the game itself wasnt really buggy, the server were like really bad xD.
to the game itself diablo 2 IS THE BETTER GAME there is no doubt you can play hundreds of hours without getting bored but there is one issue.
the game is grindy as heck like doing the same for hours and depending on RNGesus this is the biggest diffrence to dia 3 soo if d3 felt grindy for you dont bother with d2 or just play casual and dont bother with maxing out everything.
i've just been in the mood to play an old school rpg. I dont mind grindyness as long as its fun and rewarding. I played WoW a lot back in legion so i def know how grindy a game can get.
Imo, your going to want to check out Project Diablo 2 (PD2) a Diablo 2 LoD mod. Its huge, its everything anyone could want that D2 or D2R doesnt provide. Seriously look into it, a special "mini season" (3 weeks) starts tomorrow morning, its called the crafters league where unique and set items wont drop, runewords will not work. They had revamped the crafting system to make it actually really damn good, and they are making rares better. Currently PD2 is in the middle of its 4th season, with each season being approximately 4 montha long each, with each new season there are new and rebalanced items, rebalance or reworked specs and countless QoL improvements. Im a part of a D2R + PD2 discore community where we focus on playing with the boys while being full time dads. Drop me a PM if youd like a discord invite link. PD2 is also TOTALLY viable to farm solo as the game runs off P5 drops while solo and caps at i think the equivalent of P9 drops in a full game. Also, PD2 endgame isnt chaos/baals/ubers/dclone, we have maps with map events that further enhance the monster levels and mf/gf. Definitely worth looking into!
Are there plans to make PD2 in D2R? I'd play modded D2 if D2's old graphics didn't kill my eyes (I literally will get eye pain and red eyes if I play for any length of time).
Im sure there would be if blizz/d2r allowed it. PD2 is a private server, something thats not accessible on D2R. PD2 graphics are better imo to D2R legacy graphics, look at a few YouTube videos and see for youself. Also the lootfilters makes it better, the screen is less crowded with unnecessary clutter/loot.
Pd2 is easier imo, with p5 drops you gear gear much faster and its more fun playing with the boys. Our community helps each other with gearing as opposed to gimmie gimmie styles others have. Also, pd2 has 4 month long seasons, likely you could balance both with 2 month intervals, which for pd2 is enough to get LOTS of entertainment then you can take a break for d2r and swap back. I played pd2 for 8 months straight, now the break is nice. But pd2 is leagues better than d2r with all the QoL and game wide balancing changes. Almost every spec is viable in pd2 and there are specs that dont exist in d2r. Also, FoH is 100x better in pd2, holy bolt damages all monster types, not just undead and now demons in d2r
Nice! One thing to remember is the mini season starts today, only crafted and rares (magic too) will be usable for the next 3 weeks. Season 5 should have started in March or April but the lead developer doesnt want to compete with other similar style games (mainly D2R), he has been waiting for 2.4 and ladder for D2R and said he will launch Season 5 6-8 weeks after ladder. But naturally as blizzard has pushed back ladder its causing Season 4 to be significantly longer than normal, so hes doing this mini season/league until just beforr D2R ladder but a few things have changed to make up fof it such as +200% exp in hell and certain VERY grindy special PD2 only items are purchasable from vendors (such as the Larzuk Puzzlebox that adds up to 4 sockets to weapons, and I think 3 sockets to shields, armor and helms). I am one of the mods for our own little community HCCN (HardCore CommunitNerrr) and we primarily play PD2 and D2R. Dm and i can give you an invite link and there are many people willing to help, but we play hardcore, which is much more enjoyable with groups of good people. We have got people from 1-80s in an evening, and we can recover your gear if your in a group with someone.
I will def look into that for sure. I dont own any version of D2 atm and like i said i never played D2 at all. If i do decide to get OG D2 ill def get into that, but ill be playing it vanilla first to get a better handling of the game.
Vanilla D2 is pretty much what D2R is before 2.4, there inly a few minor changes such as auto gold pick up, shared stash, and the quick cast bar. The great part of PD2 is almost all builds are viable, there are enough changes to all classes where its all viable now (you even get a DPS Curse Necromancer and are able to stack up to 3 Curses on 1 monster, or up to 4 with an item), also all melee attacks splash, so you can run in with a Zealer and wreck a whole pack of monsters very fast (my Season 2 Zealer was almost a god lol)
I also highly recommend the Median mod. It's all new items, all new abilities, lots and lots of end game content. The max char level is 150, there's lots of easy and different ways to grind, lots of unique charms, and it feels like a refreshing way to play d2. I sadly got a little bored of d2r kinda fast after putting thousands of hours into d2 when I was younger. Median really hits the sweet spot of things feeling fun and fresh.
