TL;DR – Diablo 2? I don’t get it
Diablo 2 is one of the most popular and influential PC games of all time, and over the years has garnered a massive fanbase across the globe. As not only one of Blizzard’s most popular games during it’s golden age, but also as a frequent addition to the myriad “greatest PC games of all time” lists I’d also felt like I was really missing out by not playing it. Now for a quick bit of context, I only really started caring about the PC during the 6th console generation and while I did plenty of older games I tended to stick with RTS games and some shooters. As such while I did buy Diablo 2 around 2005ish, I never really got into it and dropped it at the end of Act 1 in favour of playing more Red Alert 2 / World of Warcraft / Simcity 3000. Now that close to two decades have passed, I’ve finally gone back and played through the entirety of Diablo 2 after having played a couple of other ARPGs such as Torchlight 1 & 2, Titan Quest, W40K Inquisitor and even Diablo 3.
And boy oh boy do I not get it at all! That’s not to say it’s a bad game, but honestly the whole experience could be described as a graphically impressive treadmill. Maybe it’s due to the fact that I picked the Necromancer class and focused on my summon abilities, due to the fact that I thought it was pretty cool having a bunch of disposable goons in front of me. Maybe it’s the fact that I played a bunch of other successor games first, and so the novelty of Diablo 2 wasn’t there. Or maybe it’s just a case that I don’t see who this genre is for or why people bother with them. To give some context, once I hit around level 10 or so every fight played out exactly the same. My skeletons and golem would rush in, my mercenary rogue and skeleton mages would hang back, and I wander around occasionally resurrecting my minions or engaging in combat myself to expedite everything. This was every encounter for around 15 hours once I’d got my cool spells (prior to this I didn’t have a golem sadly). Now I can only assume people will point out “Hey LOSER, you can just play another class or build!!!” but that seems to be a solution that sounds great on paper but doesn’t actually achieve anything. I can say this with confidence because I initially played this game all those years ago as a… Paladin and it was really boring. Then while playing my Necromancer I switched between melee and ranged builds, then dabbled with the other spells and really the whole felt identical. I was wandering around like a big spooky simpleton, getting rushed by the same mobs and clicking on them ASAP before they made my health bar go down. Sure I could emulate President Trump and build a BIG BEAUTIFUL (bone) WALL to keep them at bay, or I could use an Iron Golem instead of a Flesh Golem but it really didn’t change the overall dynamics of the game at all. You’re just some feckless murder-hobo being pushed from big open plain to small dungeon to big open plain for about 20ish hours.
Fortunately the developers at Blizzard came up with an ingenious system by which losers gamers would be kept endlessly amused by this entertainment juggernaut. That solution? You can pick up items, that give you some bonuses to some stats that make you better at clicking on things! I guess the name for their MMO originated from players yelling “WOW!!!” at the prospect of fighting the same enemies in the same places over and over and over and over so they could have another Crossbow but this time with BIGGER NUMBERS. You probably think I’m probably being facetious (and I am) but honestly the max level is 100 and you can beat the game before you’re level 30. So why the hell would you spend the incredibly large amount of time grinding up that main number so that you can then grind for the other items that contribute to the little numbers? This is what I mean when I start my review with “I don’t get it”. It’s not that the combat is bad, as it’s fine and honestly the enemy variety is pretty decent for an RPG. There are cases where enemies are reskins, but it’s not a big issue and most enemies fit into a clear archetype that when combined results in some fun target prioritisation. But unlike say… Serious Sam which does the same thing in a frantic FPS environment where you are dealing with dozens and sometimes hundreds at a time, Diablo 2 is only giving you at most a room full of guys to deal with (around 20). Otherwise you’d just get melted by everyone punching you at the same time. Instead of having progressively higher stakes and needing to learn movement mechanics like in a good FPS game, you instead get a big ass unnecessary grind for you to brag about on the online servers (and/or forums). It’s baffling to me that this is not only one of the exemplars of Blizzard’s existence, but that this grinding simulator is held up as the pinnacle that inspired an entire genre of successors. Who the hell wants to do the Act 2 boss fight 50 times in a row so that they can maybe get the Ultimate Halberd of King Knut (+30 life +30 energy +1cm penis size +2 Dexterity +15% chance to cast bear mace (Level 3) on hit) so that they can then have a powerful build for when they replay the same game but at a higher difficulty level? Why do these people exist???
