the ambience of the first Diablo seems almost completely gone. NPCs are not fleshed out or humanized in any meaningful way. Quests are threadbare and often nonsensical, somehow becoming worse the more you progress in the game. The dialogue is basic madlib with the various triggers and game objects the player must interact with to progress ("This {Darkness} must be the work of {Claw Vipers}! Go to their {Nest} and kill them").
What seems to have preoccupied the designers are two equally odious pillars constituting the core gameplay loop: 1) a nested system of slot machines for random gear and upgrades that the player can collect, 2) a ridiculously over-engineered skill tree promising gameplay variety, but in reality offering only a few combinations that give the player a viable chance of completing the game.
The success of your character is defined almost exclusively by your build and your gear. As the gear is randomly generated through the aforementioned slot machines, the only skill involved lies in properly setting up your character. This is where the design runs into trouble. As I discovered in my first outing with the game, there is no real way for the player to predict what kind of abilities they will need later on. What works very well in one part of the game can suddenly drop off in usefulness without warning. Respeccing opportunities are exceedingly rare - only once per twenty-hour plus run - but the game does not inform you of this beforehand. Worse still, this chance is provided at the very start of the run, when you are the least likely to make good use of it. Spreading your skill points out to experiment with the various abilities does nothing but hurt you, the path to success is instead to cram almost all points into one thing.
This time I decided I didn't have time to screw around with a bad build and followed an online guide instead. As I followed the guide, I was disappointed by the sheer number of immersion-breaking things I had to do, things that would have been close to impossible for me to discover organically as a player taking the game's fiction and premise in good faith. The distribution of points was exceedingly lopsided and non-intuitive. I had to reload constantly to reset vendor stocks, farmed an early game boss for runes, had to make extensive use of the Horadric Cube (another slot machine) for item transmutations, the list goes on and on. Almost all skill points were fed into a single aura that was almost game-breakingly powerful - that is, until the final act, where it became almost useless.
The more I played, the more I came to hate the core systems of this game. Players are severely punished for experimentation and more or less forced to min-max with the aid of guides. Following the intuition you build up through normal gameplay never seems to lead you organically to good choices.
As I played through the game, the slot machine analogy stuck with me more and more. The soundscape is dominated by mid-range boosted sounds of rushing coins and gemstones. Minor dungeons end in seas of gold and purple sparkling chests. Bosses explode into fireworks of gold-colored loot. What I'm trying to say is that this game just feels like an online gambling app with a grimdark fantasy skin. As players mindlessly click-click-click their way through this procedural slop, are they really appreciably different from the rows of decrepit boomers in Vegas awaiting their final descent into oblivion?
In a world with the Soulsborne games and modern action rogue-likes, there is absolutely no need to play this. It's a bad sequel with nothing of what made the original Diablo good. It's more like the spiritual precursor to something like Raid: Shadow Legends - a hollow, insincere Skinner box that's just there to soak up your time without investing your actions with meaning or a vector for mental growth. Absolute detestable dreck. A cancer and a blight upon the history of games development. One star.
Maybe it's sacrilege to say this, but I think this is a terrible sequel and almost like a Eurojank knock-off of Diablo. Like in the first game, you zip through procedural levels going through a mindnumbing repetitive loop of killing/looting a series of monsters and then town portaling back to the base. Sell, restock, repeat. But things get cranked up several notches too many. Everything is super smooth and zoned in on this core loop to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing leads to discomfort for the player. Vendors are strategically placed for minimum travel distance after the town portal. Hirelings smash enemies without you needing to lift a finger. If they die they can be resurrected within seconds at a negligible gold cost.
The game is dark and bloody, but the ambience of the first Diablo seems almost completely gone. NPCs are not fleshed out or humanized in any meaningful way. Quests are threadbare and often nonsensical, somehow becoming worse the more you progress in the game. The dialogue is basic madlib with the various triggers and game objects the player must interact with to progress ("This {Darkness} must be the work of {Claw Vipers}! Go to their {Nest} and kill them").
What seems to have preoccupied the designers are two equally odious pillars constituting the core gameplay loop: 1) a nested system of slot machines for random gear and upgrades that the player can collect, 2) a ridiculously over-engineered skill tree promising gameplay variety, but in reality offering only a few combinations that give the player a viable chance of completing the game.
The success of your character is defined almost exclusively by your build and your gear. As the gear is randomly generated through the aforementioned slot machines, the only skill involved lies in properly setting up your character. This is where the design runs into trouble. As I discovered in my first outing with the game, there is no real way for the player to predict what kind of abilities they will need later on. What works very well in one part of the game can suddenly drop off in usefulness without warning. Respeccing opportunities are exceedingly rare - only once per twenty-hour plus run - but the game does not inform you of this beforehand. Worse still, this chance is provided at the very start of the run, when you are the least likely to make good use of it. Spreading your skill points out to experiment with the various abilities does nothing but hurt you, the path to success is instead to cram almost all points into one thing.
This time I decided I didn't have time to screw around with a bad build and followed an online guide instead. As I followed the guide, I was disappointed by the sheer number of immersion-breaking things I had to do, things that would have been close to impossible for me to discover organically as a player taking the game's fiction and premise in good faith. The distribution of points was exceedingly lopsided and non-intuitive. I had to reload constantly to reset vendor stocks, farmed an early game boss for runes, had to make extensive use of the Horadric Cube (another slot machine) for item transmutations, the list goes on and on. Almost all skill points were fed into a single aura that was almost game-breakingly powerful - that is, until the final act, where it became almost useless.
The more I played, the more I came to hate the core systems of this game. Players are severely punished for experimentation and more or less forced to min-max with the aid of guides. Following the intuition you build up through normal gameplay never seems to lead you organically to good choices.
As I played through the game, the slot machine analogy stuck with me more and more. The soundscape is dominated by mid-range boosted sounds of rushing coins and gemstones. Minor dungeons end in seas of gold and purple sparkling chests. Bosses explode into fireworks of gold-colored loot. What I'm trying to say is that this game just feels like an online gambling app with a grimdark fantasy skin. As players mindlessly click-click-click their way through this procedural slop, are they really appreciably different from the rows of decrepit boomers in Vegas awaiting their final descent into oblivion?
In a world with the Soulsborne games and modern action rogue-likes, there is absolutely no need to play this. It's a bad sequel with nothing of what made the original Diablo good. It's more like the spiritual precursor to something like Raid: Shadow Legends - a hollow, insincere Skinner box that's just there to soak up your time without investing your actions with meaning or a vector for mental growth. Absolute detestable dreck. A cancer and a blight upon the history of games development. One star.