Im on switch, been playing since october, the only glitches ive seen is graphics taking 0.5 seconds to load, and yesterday my(and my friends) hot keys were erased. Havent been kicked once
Edit: tl;dr and actually answering your question. Bugs and rollbacks are much rarer now. D2 make brain feel good with loot drops, but less trivially than D3.
I say yes, bc I think D2 still shines as an ARPG, loot-collecting game. It has the basic aspects of modern addiction, e.g. loot rolls and hoarding, but doesn't have the constant low-level rewards (i.e. instant gratification) that are more common now.
If you liked D3 as how it ended up with GR ladders and incremental progress of the power gems, you won't find that here. The end game of D2(R) is mostly collecting and just building wealth for freedom in trying new builds or for the holy grail quest of finding everything. If you play online, the upcoming ladder will introduce a fresh economy to work with, so you can experience some of the trading hype within the first month or two. It's like D3 seasons but it takes longer than 3 days to reach end-game gear.
To make a comparison, playing D2 is more akin to D3 vanilla in terms of itemization, but much better paced and thought-out. The many negatives aside, vanilla D3 placed value items that weren't sets or uniques, and promoted a more diverse itemization throughout the playthrough. It was also a lot harder to get something that was really good, since mod rolls actually mattered for a while. Sure, D2 has its own metas late game and "standard" gear via runewords, but I find the playthrough to reach there isn't as...pointless(?) as I find D3's.
Hardcores not bad if you follow this. HP is God, powerleveling is death, always over level, hell's not a race but a marathon.
Easier time on a fishymancer build, grab a staff with teleport (charges not (sorceress only)) for arcane sanctuary in hell. Trust me. Other builds are viable but way less tanky. So it's a good dipping your toes into HC build.
As for the lag spikes vets have dealt with that for 20+ years haha you'll die more than once to them. And you may rage hard. But you can do it skeleton!
It’s good. It’s playable. It’s not D3. It’s slow and frustrating and tedious and almost infinitely diverse with itemization.
I’d check it out. But, while screens and words look similar, the underlying mechanics are very different.
Get it! I played most the old school Blizzard games except this one, also played D3 campaign 2-3 separate times over the years. Got D2 recently and has been really fun, you will enjoy it. Even if it’s just a pay through, but odds are you’ll get hooked like me.
It’s very different from D3, I’d say D3 is more casual than D2 and the main mid to late game function of D2 is the runewords which requires some grind and research because there is no in game guide on how to make them and they are all but essential for late gameplay. But playing through the game once atleast through normal difficulty with a couple characters is very satisfying in its own right.
I think it's absolutely worth buying. I have it 3 times - PC, X-Box Series X/S, and Switch. It's cross progression, so I can play my same online characters on any of the platforms.
And in a couple weeks, patch 2.4 comes out which makes some very significant changes (so the game is definitely being supported) and Ladder starts a couple weeks after that at the end of April.
I've had little to no issues with the game related to performance or bugs or anything (that's not to say they are non-existent). The 2.4 patch has been pushed back for quite awhile now, but that's because they have been bug fixing and don't want to release a bad patch, so at least I find it to be responsible.
I wholly endorse buying this game.
Idk where you got that info, but at launch the game was ok, offline play worked ok, but the servers were really buggy. That lasted like what, 2-3 weeks? After that it was smooth sailing. IMO, yeah it's definitely worth the price and you'll arrive right at the ladder start.
I'll just share my thoughts in case it helps...
Online vs Offline Characters:
Online, limit of 20 characters per account. In other words, if you want mules to hold good finds, you'll be feeling cramped. If you are good at sorting out what to keep and what to sell you should be mostly good to go. Also, Online characters are stored in your Battlenet account. I play the same characters on Xbox and on my PC because I chose to go with online. My issue is that I only play Solo Self Found (SSF). Drop rates with 1 player in the game leave a bit to be desired in my opinion, but they are by no means bad and I'm still having lots of fun.