Of course I’m not being entirely fair, as there are a few points in the game where the gameplay changes. Don’t worry, there’s not a mandatory stealth section or anything. Instead when you have to face Bosses, you’ll quickly realise that they have a shitload generously large amount of health and deal a fucking retarded significant amount of damage. This changes the game a lot, because you lose a lot of gold (It’s your current level as a percentage of the gold you had) when you die and indeed when you die you need to find your corpse (to loot so that you can regain your EPIC gear), which in this case will be right next to the boss that just kicked your ass. Act 1 doesn’t really have a boss, but the final quests in Acts 2, 3 and 4 involve dealing with a very large demon that makes every other enemy in the game look like a pussy. In fact most of these bosses could shred through my big health golem very, very quickly and my other summons (and mercenary) even quicker! This obviously presented an issue, as even with my more powerful spells and abilities I was in trouble. Fortunately I devised an expert strategy that almost never failed, which was to bring a lot of potions… and use the shared section of my stash so I didn’t lose any gold when I died… and just teleport away when near death to regain health for free. So in a sense, they were kinda broken in terms of balancing and I was super broken. I did feel kinda bad, because it seemed like the heroic thing to do would be to rush in like a crusader of yore and batter them into submission, but even my fancy golden crossbow did bugger all damage to them and missed like a third of it’s shots. So each boss fight became a battle of attrition between my character and how many mana potions I could fit on my belt to keep spawning golems so that I could shoot more crossbow bolts that basically just tickled the bosses. I also tried melee and died really quickly. Plus I did try using spells, which did more damage (yay!) but meant that I burned through way more mana and so it was much harder to keep golem meat-shields around. I’m sure there’s some build that makes the bosses a cakewalk, but after double checking how to deal with the Act 2 boss without being a little cheating bitch I found out that my build was actually considered one of the best ones. Go figure.
On the subject of mercenaries, these are NPCs you can recruit that function as companions and followers. Unlike in many fully fledged RPG’s they have no dialogue (well, they say thanks you give them items) and don’t impact the plot at all, but they’re still useful to have. In my case I kept my starting rogue, as these mercenaries level up and have a variety of abilities they use automatically. They can also equip a weapon, a helmet and armour that you give them but not the other item slots such as rings, boots, gloves. On the flip side they don’t need ammo which is great, but when they die you need to pay to resurrect them. Which would be fine, if they weren’t suicidal when dealing with bosses. You see the companion AI is about the same as the minion AI which is the same as the enemy’s AI which is on the level of charging the nearest hostile and being dumbfounded by chasms. Due to this, I’d say keeping my emo rogue alive constituted almost the entirety of my gold expenditure throughout the game as death was free, shop items sucked and so many potions and teleport scrolls were dropped by the baddies that I never had to buy them. Even this source of expenditure was fairly low, except for the final boss when my occasional death to Diablo’s basically one-hit kill death-beam would cause them to kill themselves in solidarity. So even after abusing the stash gold loophole, I still had to pay some money to bring them back. Which would’ve been fine, if they had been able to avoid Diablo’s attacks, which they couldn’t, so they often died really, really quickly.
But all my negativity aside there are some aspects of Diablo 2 which are actually pretty impressive. First of all having the entire game be playable with friends (or randoms) is cool. No doubt about it, if you couldn’t afford an MMO then this was an interesting way to interact with people and I can say that even when I last played the game close to a decade after release it was still popular. Plus as mentioned there is plenty of enemy variety, you’ve got multiple classes with different builds and the challenge of grinding out the harder difficulties. Why you’d bother is a question I can’t answer, but if you enjoyed the game for whatever reason then hey you can play it with other weirdos online and there’s a ton of (repetitive) content to explore! Perhaps more noteworthy for me as someone who wasted around 20 hours of their fleeting, worthless existence on this game due to the peer pressure of strangers, I will admit that the art style is pretty good. There’s plenty of variety between the zones of each Act, with the general look and feel of each area being handled well. It’s a good looking game and the remaster does a solid job of bringing it up to modern standards, without losing any of the appeal. Even the font and UI have been chosen with care and the whole game successfully captures the feel of a Gothic low-fantasy world. The music is also a good accompaniment to the game, although I have to confess that it loops like a motherfucker because there aren’t really many tracks here. The ones that are there are good, but I’d personally say they kinda peak in Act 1. Last but certainly not least, the cinematics show that Blizzard really know what they’re doing in this department and as ever they’re great. Not only they are visually impressive, but they’re a good way of providing context to the events in the game’s world and are a good way of breaking up each Act. In fact I’d say they provide a better reward than the loot on offer, but I’m probably just biased because my class couldn’t use half the late(r) game equipment due to not having enough Strength.
In conclusion then Diablo 2 is a game I really don’t understand. It’s a perfectly serviceable ARPG for those who are desperately seeking more carpal tunnel syndrome in their lives, but for the typical player I don’t see the appeal. It’s a game that looks great and has a striking art-style, with well made accompanying music and plenty of content for you to grind through if that’s your bag. For those seeking a good story, that’s not here. For those seeking a varied and engaging combat experience, I don’t think that’s here either. Instead it’s an RPG for that subjection of RPG gamers who only wants to make the numbers go up. The plot is minimal, there are no choices, there isn’t even much of an ending, but there are numbers. By the light, are there numbers. So for those who love grinding, or are seeking a co-op game at short notice then by all means give Diablo 2 a go. But for me, it’s just the cause of one big inescapable question – Who are these games for???
