Diablo II - Resurrected

Regime said:

you'll play this alongside Nirgon and I.

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Ppl said this about wow "classic"

0% chance

Have a sit down with the old man? Do some gamin? Ok.

Total Warhammer 3 campaign is a thing I'm gonna do at some point.

Deathwing said:

What is this offering that PoE or current D2 mods don't?

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A bloated nightmare of system on top of system without much thought into how they mesh/stack?

comparison is dumb. nostalgia. i don't even knock poe. i guess people just have to be contrarian for the sake of it. a relative is very much like. "what you playing? nothing, slammin d3 season opener this weekend. oh my god why dont you just play poe----"

jesus. its like another dude critiquing the porn you watch. barely have enough time for games as is, let a man enoy life!


one thing that stuck out to me during the dev interview is the actual depth, scope, and updated graphics already make a dark game (d2) feel much more dark. i mean, look at durance of hate - piles and piles of mutilated corpses. that shit would have a hard time flying to market as a blockbuster -- so glad they're doing this.

i don't think they touched upon drop rates. that would really fuck with the system and i don't think they are going that route. sounds amazingly true to the game.


and shared stash is a change everyone can get behind. even faggots can understand sitting in a game for 5mins for your mule to save isn't some feature people fawn over.

Did anyone else think it looks (graphically/art) better than D4?

i'm just yelling to the void from my personal experiences, ignore.


like i mentioned i picked up d2 again because i wanted to try to speed run in the small amount of time I have to veg out, but ultimately got suckered into character building. i think diablo 2 has a nice addictive combination of ultra rarity + min maxing that isn't nauseating and general aspects of a "good" game. i don't want to say the game is hard at all, but it gives you the twitch-finger like need of "ahh shit, didn't pay attention. dead". not a giant consequence, but ultimately enough to want to avoid.

items really made it. sure rune words can triumph all, but there are so many combinations that work that getting a specific piece can really make it enjoyable. for the record on remastered, no items are getting messed with besides the exception of new icons and/or graphics on the character.

Khalan said:

Did anyone else think it looks (graphically/art) better than D4?

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In regards to aesthetics, yes. In quality, not quite. Yet, D4 has (so far) moved towards D2 rather than staying with D3.

Deathwing said:

Should I assume that you're implying that's what PoE is? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that's not how I worded my original question.

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Yes, that's what I'm saying PoE is - or at least, quickly turning into. I do see how I responded made that slightly confusing.

D2 offers a fairly "frills free" ARPG experience. At the end of the day, I play an ARPG because I want to chill, listen to a couple podcasts/music/whatever, and microdose on dopamine in the form of lootsplosions. I don't necessarily want to be inundated with 50 systems that barely interact with one another at best and contradict each other at worst. PoE has stacked way too many layers on top of shit without really giving thought as to how it interacts with the overall experience.

Just as an example - shit like Labs is such a fucking outdated mechanic for unlocking ascension that it's comical, especially the way uber labs is unlocked. At this point, they need to either completely redo labs or, ideally just tie ascension to another more useful, recent mechanic and ditch labs completely. Unfortunately, GGG seems married to the idea that they can't EVER invalidate any of their past work, so they shoehorn it into an ever bloated gameplay experience that makes a lot of players quit early. Hell, I haven't played since Metamorph league because I just don't want to be bothered figuring out the 90 different systems they've stacked on-top of the game since then. It really makes a lot of new players question wtf systems they're "supposed" to be interacting with, not realizing that some of those older systems aren't really worth doing at all anymore. Yet, they stick around in the game with their only real purpose seemingly to confuse the fuck out of new/returning players.

Anyhow, to get back to the subject of the thread, I think this remaster looks solid. They seem to have done a good job keeping this as simple as possible and mostly just turning it into a graphical update with a few QOL changes. But, D2 is 20 fucking years old at this point and ARPGs have evolved past a lot of what D2 is/was. It'll be great for nostalgia, but I doubt I'd do much aside from a single playthrough just to relive some of those memories. Paying $40 for that? Fuck off. I think my max would be $20, but we all know that isn't what Blizzard is going to charge.