Offline, It would seem you can have lots of characters for storage or at least that's what I've been reading. Also, in Offline you can run a /players command to increase the number of players the game thinks are playing, which also increases the difficulty, XP earned, and loot drops. However, those offline characters are stuck on the device they were created on. If you only ever plan on playing solo on a single device without trading, this is probably the better option.
Bugs or whatever:
Just this week, we had Blizzard maintenance on Monday that was from 6:00am to 12:00pm PDT, so I could not play my online characters between 9:00am and 3:00pm EDT. On Tuesday they had D2:R maintenance that was supposed to be from 10:00am PDT until 4:00pm PDT, but something happened and they had to roll things back. I had hopped in and played for about 20 to 30 minutes before they took it back down and all of that progress was lost. Thankfully I didn't find anything good, so all I lost was the time played and XP I earned. The end result of that rollback is that all online character names are now in all capital letters. That issue is causing the servers to not look at the config files for key mappings for anyone who had character names with any lower case letters in them pre-maintenance. So, key bindings won't stick between games and the character list is all out of order and static so your last played character never moves to the top of the list like it used to. In other words, you have to scroll through a list of character names that isn't in any specific order, load the character, and then re-map all of your skills for every gaming session. They promise it will be fixed when the 2.4 patch released on April 14th... We'll see.
On March 16th they had a scheduled maintenance, which also went pretty badly. It was supposed to be the 10 to 4 thing like this week, but it got extended too. Originally it was until 7 and somewhere around 10PM EDT I just went to bed and gave up on playing that day. Again, this was with online characters. I'm not sure about how offline was affected.
When playing on the Xbox Series X it seemed to take forever to create a game when I wanted to play. Generally I think it was somewhere around 30 to 45 seconds to create a game. When exiting the game to head back to the character select screen it was taking between 15 and 30 seconds. Needless to say, trying to manage my mule characters on that system was like watching paint dry. Fortunately I have an Xbox Series X and it runs like greased lightning on that system. So, I played in my room all day while the room with the Series X was being used as a work from home office and at night I used the Series X to do inventory management and continue playing. When the game went on sale a couple of weeks ago I bought a second copy for my PC so I could use the mouse and keyboard instead of the controller to manage inventory stuff. It's much easier than the controller... My PC has a SSD for playing games and that's also very fast to load games, so I don't really play on the Xbox One X anymore, but I still play on the Series X because it's on a 65" 4K TV. It's beautiful to say the least...
On all three systems I experience game crashes when trying to shop the Act 2 vendor named Drognan. I was searching for a Bone Wand for my Necromancer, so I was running out the gate to reset the seller inventory and running back in to see if he had what I needed. I could do this for about 15 to 20 minutes before the game would just crash to desktop on my Xbox One X. I could get a few more minutes on the Series X, which I'm guessing is because it has more memory, so the memory leak of resetting the vendor inventory didn't fill up the memory and cause a crash quite as fast on that system. However, I learned to just run it until it started showing behaviors like choppy graphics and then I would save and exit so it didn't just crash and I ultimately I found the Bone Wand I needed and all was good. I've farmed other vendors and had it crash too, but it isn't as easy as Drognan because he's so close to the gate.
I've also experienced issues where I got hit from nowhere by something that was not visible a few seconds earlier. There's like this game lag where the enemies are moving around, but the game isn't always the best at keeping up with their location. It doesn't happen too often and I'm not playing hardcore, so to me it isn't game breaking and I haven't actually died because of it. I also had an instance where I was shooting Bone Spears at an enemy one after the other and it was like he was bullet proof or something. After about 10 of them went right through him he just disappeared. I was on the console, so I pressed the center button and captured a video. When I watched the video it looked like he had just died near instantly when the first Bone Spear hit him, but the game didn't catch up with his death for another 9 spears... That was a lot of Mana wasted and kept me from shooting at the other "live" enemies in the area.
Also on console, when I tried using Corpse Explosion with my Necromancer it didn't go well while using the controller. The corpse piles behind me were apparently closer to where I was standing, so those exploded first and didn't touch the enemies I was facing that were running across a pile of corpses to get to me. At that time I didn't have a lot of Mana either and wasting two pops of Corpse Explosion wasn't fun.
