We’ve done some psychic research and are aware quite how many Diablo II fans there are reading. Loads of you. So there should be some smiles at the news that there’s an unofficial patch to finally let you play it at a decent resolution. If you’re still playing the game, and we know you are, you’ll know the frustration of the limitations. Fret no more! (The small catch is it means you can’t play online.) You can get the patch from ModDB, and then play the game in any resolution your monitor is willing to present.
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It may have design problems, but boring?
So all those people who are now playing D2 for a 20th time, are what — lying to themselves?
I loved it, not so much for gameplay, but for movies, story and general looks.
Alaric I’d say that the game didn’t suck, it just wasn’t for you. It isn’t a mediocre game which spawns its own genre.
I’ve raked hundreds of hours in D2 and tried lots of hack and slashes since. Not one got the sense of progression and pacing as good as Diablo. When I play Titan Quest for example I see it represents everything that people say it’s wrong with the genre, that’s why I’m waiting patiently for D3 to get it right again.
D2 didn’t spawn it’s own Genre Alse, the genre had already existed for some time before Diablo was ever made, sorry mate.
@Serondal
Action RPG’s may have existed before Diablo, but I don’t see how one could deny that Diablo/Diablo 2 were the principle force in popularizing the (sub)genre.
I agree that Diabo was the first game to make the Rogue style game play popular and Diablo 2 was the best example of a Roguelike game ever made (To this date I can’t think of one that tops in my book) I’m just saying it didn’t /create/ the genre. I certainly wasn’t saying Diablo 2 wasn’t good. I loved that game ^_^ There is more than just clicking on animations until they stop animating. getting the perfect gear, skills, stats ect and putting them to use is a great deal of fun to me. I used to love whirl winding through hordes with my barbarian with my friend backing me up with a necromancer.
I’ve just this week hit D2 with four IRL friends and are currently bashing through hardcore NM. Then there’s a post on RPS about it! Wtf!
God damn I’d love to play it online at 1920 res. Makes you wish Blizz would somehow shoehorn it in to the game officially.
Diablo 2, a Roguelike? That’s… not something I’ve ever heard suggested before. It wouldn’t occur to me to call something real-time and lacking permanent death a Roguelike.
The elements of a rogue like are that the game is randomly generated each time you play it. The items/levels/location of monsters and bosses (and indeed some of the bosses) are all randomly generated each time you play the game. Plus there is a perma death option if you want to be Hardcore ;) I’m certainly NOT the first person to suggest Diablo 2 is a rogue like.
Even the wikipedia page lists Diablo as a roguelike ;P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(video_game) (and no I didn’t just edit that in thank you very much)
But the original Diablo 2 was 640×480 in year 2000. Yea, sure in 2001 it was increased to 800×600 if you bought an expansion. Whoopti-doo. Just to compare, Total Annihilation, which was released in 1997 scaled to ALL resolutions.
Wakey wakey, Blizzard go for strong art direction over graphical fidelity. There’s also more people playing Diablo 2 and Warcraft III regularly online right now that have probably ever played Crysis. Mediocrity etc…
You seem to suggest that artistic beauty and non-yesteryear graphics are mutually exclusive.
As to the amount of people playing any particular game… if we judge the quality of anything by the amount of fans it has, then Diablo II is certainly a magnificent game, Titanic is the best cinema has to offer and McDonalds makes the tastiest food.
Zzz the old popular != good crowd. Don’t tell me you got a Blackberry instead of a iPhone and you use Linux over XP.
i’m not talking popularity like sales i.e. Fifa
i’m talking popularity ten years on – longevity if you will – as testament to how good the game is
Things are judged by the amount of fans they have all the time. The President of the United States is elected that way. There is more to Mcdonalds than the taste of their food they are popular because of several things. they food is tasty enough to eat it, it is cheep enough to afford it , and service is fast enough to fit it into your schedule very easily. They provider a service that is in demand for a reasonable price.
Just because you didn’t like Titanic doesn’t mean it isn’t one of the best movies ever made, the people that go to see it/pay to see it/buy it obviously disagree with you on the quality ;P
Diablo 2 is still popular after all these years despite the graphics. That is because the game = fun, no one is going to keep playing a game if they don’t enjoy it. There are countless Japanese MMORPGs out there that are free to play and offer very similiar game play with better graphics , other Diablo like games that are very cheep to buy now, but Diablo 2 is still popular. Why, because it is a good game, peroid.
Umm… neither, I have a G1, and for precisely this reason. Just because the herd went for something (iPhone) doesn’t make it good. In fact it’s probably not good since the average intellect of a crowd is always… well lacking.
In any event, I don’t think Diablo II is a bad game. I just think it’s mediocre. It is well polished, yes, but nothing about it stands out. Not the story, not the graphics, not the gameplay, not … anything at all.
