Diablo II: Resurrected (2021)

DUNGEON CRAWLING RPG - Vanquish Diablo and the other Prime Evils in order to save the mortal realm.

PROS:

++ Addicting gameplay. The moment to moment gameplay is fun and engaging, and the overall focus on finding better and better loot is what makes the game so addicting.

++ Progression. Character progression is incredibly satisfying, without making you feel too overpowered compared to the bosses.

++ Great remaster. The enhanced visuals are great and did an outstanding job of cleaning up the original.

++ Infinitely replayable. There are 7 classes with multiple viable builds, along with two NG+ difficulties (Nightmare & Hell) for those wanting an even greater challenge, and better loot.

++ Stunning cinematics. Cinematics, though few, were done well and the general voice acting was great.

CONS:

-- Spotty companion AI. As a druid, summons and companions had a habit of getting stuck and at times, were unable to follow me properly.

-- Forgettable story. Story was okay. It does the job of moving you from place to place.

-- Town Portal usage. Bosses can be easily cheesed by exploiting the use of Town Portals.

-- Small inventories. Inventory size and inventory management was needlessly restrictive and annoying. With so much loot, and so little inventory, players have to make constant trips back to town to sell or stash their new gear.

I remember when Diablo 2 first came out back in 2000 and I spent my entire summer break playing it late into the night every single day. When the expansion came out the next year, I spent even more time playing that. In short, it’s a very familiar game to me, a campaign I’ve played through hundreds of times. Resurrected is a great visual upgrade to that game which, for better or worse, does not make any attempt to improve the games flaws. The AI pathing and targeting for weapons still feels janky, and I consistently had problems connecting attacks with enemies, getting attacked through walls, etc. just like I did back in 2000. The boss fights feel overly-simplistic, especially for melee characters, and amount to trying to tank & out-heal the boss long enough to win through attrition and portaling back to the boss room between deaths. On the plus side, in revisiting Diablo 2 I loved how it trusted the player to discover things themselves: quests, locations, character builds, etc. It was refreshing and added to the world feeling a little more dark and dangerous.

The campaign felt weighty & complete, certainly the core product and not some temporary attraction on the way to an endless “end-game”. My playtime clocked in at ~20 hours even though I remembered it pretty well and knew where to go and what to do. I appreciated that the story telling in the campaign was minimal, opt-in, and left plenty to your imagination. This is a wonderful contrast to Blizzard’s storytelling in Diablo 3, SC2, WoW, or any of their any other modern output which has been front-and-center and often of extremely poor quality. Playing Resurrected has made me cautiously optimistic about Diablo 4; it would be interesting to see a return to a darker Diablo with more mysteries and fewer rails. It remains to be seen if modern Blizzard can deliver something like that, or if it will fall victim to a severe case of GAAS and Blizzard writing.

More often than not, I am someone who comes to RPGs for story and simply tolerates the combat, items, and all that, especially in older games. This game theoretically would be the antithesis of that, but is fun enough to appeal even to someone like me. Its transfer from 20-year-old PC game to remastered console game (I played on the Series X) feels smooth and approachable as a first-time player, and has had me coming back for hours each day.

The story and characters are not anything amazing, but the cool-looking places you go, the overall atmosphere, and the presentation of the re-done cutscenes feels really solid. These areas can be incredibly dark, mysterious, and intimidating, especially at first. The darkness is a good match for the game's map design, which consists of procedurally generated towns, fields, and dungeons where you really never know what's around any corner.

I sure found out though, since I felt compelled to explore every single tile of these maps and clear everything out. This methodical rhythm strikes a weird balance between tense and relaxing that makes it playable for hours on end without getting boring. The gameplay has just enough strategy to keep you on your toes, while rarely being super hard to actually execute on the default New Game difficulty.

The game does have too much focus on rote actions like inventory management, heavy potion use, identifying items, warping back to town... I think the experience of combat and exploration could have been significantly improved by increasing inventory size, HP, and mana, in exchange for making it harder to get potions and nerfing inventory charm buffs to keep the balance in equilibrium. These minor annoyances add up a bit over time, but are not experience-ruining, just simple things that could be better.

Nearly every other limitation imposed on the player contributes positively to the overall tension of exploration, satisfaction of completing each quest, and reward of character building. This game really does well with build and gear variety. Though you can only ever really explore a couple build paths in one playthrough, it's a deep system that makes the possibilities available to you fun to think about for next time. Even within one class, there are a lot of nice-feeling options.

What would have made this better for me... A bit better enemy variety, smoother difficulty progression, some more quality-of-life improvements, and more interesting boss fights — some of that would help a lot. Maybe I'm spoiled by certain other games, but even Diablo himself was an example of a fight that was a bit anticlimactic for me.

I can easily see why this became such a hugely popular classic. It felt surprisingly easy to get into with a few tips from Google, while also having an extremely high ceiling of possibilities and challenges for those who want them. I am not the kind of player who will push Diablo II to its limits, but I think it's plenty enjoyable as a plain and simple, really fun action RPG.

This is exactly the same game that I played 20 years ago, but with better graphics. I would rather prefer a full remake with more quality of life improvements. It was nice to complete campaign one more time with my friend, but I have no intention to continue playing.