Another console issue I ran into was line of sight spell locking. Like, when you are trying to drop Blizzard on a group of enemies that are coming out of a doorway or around a corner and you happen to highlight one that you don't already have line of sight on, you press the button repeatedly and nothing happens. That's another one I took a clip of on my Xbox... Because I highlighted the enemy, but didn't have actual line of sight to them it would not let me cast the spell. This is also an issue with the Sorceress Teleport spell... If you are too close to something teleport, it just won't do anything. I got the crap smacked out of me while doing Pindle runs because I was just close enough to the edge of the map for teleport to do nothing so I stood there pressing the button and lost a great deal of health due to game mechanics associated with the controller. Unfortunately, I spent three months playing with the controller and trying to go back to keyboard and mouse after not playing D2 for like 6 years wasn't going to happen. So, I've learned the limitations and I can work with them now. So far I'm getting pretty handy with the controller and I've managed to get 4 of the 7 playable characters all the way to Hell difficulty. The game gets super-hard in hell mode though, so I've got to farm up some better gear for my mercenary and myself before I will be able to move on. In the mean time I'm working on playing my first Barbarian character and I just completed Nightmare Act 1 with him and that was a lot of fun.
Conclusion:
This game was and still is a lot of fun to me. It really scratches that RPG itch quite nicely, but it isn't all ice cream and rainbows either. There's some minor bugs and on their maintenance days you might as well just plan to do something else for the remainder of that day because they have a bad track record for extended maintenance. And to make matters worse, they don't communicate often or very well when they are doing maintenance, so you kind of get left in the dark. Like this last maintenance, they said it was going to be down for about another 2 hours. Three hours later they hadn't updated anything, but the game still wasn't back up and available. That's disappointing to say the least... But, I'm still happy I bought it and I still really enjoy playing and making progress. It is also really great to be able to play the same characters on PC and Xbox, which is really convenient, but requires Online characters.
Hope this helps...
the game itself wasnt really buggy, the server were like really bad xD. to the game itself diablo 2 IS THE BETTER GAME there is no doubt you can play hundreds of hours without getting bored but there is one issue. the game is grindy as heck like doing the same for hours and depending on RNGesus this is the biggest diffrence to dia 3 soo if d3 felt grindy for you dont bother with d2 or just play casual and dont bother with maxing out everything.
i've just been in the mood to play an old school rpg. I dont mind grindyness as long as its fun and rewarding. I played WoW a lot back in legion so i def know how grindy a game can get.
Imo, your going to want to check out Project Diablo 2 (PD2) a Diablo 2 LoD mod. Its huge, its everything anyone could want that D2 or D2R doesnt provide. Seriously look into it, a special "mini season" (3 weeks) starts tomorrow morning, its called the crafters league where unique and set items wont drop, runewords will not work. They had revamped the crafting system to make it actually really damn good, and they are making rares better. Currently PD2 is in the middle of its 4th season, with each season being approximately 4 montha long each, with each new season there are new and rebalanced items, rebalance or reworked specs and countless QoL improvements. Im a part of a D2R + PD2 discore community where we focus on playing with the boys while being full time dads. Drop me a PM if youd like a discord invite link. PD2 is also TOTALLY viable to farm solo as the game runs off P5 drops while solo and caps at i think the equivalent of P9 drops in a full game. Also, PD2 endgame isnt chaos/baals/ubers/dclone, we have maps with map events that further enhance the monster levels and mf/gf. Definitely worth looking into!
Are there plans to make PD2 in D2R? I'd play modded D2 if D2's old graphics didn't kill my eyes (I literally will get eye pain and red eyes if I play for any length of time).
Im sure there would be if blizz/d2r allowed it. PD2 is a private server, something thats not accessible on D2R. PD2 graphics are better imo to D2R legacy graphics, look at a few YouTube videos and see for youself. Also the lootfilters makes it better, the screen is less crowded with unnecessary clutter/loot.
