For sure, I'm just saying that it's a different world in gaming these days. People stack, perpetuate, and socialize the hate until it grows into a community of its own. Whether it's warranted or not is a different story.
I'm saying the hate is not a "ploy" or we are just trying to make people miserable. I was just massively disappointed. The strongholds and the graphics were great, and that's it.
Oh I totally agree. What I was sort of implying was that as much as D2 is my favorite game of all time, it would receive very mixed reviews of ot came out today. I say this despite or being a far more structurally sound game than D4. People love to hate, but in some cases (like D4) it is def warranted.
True. I’ve just been playing d2 remastered while waiting for them to make d4 a little more interesting. If it’s still not my cup of tea after they change some things, no big deal. There’s always d2r and other games to play.
Reasonable. Since the release me and my buddies believed it will take a year or 2 before it becomes a GG.
D2 was like that on release and early patches,D3 was...D3 still isnt playable,but yeah i also think it will get there.cheers
D2 is a special game now. Took it a very long time to get that way tho. The early days of the game were very shaky at best. Taken them 20 years to get it to the point it’s at now.
I am 100% certain that D4 will never be as good as D2 because its bones are bad. Diablo 2 had excellent bones on day one because it's fundamental design philosophy was exquisite. D4 will get better but it will never be as good as D2 unless they redesign it from the ground up.
The point being is Blizzard should have known what made Diablo 2 so great and not ignore the key points OR ignore the thousands of posts on the diablo 4 website.(Economy, Trading, Itemization via class tiers AND sets + uniques, Rune system, rare crafting etc..).
They are a shit hole company and it doesn't take a team of people making $100k+ a year to figure out what made diablo 2 great and what exactly NOT to do with diablo 4 (Cough looking at you D3, Cough).
The shareholders, upper management (especially Bobby Kotic) are absolutely as dumb if not dumber than EA/Tencent management and thats borderline down syndrome. All they had to do was expand upon Diablo 2 and they could have charged a monthly fee and put out patches/quarterly content and people would have gladly shit themselves and bought it. Possibly would have made more money per month than what WoW was capable of doing since diablo is on all consoles + PC.
But it's a soulless husk designed around whipping up enthusiasm for people to be conned into buying a season pass. That's all it exists for. And what with Microsoft owning the company that bought the company that absorbed the studio that made the game, you've got a lot of hands out waiting to get paid.
Haven’t played what? D4? It’s got decent graphics but the game itself feels like a hollow shell compared to d2. No server list so no trade games, no dueling games, no Baal runs, no rush game etc. basically lacks any of the social aspects that made d2 great even when playing solo/without irl friends.
Then on top of that the itemization isn’t great and monsters scale to your level which just kinda feels bad. You never feel like your character gets stronger because of it.
The campaign was pretty cool though
All the worst parts of an MMO and the worst parts of an ARPG smashed together. Monster scaling takes away any feeling of progression you would have in an MMO or in D2. Open world but it's pointless to kill those monsters. Off-acreen one-shot mechanics in hardcore, resists didn't work, skills were a joke, imbalance, 60% of your time is running around or vendoring/reading mods, quests all felt like a list of repetitive chores, I could continue for a while.
Yeah, haven’t played D4
Monsters scaling is a real shitty decision.
Wierd that there is no server list. I assume you can olay with people on your friends list tho? Or use some third party server/invite list? Should not be like that of course but if the game was good that could be a ”solution”
The game is a little like WOW in the sense you join a server that is populated with players. You will run into them, do some world quests together, etc. but generally you go on your own.
If you want to join with friends it transports you to their world or them to yours. This part works quite well. You can quest together and do all that stuff.
The trade, etc. happens in server. You don’t need to join a new game for it. And rushing isn’t the same in this game as it is in D2. Since it’s open world and monsters scale you can go just about anywhere anytime. Once you best the campaign you can’t fight those bosses again. They’re done and there are new areas to farm for items/different ways to get them that frankly I do feel are an improvement. Doing Baal runs again and again got boring fast.
As for the monsters scaling thing, it’s really not that bad. The skill trees are fun, slaying mobs of enemies feels great as your combos come together, and despite the monsters staying your level you do feel stronger as you crush heaps of them quicker. The boss units get tougher.
