Review

Apparently, the first Diablo was a big hit. I wouldn't really know. I played it for a few hours, which was sufficiently long enough to be struck by two fundamental questions:

1. Why do I have to click the mouse for Every Single Attack when timing is irrelevant?
2. How in the hell do I get all of the junk lying on the ground to actually show up?

Diablo provided no good answers to these questions, and I promptly put it down and never played it again. The sequel, Diablo 2, solved these two heinous UI flaws. Unfortunately, that is probably the game's most distinguishing characteristic. After having spent a considerable amount of time with Diablo 2, I've come to the conclusion that hardly anything the player does affects the game in an entertaining or engaging way. I'll go into more detail on this in a bit.

Diablo 2 is an arcade game. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The parts of a traditional RPG that it eschews, it does so unabashedly:

• There are virtually no NPC interactions.

• The only attributes that exist for your avatar are purely combative in nature.

• The combat is real-time and utterly non-tactical.

• The interaction with the game world is extremely simple, allowing for a spartan interface tailored to expediency.

• The quests are few and arranged linearly.

• The play incentives are frequent, predictable, and completely homogeneous.

Generally speaking, none of those things immediately imply that a game isn't fun. A game can possess these characteristics and still be fun, but only if those characteristics have been chosen to help clear the way for whatever else the game possesses that is fun. Sadly, for Diablo 2 the part that's supposed to be fun is MIA.

My issues with Diablo 2 do not stem from its formulaic nature. "Well, from what do they stem", you're wondering. I'll just quit dawdling and get down to it. As I said above, hardly anything the player does affects the game. My major problem with Diablo 2 is that there's essentially no game in the game. Diablo 2 is like those little kiddy rides outside of Walmart or a grocery store. You know the ones, a race car or a spaceship or a helicopter that a kid can sit in and for a few quarters it will rattle around in some stilted fashion for a minute or so. They always have a steering wheel to spin around and some levers to pull or buttons to push; all of which do absolutely nothing, but that doesn't deter the kids in the slightest. This is what playing Diablo 2 eventually felt like - that I was spinning a wheel and pulling levers on something that had no capacity to respond to me in any way.

To state it more specifically, Diablo 2 provides no opportunities for a player to be clever, creative, strategic, tactical, or inventive. As a player, your involvement in the game consists of the following basic tenets:

• allocating your points when you level

• making sure that you consume potions when your health gets too low

• when your potions run out, making sure that you flee

• ... and of course, you pick up, sell, and buy an endless stream of randomly-generated items

That's it. Seriously. When you're fighting, you pick a target, and then, thanks to the revolutionary UI, you can just hold down the mouse button instead of frantically clicking. Wait until that particular target is destroyed. Wash rinse repeat. Your involvement consists of picking targets and keeping an unwavering eye on your health orb. It's about as challenging as making a root beer float. You have to have enough eye-hand coordination to not physically miss the glass when pouring, and enough concentration to ensure that the resulting foam doesn't spill over the top of the glass.

To make matters worse, this fundamentally non-challenging gameplay is oblivious to the amount of time you spend in the game. Nothing changes as your character's skills progress. You level up, and you get more powerful. You go to the next area, and the monsters get more powerful. You level up, you get more powerful. You go to the next difficulty setting, the monsters get more powerful. Nothing else changes. The game is essentially represented by a big ratio: the damage you can inflict or absorb divided by the damage that monsters can inflict or absorb. As you progress through the game, both parts of this ratio increase in tandem, and therefore the game never really changes at all. There isn't anything compelling about the different difficulty levels - they just adjust the bottom part of the ratio, which I guess is technically all one might expect from a "difficulty" dial. As far as I'm concerned, though, there isn't any incentive to replay the game.

And yet replay it I did, for one single reason: cooperative multiplayer! The one and only reason why I didn't put down Diablo 2 and put it down fast was because I had a (softcore gamer) friend that was fond of it and it was an opportunity to play together. It's a sad testimony to how badly cooperative play is ignored by the industry that I'll latch onto Diablo 2 and play it for as long as I did. My friend and I completed the game on all three difficulty levels, and I think even he'd lost his taste for it well before we finished. In particular, the later patches (1.05B and beyond, I believe) were nerfing things so dramatically that it became very frustrating.

Ultimately, to summarize my main issue with Diablo 2, I would say "The player can't play." It's like being on a guided tour of the White House: "... let's move along now. We're killing, we're killing. Ok, to the left you'll see Hephasto, he'll kill you easily, so we'll need to kill some other things first. Let's keep moving. If you've picked up too much junk, please raise your hand and we'll portal back to the store." Diablo 2 has all the trappings of an arcade game that relies on hand-eye coordination, only Blizzard has removed the need for hand-eye coordination, leaving you as the player with not much to do.

I do, however, want to take the opportunity to congratulate Blizzard on a fabulous interface. Here's how good it is: you can legitimately use magic in real time combat. And it's not just that you can use magic, but that you can cast different spells without being at a huge disadvantage to someone (or some creature) using non-magical attacks. The game is still biased towards the barbarian and paladin, mind you, but at least the interface doesn't contribute to that bias.

There are a number of other things I'll comment on below, but I won't go into much detail about them.

Other basic issues I have with Diablo 2:

• The sorceress cannot be a pure sorceress and not be in a party.