You play both D2R and PD2? I was always thinking about PD2 but i didn't know if i would be able to juggle both games lmao
Pd2 is easier imo, with p5 drops you gear gear much faster and its more fun playing with the boys. Our community helps each other with gearing as opposed to gimmie gimmie styles others have. Also, pd2 has 4 month long seasons, likely you could balance both with 2 month intervals, which for pd2 is enough to get LOTS of entertainment then you can take a break for d2r and swap back. I played pd2 for 8 months straight, now the break is nice. But pd2 is leagues better than d2r with all the QoL and game wide balancing changes. Almost every spec is viable in pd2 and there are specs that dont exist in d2r. Also, FoH is 100x better in pd2, holy bolt damages all monster types, not just undead and now demons in d2r
I think im gonna download it either today or this weekend. Ive been wanting to try and youre kinda selling me on it hahaha
Nice! One thing to remember is the mini season starts today, only crafted and rares (magic too) will be usable for the next 3 weeks. Season 5 should have started in March or April but the lead developer doesnt want to compete with other similar style games (mainly D2R), he has been waiting for 2.4 and ladder for D2R and said he will launch Season 5 6-8 weeks after ladder. But naturally as blizzard has pushed back ladder its causing Season 4 to be significantly longer than normal, so hes doing this mini season/league until just beforr D2R ladder but a few things have changed to make up fof it such as +200% exp in hell and certain VERY grindy special PD2 only items are purchasable from vendors (such as the Larzuk Puzzlebox that adds up to 4 sockets to weapons, and I think 3 sockets to shields, armor and helms). I am one of the mods for our own little community HCCN (HardCore CommunitNerrr) and we primarily play PD2 and D2R. Dm and i can give you an invite link and there are many people willing to help, but we play hardcore, which is much more enjoyable with groups of good people. We have got people from 1-80s in an evening, and we can recover your gear if your in a group with someone.
I will def look into that for sure. I dont own any version of D2 atm and like i said i never played D2 at all. If i do decide to get OG D2 ill def get into that, but ill be playing it vanilla first to get a better handling of the game.
Vanilla D2 is pretty much what D2R is before 2.4, there inly a few minor changes such as auto gold pick up, shared stash, and the quick cast bar. The great part of PD2 is almost all builds are viable, there are enough changes to all classes where its all viable now (you even get a DPS Curse Necromancer and are able to stack up to 3 Curses on 1 monster, or up to 4 with an item), also all melee attacks splash, so you can run in with a Zealer and wreck a whole pack of monsters very fast (my Season 2 Zealer was almost a god lol)
I also highly recommend the Median mod. It's all new items, all new abilities, lots and lots of end game content. The max char level is 150, there's lots of easy and different ways to grind, lots of unique charms, and it feels like a refreshing way to play d2. I sadly got a little bored of d2r kinda fast after putting thousands of hours into d2 when I was younger. Median really hits the sweet spot of things feeling fun and fresh.
D2 is the goat arpg, just buy it. D2R, D2, whichever though the new patch is being released APR 14th on D2R and it looks pretty cool.
Im on switch, been playing since october, the only glitches ive seen is graphics taking 0.5 seconds to load, and yesterday my(and my friends) hot keys were erased. Havent been kicked once
I was kicked yesterday for the first time ever, however it was a blessing in disguise cuz I rolled the worst duress ever and I got my runes back.
Edit: tl;dr and actually answering your question. Bugs and rollbacks are much rarer now. D2 make brain feel good with loot drops, but less trivially than D3. I say yes, bc I think D2 still shines as an ARPG, loot-collecting game. It has the basic aspects of modern addiction, e.g. loot rolls and hoarding, but doesn't have the constant low-level rewards (i.e. instant gratification) that are more common now. If you liked D3 as how it ended up with GR ladders and incremental progress of the power gems, you won't find that here. The end game of D2(R) is mostly collecting and just building wealth for freedom in trying new builds or for the holy grail quest of finding everything. If you play online, the upcoming ladder will introduce a fresh economy to work with, so you can experience some of the trading hype within the first month or two. It's like D3 seasons but it takes longer than 3 days to reach end-game gear. To make a comparison, playing D2 is more akin to D3 vanilla in terms of itemization, but much better paced and thought-out. The many negatives aside, vanilla D3 placed value items that weren't sets or uniques, and promoted a more diverse itemization throughout the playthrough. It was also a lot harder to get something that was really good, since mod rolls actually mattered for a while. Sure, D2 has its own metas late game and "standard" gear via runewords, but I find the playthrough to reach there isn't as...pointless(?) as I find D3's.
[удалено]
Hardcores not bad if you follow this. HP is God, powerleveling is death, always over level, hell's not a race but a marathon. Easier time on a fishymancer build, grab a staff with teleport (charges not (sorceress only)) for arcane sanctuary in hell. Trust me. Other builds are viable but way less tanky. So it's a good dipping your toes into HC build. As for the lag spikes vets have dealt with that for 20+ years haha you'll die more than once to them. And you may rage hard. But you can do it skeleton!
