A Diablo of a finer vintage

I admit I was pretty hard on Diablo (henceforth D1 with similar abbreviations, etc.) in my earlier post on it, especially because it was a game that very adeptly mixed many different types of gameplay for its time. The main thing I was getting at was despite this the game has not aged well and the biggest reason why is its sequel did so much to improve the formula that it made it difficult to go back to its predecessor. High praise for Diablo II actually. A more factual tidbit to support this praise is that to this day D2 remains on many top 10 lists for PC games and after 12 years it is still readily available pretty much anywhere that sells computer games. Outside of another of Blizzard's prize stallions, Starcraft, this is unprecedented.

It maintains the addictive mix of exploring, killing evil things and finding loot that D1 had and improves substantially on the formula. In D1, there's one small town and one very deep dungeon (essentially), but D2 is composed of four acts plus a fifth with an expansion and besides Act IV they are each individually larger in scope than the entire first game. The first major addition is the over world of large open areas to venture into the countryside, finding both essential and optional dungeons to explore along the way. Instead of painfully plodding along you can now run, moving faster from place to place and in combat situations. While I normally wouldn't count running as a big advancement for a game (I would think it'd be a given actually), it does wonders to improve upon D1. D2's predecessor, as I mention in my overview of it, was not only slow but extremely restrictive to move around in and this hampered gameplay significantly. No longer are enemies that can teleport or run away the bane of my character's existence; yes they still exist and are annoying, but they don't stop the game from being fun.

On the topic of fun, another big difference is the diverse number of ways the game can be played. In D1, the classes respectively specialized in melee combat, ranged combat and magic, but basically they could all do the same things (a warrior could use magic, a sorcerer could wield swords). The main thing separating them was their attributes affecting how well they could do various actions. D2 vastly improves on this by offering five classes, plus two with the expansion, that are vastly different from each other. Each have their own unique abilities and beyond that, their skills can individually be customized in many different ways. The sorceress for example has skill trees for fire, ice and lightning spells and generally players who use her will want to focus on specific spells within two of the three skill trees, but if you want to be creative it's possible to use all three or just specialize in one (although I wouldn't recommend it for higher difficulties).

I chose barbarian this time around because it's the only class I haven't bothered to go through the game with. Now having done so, I can't say I regret my decision to ignore him. It wasn't difficult to take him through normal, but I found him very dull compared to the other classes. His is a very gear-dependent class and one problem I have with D2 is when the right gear becomes necessary for a character to advance. Now when I say the right gear I don't mean the crap the NPC merchants sell or the majority of what enemies you kill drop, I mean stuff you have to be very vigilant or lucky to find. I don't want to run a section of the game ad nauseam, fighting other players on who can click on the good loot drops first (if playing with others), to advance. Now my barbarian had a bit of an inferiority complex to my Act II mercenary for most of the game and even though completing the game wasn't really a problem, I felt weaker than I should have for most of it. I'm not sure how many other players share my feelings on this, but as someone who has only intermittently played the game I've often felt very outclassed when it comes to gear. Even though it's meant to be a loot-driven game, there's something about how the formula actually works that I've never been happy about.

Like D1, D2 certainly looked good for its time and to this day its' relatively detailed sprites give it strong visuals and art direction. I'm not the biggest fan of rendered graphics, which is what Blizzard used for both D1 and D2 along with Starcraft. For those who don't know, rendered graphics involves first making a 3D model of something like a character and then creating a 2D sprite of that model. It allows the game to display an approximation of the 3D model without causing the demand to actually render it. Rare of old had considerable success with this for the Donkey Kong Country games on the Super Nintendo. The Golden Sun games on the Game Boy Advance also made passable use of the technique. Although as I said I'm not big on this method in general, Blizzard is certainly experienced at rendered graphics and D2 may be the game that used them best.

When it comes to sound, D2 is again very similar to D1 with largely atmospheric background noise and music belittled by the number of whacks, spell flinging and groans you are more likely to hear. The amount of character dialogue is considerably increased and this is welcome. Besides Deckard Cain and very occasionally the witch Adria, nobody in D1 had much that was terribly interesting to hear. Plenty of new characters occupy D2's few safe havens and most have remarks to pass on about the world and the story, although I imagine most people completely bypass this section of the game.

Despite all the good, I'll admit I've grown a little tired with the game. I've played through it about four times with my favorite class, necromancer, and at least once now with all the others. However, the game has amazing replayability and even now I would still like to try out some of the available characters in different ways. It's just that I have to be in the right mood to play (same as everything really) and these moods are becoming more infrequent.

I am somewhat disappointed in Blizzard's present lack of support for the game on modern operating systems like Vista and Windows 7. Yes, the game is 12 years old and normally I'd give a developer a pass for not keeping a game up after so long, but D2 is still widely available in a battle chest where computer games are sold as I mentioned previously. I don't understand how they can continue to keep the game in stores but leave it a nightmare to get to work correctly on modern computers. Choosing to run it in compatibility mode didn't even begin to fix it for me or for many from what I've read. It took quite a bit of research to find a solution after going through multiple ways others used with the same operating system version as me.

Now that I'm finally finished with D2 I'll at long last be getting Diablo III. Hopefully my computer will be able to handle it well enough. I've been a bit torn between choosing the demon hunter or the wizard as my first character, so depending on how things go I'll post next weekend on my first impressions of the game.