I’d say Diablo II to games is what Toyota Corolla is to cars. A lot of people have it. It’s cheap. It’s reliable. It works. But there is nothing special about it. It’s not comfortable enough to be luxury. It’s not fast enough to be sport. It’s not good looking enough to turn heads. It’s just the celebration of the middle ground. Which is what makes it sell.
@Alaric – Only when Diablo 2 came out it cost the same as any other computer game and it’s expansion cost the same as any other expansion so your obivously missing something here. If it is a Toyota Corolla of PC games why are people willing to pay the same for it as they would the Ferrari video game ? O.o
@Serondal,
Yes, the president is elected that way, which is exactly why we keep having an epic fail after an epic fail. There is no such thing as “wisdom of the mob.” An individual can be kind or cruel, smart or stupid, brave or cowardly. A mob is always cruel, stupid and cowardly.
In any event enough about politics.
@Serondal,
You seem to be having a bit of a logical breakdown here. First you said that Diablo II cost as much as all other games, and then you said that people are paying for it as they would for a Ferrari. I’m not much of a car person, but I am fairly confident that Ferrari costs a wee bit more that most other cars.
Anyway, until recently all games cost the same on release. That was just the way things were done. Diablo II was prices as was appropriate for the time.
And I am not saying that nobody plays it now. I simply see no cause and effect relationship between the amount of people that plays it and the quality of it.
I’d simply reply with this: name a better action RPG. Hell, name any RPG with better character development, a better array of unique, well defined classes, better replayability and longevity (random map generation, random world encounters), better developer support ten years on where they are STILL adding actual content.
The same cane be said about WoW, people just instantly take a disliking to it because it’s popular, despite the fact that it’s popular for a reason.
@Butler,
I like WoW. It has it’s problems, certainly, but overall it is more or less a good game.
As to a better dungeon hack, I would say Nox was a far superior game. It came out the same year as Diablo II, but looked and played infinitely better. It got murdered by EA, when they took over Westwood.
As much as I love Nox, I’d struggle to label it the better game in terms of what I outlined above (of course your definition of my constitues a better game may differ, depending on what you’re looking for).
I’m just long since bored of the anti-popular stance people have in gaming and technology circles. Popular certainly doesn’t always mean good but, crucially, it doesn’t always mean average/bad either :p
Hmm yeah I didn’t express myself well. What I meant is that it spawned its own sub-genre: Diablo clones. I’m very familiar with roguelikes and it’s a bit similar to what Rogue created. If anything, D2 was underrated by critics. It had marks around 8 I think, and I’d rate it above many action games made since.
My point above was that a Ferrari IS more expensive than a Corolla Alaric, so if Diablo is is the Corolla why did people pay Ferarri prices for it? Even now Diablo 2 is around 20 dollars new on some online websites so people are buying your 9 year old Corolla for around half the price of a brand new Ferrari ;P My point being that your analogy is horrible and wrong. You can’t compare diablo 2 to a car or any other game for that matter.
If you want to believe that a game that has maintained extreme popularity for 9 years is some how medicore you can go right ahead and believe that. I don’t see nearly as many people playing nox, Dungeon Siege 1 or 2 or Titans Quest online . . .
My favourite diablo alone is guild wars. I love that i can fashion a build which feels personal and unique (even if that isn’t really the case) and with friends build complex cross plays.
I just couldn’t get into Guild Wars long term, I played the origonal for some time and created and help maintain a guild with its own guild house ect but it just never really grabbed me like Diablo 2 did. I can see what other people see in it but It just never got me hooked ;). I did play a lot of Hellgate London which is a LOT like Diablo 2 but lost interest in that as well. Nothing since diablo 2 has hooked me long enough to get a character near the max level.
” When you enjoy a game the point of which is to click on animations until they stop animating… something is wrong.”
You can break down every game ever to such a simple formula. And you’ll always miss the point.
You could do it if the story is good. Sure. However, the story was … well, about the quality of Doom 2.
The story in Diablo 2 is utterly irrelevant. Not that it was that bad, anyway – the usual nonsense story you get in games, but it was well told, and with remarkable cutscenes.
You could do it if the game looks gorgeous. Sure. But the original Diablo 2 was 640×480 in year 2000. Yea, sure in 2001 it was increased to 800×600 if you bought an expansion. Whoopti-doo. Just to compare, Total Annihilation, which was released in 1997 scaled to ALL resolutions.
Well, now you’ve completely lost me. Resolution only has something to do with the purely technical quality. Look at the high-res shots with this mod. It does look gorgeous. Still. Now look at TA today. It looks terrible. Bland and uninspired, like it did from day 1.
