Diablo 2: Resurrected Review

 Looking for Baal?

Talk about a wild card! When have I ever shown more than a passing interest in the Diablo franchise outside of playing that Diablo 4 beta? Well, actually I've always wanted to get more into the ARPG genre ever since I first played the demo for Diablo III almost eight years ago. That cycle of monster slaying and loot collecting whilst weighing damage values against higher philosophies of levelling always appealed to me in that puerile 'number goes up' manner that only really blossomed for me when I finally got into Borderlands. My only real hang-up has been the storied history of Diablo and how impenetrable it seemed to get into. 3 players all yearning for 2 and begging for 4 to be more like their faithful dark love rather than the cartoony style of the sequel- and I couldn't follow any of that discourse. I just thought the games seemed fun and wanted to try them out. Diablo 2 seemed to loom over anyone who wanted to play this franchise as some sort of unattainable masterpiece standard that any true fan had to play and love or else they were a pathetic faker. So I just didn't bother with Diablo at all.

Which isn't to say I've never tried to play any other ARPG. I have tried, on several occasions, to play through any one of the Van Helsing APRG games- only to fall to sleep before completing the first act of any of them. (In fact, I only even reached the first hub city in one of those games. They really weren't for me.) But I did manage to stick it out with a colourful and vibrant Xbox 360 ARPG that I played back in my secondary school days called 'Torchlight'. Diablo fans who critique the apparent 'cartoon-like aesthetic' of Diablo 3 would just vomit blood at the whimsically exaggerated body shapes, the warmfully glowing palette and goofy random-name generations of Torchlight, but those were the aspects I found so inviting to get involved with. I actually completed the first Torchlight, before finding the second a bit too 'absorbed in itself' to stick with. I also played quite a bit of Path of Exile, so I kind of jumped right past the 'hardcore' position of the Diablo player base without realising it.

But after playing Diablo 4 and realising that I really wanted to give the full game a shot, I realised that it was probably time I worked my way around to the past Diablo games, and that I had little excuse not to now that 'Diablo 2: Resurrected' exists: a high quality remake of that original 'series zenith' for my perusal. Thus was born the whim, that which has slipped me into various franchises I had no business playing with before. The whim that could steal my heart in seconds as it had when I fell for Persona 5, or for Yakuza 0, or Baldur's Gate. I've come to anticipate that whim. To yearn for it's guiding spark. And what of Diablo 2? Has that proven to be another awakening moment for me, unveiling a side of my tastes that I never knew existed? And am I still prepared to play Diablo 4, or has 2 got me hooked forever more?

First I should start by establishing that as far Remakes go, Diablo 2 Resurrected is faithful to an almost frustrating fault. It's not a retelling of the narrative done with the gameplay lessons of a modern design stance, it's pretty much the exact same game as Diablo 2 remade using a modern engine so that it plays as close to the original as possible whilst not making your eyes bleed on a 4k screens. It's so faithful, in fact, that Diablo 2 Resurrected actually runs an emulated version of the same game in the original visual style underneath your game that you can switch to at any point in order to affirm how spot-on the comparison is. Like The Master Chief collection before it, Diablo 2 Resurrected relies on the timeless quality of the original game to stand out even in the modern age, albeit with the added boons of better stability and a more readable higher resolution UI.

What that essentially means if that all of those classic old rough design elements are kept in for better or for worse in this more polished frame. You'll find this reflected in the layout of the world which employs a computer generated layout that can feel very maze-like and disorganised. You really start to recognise each tile being used after a while and start navigating by guessing how the generation engine is slotting it's assigned tiles together; maybe that's totally fine and what some people out there are looking for from their dungeon crawling experience: I prefer a more hand-crafted tailored feeling to my dungeons. At least those tiles look fantastic rendered under the Diablo 2: Resurrected engine.

Sticking with the old gameplay also means that some of the strengths of the more tactile and less 'streamlined player friendly' version of the Diablo playloop shines forth. You'll actually be deciding what skills and talents to sink points behind when you level up, with different skill trees pertaining to different skills so that you'll always be improving in the manner you choose instead of the blanket 'learn every skill' approach of Diablo 3. The stat blocks themselves aren't insanely in depth and mostly just pertain to either raising resource pools or tiny +1 boosts to maximum and minimum damage ranges every now and then. Though there is this concept of 'attack rating' in the game which feels like a hold-over from an older age of ARPG design. The way I think it works, and I could just look this up but I want to impart the exact ideas the game left me with when I played it, is that the higher the attack rating is the better the chance you have of hitting certain enemies when your attack lands. Because yes, we're dealing with Morrowind rules of 'hit doesn't necessarily mean a hit'. If I'm correct in that assumption then this stat is something of an annoying arms race to keep up with throughout the game as enemies seems to require higher and higher attack ratings to make hit contact against as the game plods on. I just gave up on using weapons altogether by the midgame and rerolled into being purely skill based, because none of the skills seemed to miss their hits ever.

The randomised nature of the world generation is decided every time you start a session, which makes it so that the average player can sometimes feel locked into a play session until they reach the next waypoint (the only immutable spot in the world outside of hubs) for fear of losing all their dungeon crawling progression by logging off for the night. Dying doesn't just cost you 20% of your gold (even if it's stashed) but also drops all the player gear that then needs to be recollected from your corpse. (A genuinely non-sensical design decision that does nothing except make the gameplay loop just that little bit more rocky and plodding.) The armour 'slot' system is so rudimentary that there's no way to create new slots on items beyond an increadibly rare resource expensive ritual or the reward of a single quest in the final act that gives one socket a playthrough. Meaning that high level players will start a fresh character and speedrun to that quest just to get that socket reward and place it on an item they'll then transfer to their main. Ain't that a pain?

