Why do people like Diablo 2?

Diablo 2 sucks.

Along with Halo, Halo 2, and Doom 2, the first two Diablo games were among the most frequent my family played together in youth. I spent a considerable amount of time in the first Diablo cheating my character's stats and inventory up to absurd levels with my father's help, at which point I'd play for an hour or two and move onto something more interesting.

Diablo is a great game. I beat it for the first time last October; it shows its age in many respects, but it's still fun. It has great atmosphere, a fun pulpy fantasy story, and decent click-and-kill gameplay, especially considering that it's like 25 years old. In 1996, it would have been spectacular.

Diablo 2, according to popular lore of the internet, is also a great game. Lots of people love it. I remembered enjoying it as a kid, and yet it loomed like the malevolent shade of Mephisto over my childhood. Constantly I would sit down to beat it, always as the Necromancer; every time I'd make it to Act II...and then give up. This happened probably ten times between the ages of six and eighteen.

The tale repeated itself last year. I finished Diablo without cheats, for the first time, and moved on to 2; finally, I thought. I would beat this well-loved game and discover the magic that everyone says it has!

I made it to Act II, then gave up.

Enter Diablo 2: Resurrected

My mission was this: I was going to play Diablo 2, I was going to beat it as a fire Sorceress, and by God I was going to like it.

I am proud to report that two out of three of these parameters were achieved. As of the very night of this writing, I have finished all of Diablo 2. What I had alas failed to realize beforehand was that my third objective was a literal impossibility, because...

Diablo 2 SUCKS.

Imagine fields upon fields of procedurally generated wilderness. Everywhere you turn, the same art assets; where is your destination? Who knows. Wander around until you bump into it. You'll be looking more at your minimap than the combat screen. When you encounter enemies, which quickly becomes more chore than anything else, you'll press shift, then left click a few times, and your fireballs will blow them up. Then you will continue wandering around until finding the right road to the next zone, or the next cellar to explore, at which point the process will repeat itself, until you eventually make it to Act V.

All the while you'll constantly teleport back to camp to sell gear, buy potions, and revive your idiot ass retarded companion, who has a habit of dying ever two seconds--even though you constantly feed him potions and also have given him the best armor you can find in the game. If you ever have the audacity to log out or swap characters, the entire map will reset. If you're on a 'look for the thing in one of any number of identical caves/temples/ruins' and you exit the game before finding the right one, tough shit. Search them all over again on a completely new layout, with all respawned enemies, when you come back. Gameplay!

Diablo 2 is a procedurally generated nightmare. Act I, which has a road, is by far the best part of the game; the rest is like Eraserhead, if it was put in a blender, dumped into a hat, and then scenes were drawn at random and inflicted onto you without any narrative or thematic cohesion.

In other words, it's a mindless, repetitive grind-a-thon, in which all of the level design has been outsourced to some guy's PS1. There is, effectively, no level design at all. It's like wading through molasses, except worse, because at least molasses might have the good courtesy to drown you and end the suffering once and for all.

Boss fights shake up this formula. In boss fights, you'll kite manasponges around a map effortlessly, launching fireballs every few steps, until the boss either gets stuck on nothing and lets you kill him, or he dies of a thousand papercuts. If kiting isn't working, you can just use Town Portal to go back to camp whenever you're out of potions, and Diablo or whoever will be patiently waiting for you to murder him once you get back.

The only fight, and quite possibly the only part, of Diablo 2 that's any fun is the final encounter with Baal. That fight actually has mechanics and things to do aside from kiting. Unfortunately, by the time you've reached that far into the game, your life will have become nothing but suffering, and your only desire will be for the suffering to end so you can uninstall the game and go play something fun instead, like Road to Hell: Retribution or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Diablo has a real sense of progress. There's mystery. You discover more about the cathedral every day. You clear a level...and it says cleared. There's a literal descent into Hell. You get to know Tristram and its people well, and each character receives one layout. In Diablo 2, there's no permanent progress except for the story. The maps are constantly being reset. You zip between zone after zone. You replay content constantly. Ironically, despite the greater amount of variety in setting--like, for example, some of the game now takes place outside--the levels actually feel more claustrophobic and more repetitive, because their procedural generation makes them all feel the same, whereas each new biome in the first game feels different in far more meaningful ways.

But what I think I dislike the most about Diablo 2 is that it lacks any and all of the first game's atmosphere. This always stuck out to me as a kid, too. It's just so bland and repetitive. There's no creepy music, it doesn't all take place at night. There's no goofy voice acting with weird and stylized dialogue. It's just...bland. That might be the worst crime of all; Diablo is mediocre by modern standards, to be sure, but it has so much charm. It feels so unique, so focused, so original.

Diablo 2 has no charm whatsoever.

So. Why do people like this game?

All nostalgia, I'm afraid. Some of the sins of Diablo 2 could be overlooked back in 1874 when it was first released, but these days, they're inexcusable. Aside from a capacity to act as a timesink, as a black hole with which you pass the time through your meaningless existence, desperately doing anything as you long for the sweet release of death, it has nothing. The gameplay is mediocre. The level design is some of the worst of any game ever made. The story is nothing. The art--well, that's where we come to Resurrected.

Who remasters the master?

What I hate most about the Resurrected edition of Diablo 2 is that it's a great remaster. The new art is phenomenal. The new functionality perfect. Added controller support works surprisingly well. The new online features are easy to use. Best of all, they didn't even have to nuke the old version's client to make this one work! What a crazy thought!

Yes, it's a great remaster. I can't imagine it being any better, truth be told, without seriously altering the gameplay. The only problem is that the Blizzard game with the best remaster is also the worst Blizzard game.

That Diablo 2, an enormous piece of shit, got this treatment, and WarCraft 3, one of the best games ever made, got this...

..whatever this is, this catastrophe where everything looks like plastic toys, is almost too painful to endure. It breaks the heart.

Anyway, Diablo 2: Resurrected is the best remaster I've ever played. It looks great, plays great, and runs great. The only other that comes close is Halo 2: Anniversary, and they're both fantastic for the same reasons: they preserve the style of the original, while bringing it into modern sensibilities--with excellent, and I mean truly excellent, new, high-fidelity art.

(Incidentally, these two remasters also share something in common: you can switch between old and new graphics at will, with a single button press. This is a great feature, although I can't escape the feeling that Blizz is cheating us slightly in D2:R, since the old graphics run at 15 FPS and in 800x600. In reality you can play old school Diablo 2 in 4K, and at any framerate you like. It still looks awful--worse than the first game, I'd say--but it doesn't look anywhere near as awful as the 'press g for old version' feature in Resurrected would have you believe.)

So there you have it.

The only thing Diablo 2 is good for is when you're too ADHD to sit down and read a book, too lazy to go exercise, and you just want to do something with your hands while you listen to an audiobook or podcast. I may continue to use it for this function, whenever such a need arises in my life.

As for a game itself...it's just not good. I'm afraid $40 is an absurdly high price to pay for a chance to revisit this shitty old game, even if it now has amazing visuals. If you have nostalgia for the game it might be worth it; otherwise, you'll get about the same amount of enjoyment out of four trips to McDonalds.