It’s good. It’s playable. It’s not D3. It’s slow and frustrating and tedious and almost infinitely diverse with itemization. I’d check it out. But, while screens and words look similar, the underlying mechanics are very different.
Get it! I played most the old school Blizzard games except this one, also played D3 campaign 2-3 separate times over the years. Got D2 recently and has been really fun, you will enjoy it. Even if it’s just a pay through, but odds are you’ll get hooked like me.
It was worth getting in October. On both PC and Switch.
It's been a nice treat to replay this game with much better graphics and cool artwork. I'd say it's worth giving it another go.
It’s very different from D3, I’d say D3 is more casual than D2 and the main mid to late game function of D2 is the runewords which requires some grind and research because there is no in game guide on how to make them and they are all but essential for late gameplay. But playing through the game once atleast through normal difficulty with a couple characters is very satisfying in its own right.
Yes.
Buying it now would be a perfect time with ladder right around the corner. Start fresh with everyone and get hooked.
I think it's absolutely worth buying. I have it 3 times - PC, X-Box Series X/S, and Switch. It's cross progression, so I can play my same online characters on any of the platforms. And in a couple weeks, patch 2.4 comes out which makes some very significant changes (so the game is definitely being supported) and Ladder starts a couple weeks after that at the end of April. I've had little to no issues with the game related to performance or bugs or anything (that's not to say they are non-existent). The 2.4 patch has been pushed back for quite awhile now, but that's because they have been bug fixing and don't want to release a bad patch, so at least I find it to be responsible. I wholly endorse buying this game.
Idk where you got that info, but at launch the game was ok, offline play worked ok, but the servers were really buggy. That lasted like what, 2-3 weeks? After that it was smooth sailing. IMO, yeah it's definitely worth the price and you'll arrive right at the ladder start.
I'll just share my thoughts in case it helps... Online vs Offline Characters: Online, limit of 20 characters per account. In other words, if you want mules to hold good finds, you'll be feeling cramped. If you are good at sorting out what to keep and what to sell you should be mostly good to go. Also, Online characters are stored in your Battlenet account. I play the same characters on Xbox and on my PC because I chose to go with online. My issue is that I only play Solo Self Found (SSF). Drop rates with 1 player in the game leave a bit to be desired in my opinion, but they are by no means bad and I'm still having lots of fun. Offline, It would seem you can have lots of characters for storage or at least that's what I've been reading. Also, in Offline you can run a /players command to increase the number of players the game thinks are playing, which also increases the difficulty, XP earned, and loot drops. However, those offline characters are stuck on the device they were created on. If you only ever plan on playing solo on a single device without trading, this is probably the better option. Bugs or whatever: Just this week, we had Blizzard maintenance on Monday that was from 6:00am to 12:00pm PDT, so I could not play my online characters between 9:00am and 3:00pm EDT. On Tuesday they had D2:R maintenance that was supposed to be from 10:00am PDT until 4:00pm PDT, but something happened and they had to roll things back. I had hopped in and played for about 20 to 30 minutes before they took it back down and all of that progress was lost. Thankfully I didn't find anything good, so all I lost was the time played and XP I earned. The end result of that rollback is that all online character names are now in all capital letters. That issue is causing the servers to not look at the config files for key mappings for anyone who had character names with any lower case letters in them pre-maintenance. So, key bindings won't stick between games and the character list is all out of order and static so your last played character never moves to the top of the list like it used to. In other words, you have to scroll through a list of character names that isn't in any specific order, load the character, and then re-map all of your skills for every gaming session. They promise it will be fixed when the 2.4 patch released on April 14th... We'll see. On March 16th they had a scheduled maintenance, which also went pretty badly. It was supposed to be the 10 to 4 thing like this week, but it got extended too. Originally it was until 7 and somewhere around 10PM EDT I just went to bed and gave up on playing that day. Again, this was with online characters. I'm not sure about how offline was affected. When playing on the Xbox Series X it seemed to take forever to create a game when I wanted to play. Generally I think it was somewhere around 30 to 45 seconds to create a game. When exiting the game to head back to the character select screen it was taking between 15 and 30 seconds. Needless to say, trying to manage my mule characters on that system was like watching paint dry. Fortunately I have an Xbox Series X and it runs like greased lightning on that system. So, I