But for everything that is annoyingly cumbersome about the older elements of Diablo 2, Resurrected has stuck with me for it's boons. The enemy designs are great and varied, with fantastic models and some distinct enough styles of attack that I would at least acknowledge who was who and plan my attacks accordingly. (At least I did until I respecced into favouring my Assassin's Trap skill tree. Don't really need to even know which mob is which when you melt them all that quickly.) Specialising and honing in on your build feels a lot more impactful when magic items are rarer and every level-up contributes directly to your chosen skills. And the game was just pick-up and play friendly enough for me to get sucked into multiple hour play sessions from just a passing fancy, which to me is the sign of a winning game formula.

Yet, some of my biggest gripes that aren't just mere 'annoyances' do stop me from seeing the game as some legendary gem of yore. Perhaps the relative infancy of the genre is to blame for some of them, such as the fact that the bosses are largely uninspired and straight forward, lacking in creative attacks or complex fight rules of any kind. Pretty much every boss is just a really big guy with a lot of health and a bunch of wide berth attacks. And leading on from that, the difficulty curve of the game seems a little blind at some points. Sure, the acts step up in level and difficulty for the most part, (I think the mobs of Act IV were significantly more dangerous than the mobs of Act V) I often found the major quest bosses proved much harder than any challenge around them. Typically you'd expect surrounding side quests and lead-up trash mobs to prepare you for the major main quest fight- but anyone who has survived the Duriel fight from Act II knows the futility in that belief. Again, these just weren't the angles that developers thought they needed to cover back when the original game was developed.

Another issue which I came up against with more and more as I played on was the Online components. Anyone playing a Diablo game knows that you're pretty much always going to want to engage with the game in it's seasons, enjoying seasonal content and racing to max level- but Diablo 2: Resurrected' comes with a strangely draconian 'always online' stipulation I ran afoul of painfully often. Basically, any character you make who is involved with the series 'ladder' (Diablo 2's version of seasons) requires you to play with a constant server connect that, should it falter, will kick you back to the home screen. There's no 'play in offline mode' either. If you make an online character, they're online for life. And as is always the case in these sorts of systems, that meant I got kicked in the final moments of slaying the final boss of the game. Ain't that just the way?

The narrative of Diablo 2 is a classic gothic faire which in itself doesn't necessarily present anything special or mentally stimulating if you've come looking for a narrative. All you need to know is that the hero of Diablo 1 seems to have become possessed by the very monster he slays and is on a very one minded journey to get the 'big bad mcguffin' which the player follows along with. I've said before how I'm not a fan of the "Oh, you just missed the big story thing, it happened a while ago" style of storytelling, and that makes up Diablo 2's entire campaign. I felt like I was playing catch up right until the final moment where the game actually couldn't run away from me anymore. But at least the plotpoints were coherent, the story was passable, (the pertinent lore drops were a little garble-mouthed at points; and I cringed everytime I heard someone pronounce 'Baal'. It's so wrong it upsets me.) and the newly rendered cutscenes are utterly gorgeous. You'd never know these new scenes were shot-by-shots reanimations of antiquated 2000's era animated scenes. (You should see the side-by-sides- it's wild how good of a job Vicarious Visions and Blizzard did.) 

And finally, as always, I must cover the music. I was quite impressed with how memorable the orchestral soars of the Diablo 2 soundtrack were, to the point where at it's best I genuinely found the music to be emotionally swelling. It's quite easy in games of these genre for the music to slip into being generically appropriate and indistinguishable from the other dark fantasy titles around it, (having just started Diablo 3 I'm getting that feeling over there) but Diablo 2 marks it's own territory with it's suites to a great and moody effect. Personally I think the best track is the overworld theme for Act V which seems to perfectly slide into it's role as the rallying cry of the final action set piece of an epic movie. I really did appreciate this soundtrack, more than I expected to.

Summary

Which leaves me with the unenviable job of having to summarise all these disparate and conflicting thoughts into a coherent notary. I wonder, do you know the way I'm leaning with this one, because I don't. To be clear, Diablo is a series of games designed to be played over and over again, and I finished this blog after a single playthrough to which I can affirm that I do have a desire to play again. The smoothness of the gameplay, the fun of levelling, the randomised nature of the dungeon layouts- all are enough to draw me back in to push through a 'nightmare' difficulty playthrough at some point in the future. Perhaps because this game flitters perfectly into that space of a 'background game' you can mindlessly push through which watching something else, whilst still being quality enough to demand your attention in the bigger scenes. But the unfriendly systems around the endgame, particularly with the insanely restrictive slotting system, makes me unwilling to really invest myself in the game in any dedicated fashion. I'm at odds with the quality of the game and how it's design choices make me feel, which is probably why I'm erring towards a respectable B- grade on my arbitrary review scale. The game shows it's age, not in it's face but in it's design, and the ugliness therein does tarnish what might otherwise have been the superior Diablo experience to play for the moment. That being said, Diablo 2: Resurrected is still an absolutely fine title that shouldn't deter anyone looking to get into Diablo or ARPGs in general. It's still just janky enough to miss my blanket recommendation, but for a Diablo fan getting ready for 4 the game is pretty much a must play that I'm sure they've already rocketed through more times then my sensibilities can stomach.