Diablo 2: Review Retrospective

Diablo 2 Review

Blizzard North's Diablo 2 (2000) is a cRPG whose updates have caused it to become worse over time. Runewords, respec and synergies ruined Diablo 2. Some good things were added, but overall we're looking at a net loss.

Runewords such as Spirit, Grief, Infinity, Insight and Enigma render many unique, rare and magic items redundant. Now, only godly Rare arms and armor encrusted with the best Diablo 2 jewels can beat (some) runewords. Which for 99.99% of players means nothing does because the best Rares are so rare that they barely exist.

  

Respec means the player is never forced to commit to a Diablo 2 Build and their build choices. Respec is a casual feature that has no business being in any game whatsoever. cf. cRPG Builds.

In addition, synergies greatly reduce build variety and experimentation since they knock out hydrid builds.

Good things that were added to Diablo 2 include an increased stash size and Act V of the Lord of Destruction expansion. However, the new Druid and Assassin classes introduced by LoD never appealed to me; they're just bloat.

In a perfect world, Diablo 1's combat system would have been turn-based tactical (as originally envisioned), and Diablo 2's would have been turn-based tactical but with full party control as well. In other words, the player doesn't control just one character class but rather ALL character classes in a party, simultaneously: a proper tactics game instead of an arcade game.

cRPG dungeon design and cRPG combat encounter design would have to be completely different in order to accomodate such elite gaming concepts, but I think it could have resulted in better games if executed well.

And yes, I would have sacrificed any feature of Diablo 2 that made turn-based difficult to implement because robust turn-based systems do not make compromises, and override every other consideration.

One thing I don't like about Diablo 2 is the lack of precision in movement. When we click a destination for the character to move to, the character does not move to EXACTLY that position (like it does in Diablo 1, Fallout 1 and Jagged Alliance 2). Many cRPGs lack precision in movement, but that is no excuse. I do not like approximations in pathfinding and positioning. I prefer cRPGs that have strict player-assignable formations (lines, files and wedges) and unbreakable -- indeed, persistent -- turn-based modes (X-COM UFO Defense).

For a game that can be played competitively, the pathfinding and movement rules in Diablo 2 are absolutely atrocious. We can even get stuck (reproduceably) on the edges of walls. That is just lousy for a game that is otherwise very well-coded.

cRPG Itemization would be more like Diablo 1 or Icewind Dale 1 (random or a mix of static and randomly drawn from preset pools). Diablo 2's itemization is basically without soul compared to its predecessor's.

Act design is poor. Diablo 2 consists of 134 different areas that constitute five Acts, each of which is visually distinct: grasslands, desert, jungle, Hell, tundra. There is a randomness to most area layouts though there are constants and perceivable patterns within them, knowledge of which is put to use in replays.

Some verticality is employed in terrain for tactical purposes (height-mapping), and there is also some limited destructibility (placeables, doors and barricades), but there is no terrain undulation and terrain does not impact movement rules. Instead, the battlefield is dead-flat and static but for the mobs of monsters that are waiting around for the player to come and slay them. That is, in the vast majority of cases, the monsters are not engaged in raiding, looting and slaying of their own accord but are instead just standing around picking their noses, and only when they see us do they come alive, rage hard and attack.

Act I is great but Act II and III utterly suck on replays. In those two Acts, I only enjoyed the Maggot Lair and Travincal. The Maggot Lair is one of the best dungeons in Diablo 2 because it forces players out of their comfort zone. Acts IV and V are good as well.

It's the art, the soundtrack, the sound effects, the voiceacting (VOs), the tactile user interface and the treasure-hunting in a competitive arena that made Diablo 2 popular. Slaying stuff and looting corpses is pretty damn satisfying due to the accompanying sprite animations and sound effects that give the game a solid texture and increase its immersion. But veterans of cRPGs will ultimately come out with an empty feeling even if they acknowledge some aspects of Diablo 2 as works of genius.

Unlike its predecessor, Diablo 2 is very difficult to enjoy in single-player mode of play. cRPG veterans should make no mistake: the game is designed for multi-player and single-player is an afterthought. Everything about the game screams multi-player!!! from the hilltops, including the itemization RNG and the ridiculous wide open area and dungeon design, which features barely any tight corridors and pathways (the above-mentioned Maggot Lair being a notable exception).

Single-player is not so much a challenge as it is a mind-numbing and soul-destroying grind without equal. If not for self-modding, I would never have played Diablo 2 for as long as I did in single-player mode; it would have been a complete and utter waste of time.

Blizzard North and Blizzard Entertainment (WarCraft 1 and WarCraft 2) were super-talented coders and designers. If Blizzard focused on developing pure cRPGs instead of mere arcade-adventure games, they would have wiped the floor with most of the competition in cRPG History. But that's not the subgenre they chose to develop for, and their decision paid off big-time.

Criticism of Diablo 2 itemization in Single-player mode

My biggest issue with Diablo 2 single-player mode is as follows. Once we reach Act III of Normal mode, all of the base weapons and armors offered by vendors (Normal, white) are "upgraded" to magical ones (blue). But no one wants magical items at that point. No one. What we want is a baseline selection of Normal items that have sockets for gems, jewels and runes, like the ones that are offered for sale by merchants in Acts I and II, but which don't cut the mustard anymore because they are low-tier bases. Acts III, IV and V merchants ONLY offer magical items, which is useless garbage to us.

Plus, there is no Horadric cube recipe that allows us to up-tier baseline weapons and armors. This only exists for rares and uniques, which means we have to farm for a baseline item, but that's like looking for a needle in a haystack when we consider the breadth of itemization pools. And not only that, but at that point we are looking for exactly the right amount of sockets for the runeword. Suffice it to say that our chances are slim.

The restrictions on baseline arms and armor availability ultimately means that, relative to the enemy, we are stagnating equipment-wise.

We can, of course, push on and succeed in Normal mode (our Diablo 2 Build improves regardless of itemization) but in Nightmare mode it's going to get hard for physical-based, equipment-dependent builds, such as Barbarians. In SP Hardcore mode, Nightmare is like hitting a brickwall and Hell is like hitting a titanium wall. We need our up-tiered arms and armor. Not want, need. We don't want those war axes in Nightmare, we need Nagas. And we don't want those Nagas in Hell, we need Berserker Axes. Yet getting such a basic thing as an appropriate baseline weapon -- what a warrior lives and dies by -- is not easy.

Let me give an example: straight-up axe-wielding Barbarian. As shown in my Double Swing Hardcore run, he couldn't even upgrade his axe into a war axe. And in Nightmare, he wasn't going to find baseline Nagas without engaging in mind-numbing repetition. Strength, Honor and King's Grace runewords in Nagas and Zweihanders were a distant dream. Yet in multi-player, that stuff is basically skipped. It isn't even needed.

This is why many of us forego Hardcore mode, turn into wimps, and twink with PlugY in Softcore mode, but that is too easy (though very fun to experiment with). This is also why Median XL exists: to make Diablo 2 more SP-friendly, to focus more on skill and knowledge rather than luck and grind.

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