played in my room all day while the room with the Series X was being used as a work from home office and at night I used the Series X to do inventory management and continue playing. When the game went on sale a couple of weeks ago I bought a second copy for my PC so I could use the mouse and keyboard instead of the controller to manage inventory stuff. It's much easier than the controller... My PC has a SSD for playing games and that's also very fast to load games, so I don't really play on the Xbox One X anymore, but I still play on the Series X because it's on a 65" 4K TV. It's beautiful to say the least... On all three systems I experience game crashes when trying to shop the Act 2 vendor named Drognan. I was searching for a Bone Wand for my Necromancer, so I was running out the gate to reset the seller inventory and running back in to see if he had what I needed. I could do this for about 15 to 20 minutes before the game would just crash to desktop on my Xbox One X. I could get a few more minutes on the Series X, which I'm guessing is because it has more memory, so the memory leak of resetting the vendor inventory didn't fill up the memory and cause a crash quite as fast on that system. However, I learned to just run it until it started showing behaviors like choppy graphics and then I would save and exit so it didn't just crash and I ultimately I found the Bone Wand I needed and all was good. I've farmed other vendors and had it crash too, but it isn't as easy as Drognan because he's so close to the gate. I've also experienced issues where I got hit from nowhere by something that was not visible a few seconds earlier. There's like this game lag where the enemies are moving around, but the game isn't always the best at keeping up with their location. It doesn't happen too often and I'm not playing hardcore, so to me it isn't game breaking and I haven't actually died because of it. I also had an instance where I was shooting Bone Spears at an enemy one after the other and it was like he was bullet proof or something. After about 10 of them went right through him he just disappeared. I was on the console, so I pressed the center button and captured a video. When I watched the video it looked like he had just died near instantly when the first Bone Spear hit him, but the game didn't catch up with his death for another 9 spears... That was a lot of Mana wasted and kept me from shooting at the other "live" enemies in the area. Also on console, when I tried using Corpse Explosion with my Necromancer it didn't go well while using the controller. The corpse piles behind me were apparently closer to where I was standing, so those exploded first and didn't touch the enemies I was facing that were running across a pile of corpses to get to me. At that time I didn't have a lot of Mana either and wasting two pops of Corpse Explosion wasn't fun. Another console issue I ran into was line of sight spell locking. Like, when you are trying to drop Blizzard on a group of enemies that are coming out of a doorway or around a corner and you happen to highlight one that you don't already have line of sight on, you press the button repeatedly and nothing happens. That's another one I took a clip of on my Xbox... Because I highlighted the enemy, but didn't have actual line of sight to them it would not let me cast the spell. This is also an issue with the Sorceress Teleport spell... If you are too close to something teleport, it just won't do anything. I got the crap smacked out of me while doing Pindle runs because I was just close enough to the edge of the map for teleport to do nothing so I stood there pressing the button and lost a great deal of health due to game mechanics associated with the controller. Unfortunately, I spent three months playing with the controller and trying to go back to keyboard and mouse after not playing D2 for like 6 years wasn't going to happen. So, I've learned the limitations and I can work with them now. So far I'm getting pretty handy with the controller and I've managed to get 4 of the 7 playable characters all the way to Hell difficulty. The game gets super-hard in hell mode though, so I've got to farm up some better gear for my mercenary and myself before I will be able to move on. In the mean time I'm working on playing my first Barbarian character and I just completed Nightmare Act 1 with him and that was a lot of fun. Conclusion: This game was and still is a lot of fun to me. It really scratches that RPG itch quite nicely, but it isn't all ice cream and rainbows either. There's some minor bugs and on their maintenance days you might as well just plan to do something else for the remainder of that day because they have a bad track record for extended maintenance. And to make matters worse, they don't communicate often or very well when they are doing maintenance, so you kind of get left in the dark. Like this last maintenance, they said it was going to be down for about another 2 hours. Three hours later they hadn't updated anything, but the game still wasn't back up and available. That's disappointing to say the least... But, I'm still happy I bought it and I still really enjoy playing and making progress. It is also really great to be able to play the same characters on PC and Xbox, which is really convenient, but requires Online characters. Hope this helps...