Diablo 2: resurrected review in progress

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Diablo 2: Resurrected has arrived and I’ve had a couple of days head start. I’ve been squishing demons aside for enough hours that I’m now entering Act 3 and I’m not absolutely bored, I’m honestly delighted. I probably played hundreds (but I would bet less than a thousand) hours of Diablo 2 between 2000 and 2007, and Resurrected absolutely scratches the itch for a style of play that is no longer really done, not just aesthetically, but mechanically. Everything is coming back.

I mean, the mood of this game is just magnificent. The updated graphics do much more than a simple homage to the original game, adding details of the environment that were out of the question in 2000. Locations like Monastery Gates in Act 1, an outdoor area that was always a bit strange from a vantage point. Isometric view point of view, now have visible roofs on the buildings instead of just a black sea beyond the walls. There’s a lot of detail in every scene and in the character models, that really makes me appreciate the ability to dynamically switch between the old and new graphics to see the contrast.

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Wonderfully, when you switch to the classic graphics, you also switch to the original sound, although the difference is not so marked here because it didn’t need any significant updates. Other than a bit of remastering, it’s identical to the original, and it’s still phenomenal. the whistle When a gem hits the ground, the whirlwind of weapons and the guttural voices of demons (“Rakanishu!”) are an iconic sound design. Not to mention the remastering of the classic soundtrack, or the new remixes, which are beautiful work. (The voice acting, well … let’s just say it was a different time.)

I chose Paladin as my first character. This is because, for two decades, I’ve held a personal grudge against the dung beetle soldiers in Act 2, you know, the ones who shit when you hit them. The Paladin’s lightning resistance aura allows me to laugh at their faces and kill them in humiliating ways, and it has been everything I thought it could be.

Some of the mechanical ideas feel old school in relation to how things are done in action RPGs these days. For example, you only get two active abilities at a time. It sounds harsh, and it is, but what was a technical and design restriction of the game at the time is pretty fun when you get into it. You have to choose your skills carefully, as having too many could give you a huge set of tools that you are not fast enough to use. I like to smash my Paladin against enemy herds with a Charge before switching to Zeal for a series of quick strikes, or Vengeance for elemental-infused strikes that take down monsters resistant to physical attacks. For the tough elite groups, I’ll switch weapons and throw gas grenades to weaken them before entering. I even have a cool desert mercenary wielding a polearm. Don’t worry – it’s still as stupid as a sack of bricks and gets stuck on walls constantly.

There’s no shortage of options, and part of the delight of Diablo 2 is that it has a weird skill system that you can use to build some really weird characters. It’s flexible enough that you can make ranged builds for melee characters, like a Crossbow Paladin that fires explosive bolts. How about a barbarian focused on the War Cry skill, who just runs screaming until everything dies? How about a sorceress who enchants weapons instead of stunning enemies from a distance? I’ve always wanted to try and make a Necromancer tank, personally, maybe I’ll finally get it done.

There is a lot of freedom … that is, if you’re willing to discard 20 years of accumulated wisdom in Diablo 2. In many ways this game is “solved”, in the sense that the best constructions and their detailed descriptions have been studied thoroughly over the years. You’re welcome to play like it’s 2000 and not search for optimal builds, of course.

However, while I normally encourage you to blind yourself and experiment for yourself, I will not in this case because some of the Diablo 2 designs have not aged well. For example, there are a lot of skill traps for new players, which means that some skills you can choose from don’t scale much beyond the initial game, or aren’t useful unless you understand their synergies with other skills that you won’t unlock until much later. late. . Some things, like the infamous Next Hit Always Misses bug, have been preserved in the name of keeping the flavor of Diablo 2 the same, but that’s something few people know about unless they do their homework. Hopefully, this fidelity to the original’s bugs has limits – I haven’t been able to check if the Amazon’s Fend or Druid’s Fury abilities still have bugs, but it would be a huge missed opportunity if Blizzard didn’t fix them, as that would open up builds of characters that have been ignored for 20 years due to a simple glitch.

It’s worth saying that I’ve hardly found myself new Resurrected-specific bugs, and the ones I’ve seen have been minor graphical glitches that don’t affect gameplay, things like doors that don’t visually change when opened but can still be traversed, or an object that overlaps a texture weirdly .

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It saddens me a bit to see that Resurrected has retained Diablo 2’s arcane skill reset system – you get only one respect per difficulty level, and the only way to get more is by farming big bosses for rare items and then pushing them back. your Horadric Cube. Unlimited Resurrections would have been a prime candidate for the overhaul to make Resurrected more accessible to a new generation and mitigate the skill cheat issue, and it’s something that could have easily been disabled for the ladder game.

It’s a bit irritating that this sort of thing hasn’t been addressed because the other big update to Diablo 2: Resurrected is a similar quality-of-life change. Instead of collecting gold pile by pile, it automatically grabs it when it passes. There is a difference between preserving experience and disrespecting the player’s time, and this change shows that a little tweak can go a long way toward removing the tedium from the original game without ruining anything.

However, the moment-to-moment gameplay that made Diablo 2 legendary in its day hasn’t completely changed. Exploration and combat still feel deeply familiar; it’s a festival of clicking (or, now, thumb sticking) where you want to go and hit your enemies. It’s as wild and chaotic as an isometric action RPG is, but in the long run, more than 20 years of game design innovation later, it’s also kind of … slow. Characters don’t move quickly and running is limited by your stamina bar. The copious and constant use of the city portal scrolls generally avoids having to go back, but when necessary, it is annoying at best. Running also makes your character’s block worse, if he has a shield, although Diablo 2 will never tell you.

I didn’t get out of Act 1 without looking for the slotted rune combo that produces armor with a bonus to Run / Walk speed, if only for, again, my own quality of life. I’m still not sure if having to fight basic game mechanics like this is fun in 2021, or if it will be fun for new Diablo 2 players who don’t know there are solutions to their problems.

I have other issues myself: How can you justify stopping LAN gaming? Why can’t I clone a multiplayer character in single player? The latter is especially concerning, as the servers on launch day are not behaving. The wait to start an online world is long for everyone, with others reporting that when they go offline their characters have disappeared. Thankfully, unlike the memorably terrible launch of Diablo 3, we can still play offline while we wait for Blizzard to figure it out.

But none of those heck in the details has gotten over the fact that I’m definitely having fun. Diablo 2’s design has aged remarkably well as an example of a relatively straightforward isometric action RPG. They all have abilities, yes, but they all interact with the same systems: health, mana, stats. There is no single coin or meter to learn for each class, just a skill tree, a billion demons, and an infinite supply of gear. It is, as always, a satisfying game.

Look at this space. I’ll keep you posted for the next few days as I dive into Act 3 and beyond. For now, excuse me: I have to go show Mephisto the door.