• The absolute necessity for resistances in the later stages makes it impossible for a sorceress to NOT have a shield. My primary character was a sorceress, whom I took to level ~60 and completed the game on all three difficulty settings. I was very disappointed at the resulting lack of freedom that I had over my sorceress because of play balance issues. I'll state it again: the need for very high resistances became so great, that I had no choice but to equip a diamond-gemmed shield. Not only should a sorceress not require

  a giant shield, she probably shouldn't even be able to wield one. I very much wanted to stick with staves and it just wasn't an option.

• Sets are useless. By the time you can complete them, you'll have availed yourself of much more useful randomly generated items, not to mention the fact that you can't really afford to tote around the dead weight of an incomplete set, which brings us to...

• Totally inadequate stash size. You're encouraged to keep multiple armor collections (the manual actually suggests it), but that's impossible. It's particularly impossible if you're keeping gems to transmute, or a few different weapons for different circumstances. And of course you're keeping gems because of the ultimately unavoidable need for resistances.

• Bugs, bugs, bugs. Diablo 2 was a very buggy game. It wasn't so much inflicted with hardware or video bugs (although those weren't altogether absent) but rather it was riddled with glaring gameplay bugs. For evidence, just browse this list.

• Poor performance. I'm still at a loss to explain how I can play a game like Infiltration for Unreal TournamentFASTER than Diablo 2 at 640x480, and play it online with LESS lag!! INF is doing accurate ballistics modeling, 3D collision detection, animation, true particle systems, probably some sort of BSP traversal for culling, executing runtime-linked scripts, processing legitimate AI, modeling 3D audio, and eventually drawing over 4 times the number of pixels. And it does it all faster than Diablo 2 can draw 2D sprites and process "magnet" AI behavior. Or if you think that's an unfair comparison, how about Total Annihilation, which was released in 1997? TA can handle pathfinding and true line-of-sight calculations for close to 1000 individual units simultaneously, and oh yeah that's at 1280x1024 as well.   Diablo 2 is a dog. Period.

Issues with the patches:

• Blizzard consistently demonstrated a severe bias toward BattleNet players. For whatever reason, Blizzard turns its nose up at LAN play and open TCP/IP play. It was obvious from the nature of not just the patches but the behavior of the game out of the box that the only thing that mattered was BattleNet.

• The patches nerfed character, weapon, and monster properties CONSTANTLY! After one particular patch, I went from being able to make steady progress in "Hell" difficulty to being almost incapable of killing much of anything. I might as well have been wielding a giant Dixie straw, or throwing doughnut sprinkles at them, for all the damage I seemed to be able to do. What's that you say, you've been using your hard earned skill points developing a competency in the lightning branch of the spell tree? Sorry - you're screwed. 3 of every 4 monsters report an immunity to lightning. Now replace "lightning" with your preferred category of damage and the story is the same. I read some garbage in one of the reviews that the new 'balancing' encouraged more diverse characters. That's a big fat lie. When you're forced to inflict a moderate amount of damage in literally every category, there is no diversity. All characters wind up with the same homogeneous set of skills, Nobody can afford to have a character that's significantly different. And if you were having fun playing solo, just forget about it. If you're in a party of 3 or more, maybe you can afford to specialize slightly. And even if you've been a good sheep and homogenized your character, you'll run into monsters that are immune to everything except the one thing you can't do well (such as inflict melee damage if you're a sorceress), so you're still hosed.

• I had to DOWNGRADE my IDE driver in order to read the CD! What?! I patched, couldn't play, and spent a few minutes rummaging around the support pages looking for a clue. I found it because I'm used to rummaging around looking for solutions to incredibly stupid hardware and software problems. Another person might not have been either so lucky, conditioned, patient, or capable of fixing the problem. Guess what that makes the game? A coaster. A frisbee. Landfill. Downgrading the IDE driver. I mean, come on! I've had to do some really disappointing things over the years to get games to run, but this is probably the worst.

Wow, I feel better. I finally got all that out of my system. Let's wrap this up.

Final Thoughts

Is Diablo 2 fun? As always, it depends on you. For myself, it was fun briefly, and only because I could play cooperatively with a friend. Diablo 2 was buggy, poorly-balanced, had poor performance, and offered up fundamentally shallow gameplay. Time and patches can remedy all but the last of those things, but don't bother telling me if it ever happens. I'll be busy playing something else.

Marketing Lies

• "..as you journey across an immense, ever-changing world."

  
  'Immense' is a relative term, so maybe they were comparing it to a Warcraft map or something.  The areas associated with each chapter were serviceably large, but not overly.  The original Zelda, or Final Fantasy, for 8bit Nintendo had comparable gameworlds.  And there certainly wasn't anything 'ever-changing' about the gameworld. Sure, if you started a new character, you got a different layout, and if you join another player's multiplayer game, you get their layout and not yours.  But the differences are purely cosmetic at best. It's not like poker - shuffling the locations of the dungeons doesn't give you a different game.

Tips

• Read the strategy guides available for whatever character type you've chosen.  The characters aren't entertaining enough to justify inefficient development choices, so plan ahead for how you'll allocate skill and spell points.  After all, there's no sense pretending that the game rewards experimentation.  It doesn't.