I agree with Kirun about the bloatness of PoE. He hit it right on point. They are incorporating too many game mechanics and some either needs to be removed or reworked. I stopped playing PoE after they introduced cluster. It’s just getting too much for my liking.

I don’t agree that D2:R will be single play through for nostalgia. There’s nothing really out in the ARPG scene other than PoE and a lot people are playing it because of that. D3 is dogshit and Lost Ark may be a contender if it ever make it to the west.

Deathwing said:

What is this offering that PoE or current D2 mods don't?

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Nostalgia.

I get that your completely in bed with PoE and that's fine. A lot of people are not. Just move on and pretend this game doesn't exist for you.

Blizzard will get enough $40 purchases from nostalgia alone to make it worth the work that has been done.

Deathwing said:

What is this offering that PoE or current D2 mods don't?

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POE is just too...much. I don't want to have to study up on a game that the genre should be pretty much kill/level/loot drink a beer in between loot. D2 with mods I haven't followed up on.

I don’t get the they’re going to fuck it up like Warcraft forged hate train on D2:R. All they (and not Blizz) are doing is layering the original Diablo 2 game with better graphics. Same mechanics, spells, classes, loot etc. It’s damn near a 1:1 translation of the original game with improved graphics, a few needed quality of life changes like shared stash, auto gold pick up if you want to and stat tabs. Hell even if you’re a D2 purist you have the option of playing the sprite base version instead of the 3D graphics. There’s no female Diablo, pink ponies, items with 1000% multipliers doing billions of damage, no pvp D3. We’re talking about Stone of Jordan, Tyrones Might, Bowazons, Baal runs in 3D D2. How can they fuck this up?

Brahma said:

POE is just too...much. I don't want to have to study up on a game that the genre should be pretty much kill/level/loot drink a beer in between loot. D2 with mods I haven't followed up on.

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This is exactly it. ARPGs should be designed to be relatively "simple", at their core. I'm all for adding some depth here and there to builds, item interactions, etc., but let's face it - this genre is all about kill, loot, repeat and finding ways to do that every more efficiently/satisfyingly. There isn't a whole lot to unpack there. The reason the genre works is because it preys on the same psychological factors gambling preys on; the thought that winning the "jackpot" is just one more pull of the slot machine handle away (or in this case, one more boss run). We all know that isn't going to happen, but the chance that it "could" and the fact we get the very occasional "win" hits our dopamine response in just the right way.

There's a reason why Metamorph was one of PoE's best leagues (the rarity of certain body parts was a problem, however) and possibly my favorite of all-time. It kept shit simple. At the end of the day, you got random body parts dropped from bosses and when you collected enough, you could "tailor" a creation based on those body parts. The tougher you made your "creation", the better the loot it dropped. Essentially, it was a "create your own boss" mechanic that you could tailor to your build, item, etc. needs. It kept shit relatively simple and to the point - kill shit, get components to make custom shit, kill custom shit for more loot.

Breach league is another good example of keeping shit "simple" and another reason why it also is among people's favorite leagues. Stand on a little breach circle, which then starts a "timer" of an ever expanding circle that gives better and better loot/tougher monsters to kill the further out you're able to push before it times out. Again, it kept things simple and is a mechanic you can interact with during normal gameplay, without having to go out of your way.

Synthesis, Betrayal, etc. were all fucking horribly received because they were shit you had to go out of your way to interact with, were needlessly complicated, and didn't interact with the gameplay loop in a natural way.

D2 was great because it kept all that shit to a minimum, while still allowing for some depth to gameplay via builds, items, etc. Now, a LOT of that was likely due to the limitations of tech at the time, but there's a fucking reason why shit like EQ, Diablo 2, etc. "worked". Sometimes, keeping it simple, stupid is really the best course and this isn't just because I'm a gaming boomer. Valheim has fucking exploded in popularity and at the end of the day, a large part of the reason is because of how "simple" they kept the gameplay loop. Where so many other survival games failed by trying to overcomplicate shit and make things intricate, Valheim succeeded by "dumbing" shit down, in a way.