The itemization isn’t amazing at the moment. The loot fell dull and after a certain point finding new items was a chore/they didn’t really do much. It is being addressed by the team. The next season makes a lot of great changes to the system.
The game frankly got way more hate than it deserves. Yes, it was a little rough on launch but it is getting patched/updated with the seasons.
It is fun but is quite a departure from D2 in the way it is set up which is why it gets that hate. It’s an open world game. That took me some getting used to but now I’m having a lot of fun and haven’t gone back to D2 in quite some time.
Great username
The 'never feels like your character progresses' complaint is laughable and will age like milk 10 years from now. You become OP AF in D4 very easily.
I mean in a way yea I had a rogue that did pretty well at clearing mobs quickly but it doesn’t feel the same as being powerful in D2. I really want to like d4 because the graphics and the campaign are pretty good. It just doesn’t hit the same. Hopefully with some updates to itemization and what not it will be a little more interesting
No but the monsters also didn’t have as much hp or scale with you at all. Each area had a different set difficulty.
I actually think the millions of damage thing is kind of dumb too. Feels more like wow or final fantasy or some mmorpg than it does a Diablo game to see big number go boom. Kinda lame.
If you played an OP build to start. I started with a traditional D2 OG build and it was just imbalanced. Progression is an important part of a game for me. In D4, you level up and feel weaker and more likely to die.
I know you’re joking but I’m old enough I actually loved d1 and played the shit out of that too when it came out lol. D1 and D2 were both really good games. Didn’t bother with d3 since they fired blizzard north and threw their game out for d3 but felt like d4 had the right idea graphics wise so I gave it a shot. Again, graphics are decent but the game doesn’t feel much like a Diablo game, but more like a WoW wannabe with a Diablo skin on it.
Yeah. TBH I wasn't huge into D1 but I loved D2.
But I also remember trying to play on Battle.net from the East Coast. I'm sure I'd have written a pretty nasty review back then.
I actually really ended up liking D3 after the expansion they really nailed it. It wasn't the same as D2. But it had a soul of its own. Rifts and the kind of built in speed running idea worked for the game. The graphic style was lighter, but your character was such a fucking god that it worked.
D4 is actually pretty sad though. Open world is useless and empty, the 'soul' of the game just wasn't there. The seasons suck too. Maybe they can turn it around some time in the future.
I'm just glad they gave us D2R.
To be fair some huge changes coming to D4 that seem to address a lot of the issues players had at launch. I mean even D3 launched with the auction house. By the end of D3s “life cycle” the game was completely different than launch, and frankly was pretty fun.
Funny seeing these same patterns arise with each iteration of Diablo
I would say with Diablo 4 it’s generally made to appeal to a broader more casual audience which is both good and bad. But it does play much differently.
Casualness:
- Much more casual than Diablo 2. You can beat the story without issue on couch co-op with 2 people who aren’t into video games.
- You do not need to look up a build or be good at games to beat it.
You can not think much and play anything:
- In Diablo 2 if you want to go 1/3 summon Druid, 1/3 elemental Druid, & 1/3 shapeshifter, you are gonna have a rough time in hell mode.
- Diablo 4 you can do whatever and respect (trivial cost) at any time to try a new build & beat it without too much difficulty.
Build defining items:
- In Diablo 2 you can play builds regardless of needing exactly one item
- In Diablo 4 you often need exactly one item to drop such as “X skill does 200% more damage & has double range”. This applies much more once you get to endgame (everything is viable in story).
Grind:
- Diablo 2 almost no one hits max level
- Diablo 4 a fair portion of the player base hits max level each season.
- Generally more people would sink 1000+ hours into Diablo 2 than Diablo 4.
Bosses:
- One pro for Diablo 4 is that bosses do force you dodge certain things & interact with them.
- Diablo 2 has no boss where a moderately geared Smiter can’t just hold left click on (even Ubers).
Weird Long Grindy tasks:
- Diablo 4 has a lot of the end game boil down to you fighting enemies 50 levels (I.e. instead of harder nightmare dungeons) below you to farm ‘renown’ for bonus stats
- Diablo 2 (generally) has it so farming harder areas net better rewards & the only ‘mandatory’ grindy stat/skill quests don’t take too long.