I’ll never understand why mediocrity is ever so popular.
Well, that I agree with. Only I’d never apply it to something so blatantly not mediocre.
Exactly
Diablo 2 at the time of it’s release was very good in many ways but after all these years it doesn’t quite pass muster anymore. It’s still fun but there are mechanical issues (brought to light, ironically, by the innovations of WoW) that linger.
Anyway, we aren’t forced to grade it one way or another. As long as you have fun with it, it matters not.
@Xocrates:
Yes, it is obvious. The team working on Diablo3 can’t be arsed with using the lore of the Diablo universe, so they just mash up some WoW esque BS on their own. That’s simply ultra weak sauce.
Look at the Witch Doctor, just look at it. It’s like Fisher Price got a hold of Diablo and tried to redesign it for 7+. Necromancers? Nah, that’s a bit scary. Not enough colours on that lot, let’s make them sort of goofy looking indians, with feathers and shit. The kids will go crazy!
I don’t care how much other people enjoy lazy lore like WoW. Stealing from 30 years of pop culture isn’t good lore. Neither is creating art for the lowest common denominator hardwarewise. The models in D3 have a severe case of WoW-itis, and if the almighty Blizz can’t be bothered hiring artists that can do two separate designs, why would I be bothered by checking the steaming pile out?
… and don’t get me started on having item art the size of post-stamps. Diablo2 was about having awesome gear with killer names, over the top mods and COOL ARTWORK. Jay Wilson just doesn’t get it. He has no clue about why D2 was the awesome game that is was. Simply put, the guy is almost as shitty a designer as Ken Rolston, and I almost feel bad about saying that, but he deserves it. This guy would remove the ball from Pong if he had the chance.
I’m sorry, but D3 just doesn’t look good, and the game mechanics certainly leaves something to be desired. Wilson seems to think a limited amount of cookie cutter builds is hot shit, and that about wraps it up. Unless a miracle occurs, D3 will always be know, amongst people who aren’t braindead, as the lesser successor of D2.
I do think SC2 looks pretty spiffy, though. But that’s another story altogether.
The cut scenes in D2 are still impressive, 7 years later.
Maybe this time round I can get a char past level 67. At least my clicking finger has had a few years to recover from the last attempt.
Of course, that’s 9 years later. Whoops. Still, even more impressive in cgi terms; 9 years is a hella long time.
@Angry-Man-With-A-Long-Name
Dear sir, would you kindly care to elaborate on your above statement, where you claim that Diablo II lore is somehow superior to the WoW lore? I am asking because it seems to me that you are confusing the desirable and objective realities.
The Diablo I and II lore was bland and just as borrowed from volumes of generic fantasy as WoW. Heaven vs. Hell, Lesser Evils vs. Prime Evils, etc. There is not a single original, or even well executed aspect. Even the so called “plot twist” at the end was a joke.
As for the Witch Doctor, why do you think that a tribal shaman type figure is any less realistic or appropriate for the setting than a girl with a spear wearing a bikini for example?
Can anyone get the mouse wheel to work in this? I assume its because the game is now forced toa window?
Alaric:
Actually, I never compared the two qualitatively, however I basically mentioned the WoW lore is shit.
I find it somewhat refreshing that they do half-interested mish-mash of clichéd fantasy and pop culture (I mean, tongue-in-cheek lore can be fun) — for about ten minutes. Then it gets tedious and boring. At least Diablo has a defined style. It’s dark, brooding and a with several notches more realistic art design. The main point in my previous post not being that WoW is shit, but that Diablo is distinct and needs to stay that way. Nobody in their right mind is interested in a sequel that looks and feels nothing like it’s predecessor.
@Kakksakkamaddafakka
I’m not so sure creating art for the lowest common denominator of hardware is a bad idea. Creating stuff that only the top end of stuff can run it seems more like iD’s schtick. Pretty much everything Blizzard has made seems like it runs on anything you have lying around, with the possible exception of WoW right at release.
@sigma83, I share the thought on mechanical issues; I had an experience where I decided to pick up D2 after D3 was announced, and I was mystified when pressing a hotkey didn’t use whatever I had bound to it. There were a host of other minor issues I ran into due to getting used to how WoW deals with things. Maybe I’ll revisit it later now that I’ve been off of WoW for a while, see if my assumptions on how a game should play looking as it does.
Diablo 2 was a “streamlined” MMORPG with fullloot. And was ***EXTREMLY*** popular for the hardcore players. Is not a singleplayer game that was played 9 years, it was the PVP game (I could be wrong, but thats my impression).
The question is… will D3 be compatible for the hardcore gamers? full-loot these days is niche market. If the answer is NOT, then i see a game that will be played 8 years less than the old title.