Also, it's a shame that Blizzard didn't add achievements to the PC version. I have absolutely no idea why they didn't do it.

I find it funny how people complained that D3 was not D2 and now they are complaining that D2 is not D3. The only logical conclusion? The consumer doesn't know what they want until they see it. It's my biggest issue with pandering and why I view it destructive to art. The next big crisis for art is nostalgia. Through selective memory bias, you choose to only remember the highs and ignore the lows of an experience. It's this part of human psychology that makes you miss an ex partner (whether you or they ended it). Usually there's a reason why a relationship ended.

Excluding server issues, because Blizzard is proverbially on fire from it's "frat bro culture", the game is an excellent example of a remastered done right. It's a near one to one remaster of the original game, including the option to play with vintage graphics at the push of a button. The only changes they made are minor quality of life changes that most people won't complain about. The only complaint I have heard is Blizzard not taking convenience far enough while failing to acknowledge how slippery of a slop that is and how it lead to the downfall and loss of respect for Blizzard as an Indie darling. Remaking and remastering games is tricky because it's impossible to please everyone. Refer to my first sentence.

How does the game itself age? I'm a bit divided. On one hand, it's brilliantly designed with awesome horror art direction but on the other hand that design is pretty sociopathic and laid the groundwork for micro-transactions in games. It prays on the human psychology of addiction. You are constantly pulling a slot machine each time you kill a monster. Those endorphins soar whenever you see the color of a unique item because of how rare they are. That one unique item (even if it was complete rubbish) fuels your desire to slaughter on a genocidal level hordes more of demons for the next unique drop. This results in a very stagnant, time consuming and simple game play loop. You push a few buttons and an entire screen of demons dies. Nothing engaging about that. You play this game thousands of times to "Catch em All" to complete your build. The funny thing is there is no pay off once you do. There no longer a reason to play once a build is complete. So what do you do? Play a new build and start over!

While the game excels at atmosphere and has plenty of complexity (not from combat), it boils down to a colorful farmville. The late game is extremely grindy and gear dependent making it not appealing for me. The complexity of the game comes from variety in builds and runewords. This lends the game to replayability, but it's a huge time sink each time you start a new character.

If you decide to play casually with friends and not obsess over the min/max build there is a lot of fun to be had. It's when you become obsessive that this game becomes problematic. Sadly this game is designed to make you obsessive.

20 years ago, I loved Diablo 2 (and it's predecessor). It was a corner stone of my gaming experience early on. And it was an amazing experience for it's time.

This remaster changes nothing, in terms of quality of life, except the look of it. That's not nescesarily for the better.

I remember when Diablo 3 came out, my main complaints with it were the atmosphere and story are cartoony and the gameplay is hand holdy compared to the dark atmosphere and open play style of the first two games. This is strictly true, the game is a lot darker than it's sequel and it absolutely does not hold your hand. The darker tone and design were missed, and I enjoyed revisiting them. But the lack of direction made me miss three sorely. There's no guidance to character building and there's no restraint. You can just duck it up and not know. You can also not experience everything a character can do without having to make multiple of the same class. Three might not have given me build freedom, but I could experiment as I liked. There's absolutely no reason not to let me respec my character as much as i please. It just feels like gate keeping nonsense and a huge obstacle to actually having fun. Which is why I'm here.

The story is better, yes, but the endless npc rambling and quests that amount to essentially go figure out what to do I'm not going to tell you, while a young middle school student had patience for this, I have shit to do. It's just annoying and makes playing a chore.

I'd like to take time out just to complain that enemies all have health bars over them. This wasn't in the original game and YOU CAN'T SHUT IT OFF. This is the most immersion breaking aspect of a game that's all about immersion. This needs to be patched out right now.

Bottom line, this feels like an old PC game. You will feel it's age profoundly. Though there is some nostalgia to feel , it's mostly just annoyance at how needlessly time consuming and poorly designed this game was. I still enjoy playing it, but it could have been a lot better. I had to reluctantly admit that Diablo 3 is a better game afterall.

Diablo 2 Resurrected is everything I hoped it would be.

For the most part it is the same game it was 20 or so years ago with a fresh coat of paint. More Pixels and a higher resolution with a few quality of life changes thrown in. At first I didn't think the graphics were that much better, but at the press of a button in game you can swap between the old game graphics and the new.

It blew my mind a little at how far we have come in the last few decades.

The game is also available on consoles, I'm playing it on PC currently but I'm most definitely picking the game up on Switch soon.

Diablo 2 while I poop? Yes please!

There are also some other nice quality of life changes that have been added. Gold is now auto looted as you walk over it, probably to make it easier for controller players. Stashes are saved over all of your characters, giving you more storage space and making it way easier to transfer items. You can also now kill the Cow King without locking yourself out of creating the cow level!

Also, if for some odd reason you just want to play the base game, without Lord of Destruction. You can, and can upgrade your character to the expansion at any time.

All in all they knocked it out of the park with this one, thanks for not giving it the Warcraft 3 treatment Blizz!

If you would like you can check out my video review below.