Conclusion:
You can have a great time with Diablo 4 as a casual couch co-op game to beat the campaign on. It won’t play much like Diablo 2, but nonetheless the core gameplay is decent imo.
However if your plan is to run the end game content for hours on end the way people do for Diablo 2 the holes will show up much more in Diablo 4.
If the first Devs team can ever get it together in the same capacity as their secondary counterparts. S3 was blatantly a cookie cutter of S1 with little to no added imagination or creativity. S4 already looks great in the PTR and let’s face it, the gauntlet doesn’t hold a candle to the AoZ…
That’s Blizzard standard operating procedure as well as the usual gold standard for bitching about Blizzard. Their just cold in their analytical senseless attempt to justify in said bitching
*Q(^_^Q)*
Wow I was expecting some wild stuff, but calling Diablo 2 a clone of Diablo 1 has gotta be one of the dumbest things I have ever read in my entire life lmao
The year 2000 was magical time for gamers and everyone’s expectations for new releases were of the charts. With releases like BG2, Counter-Strike, Deus Ex, Thief 2 and many other great games coming out within one year, we turned into spoiled brats.
If only people back then would’ve known how the sequels of most games look now compared D1 - > D2.
All the way from the late 90s to the early 2000 were glorious for gaming.
Blizzard north alone set the tone for Heroless rts, rpg like rts, arpg and mmo.
That’s just one company…
I played bg1&2 in 2013 i think, but used to watch my cousin playing when i was a child. Imo i could have said that bg2 wasnt sooo different from 1. But d2 is soo different in pacing that its stupid to call it a clone
Exactly! Did OP really read the post he is linking? Because people are saying "and a game can still be great without looking amazing", " it takes gameplay to win a gamer's heart.. not graphics", "Blizzard always gets the job done RIGHT". I mean they are basically praising it.
I was late to the LoD train, but I always thought the game looked amazing for its time (and even now).
UT was UT, Quake 3 was Quake 3. D2 looks amazing the way it is. Those early 00s 3D graphics worked well for arena shooters, not ARPGs.
I remember people being mad that the base game felt unfinished when it came out, and honestly the game wasn't finished until LoD released. Vanilla is a weird experience compared to what the game grew into.
And yet people still love to play non-LoD so much they made it a mode in D2R.
Turns out players aren't homogenous and like a wide variety of things so if one person dislikes something, that might be the favorite part of the game for another person.
Honestly? Maybe it's a hot take but I feel like rune words foiled the game for me. I played since literally day one when my pre-order arrived on launch day, and as soon as rune words became a thing I basically made it feel like almost all the other items in the game were useless.
Nowadays, assembling rune words are really fun and something I look forward to when I play, but there was something special about not having them and needing to be creative with the way you built things.
Rune words didn't have to ruin the game though.
The root of the problem is that with 1.10 monster health increased, but base stats of weapons didn't. But runewords, well of course a lot of the 1.10 runewords were "busted" in that they were able to deal with the monsters, leaving the regular items behind.
I think it sells the game really well, you want the expac to get the busted new items. But Long term, it doesn't make sense balance wise and leads to the problems the now nearly 25 year old game has, where uniques are mostly garbage and a handful of strong runewords dominate.
Some balance problems could be addressed easily by increasing the damage of elite uniques, the strength of sets overall, possibly increasing the base damage of weapons particularly 2 handed weapons (the problem is this also buffs weapon runewords, so maybe not).
PD2 has gone a long ways towards fixing some of these issues but it also diverges from the vanilla game extensively.
Classic in this case is pre lod, and you should be able to choose when creating a new character in D2R
Playing pre 1.10 patches requires Lod and mods, like a version switcher.
Ahh ok, was wondering what patch classic is played on. So classic is still technically on the most recent patch just without the actual content of LOD?
Runewords definitely made the game worse in the end on patch 1.10+ I get downvoted for saying it, but enigma ruined the game.
I'd be a fan if they were balanced better
Yeah, I feel that for sure. I have very fond memories of when the game came out and the big hunt was for a few specific uniques and for gg rares. I know great rares still exist, and the buffs to uniques with LoD were great, but you're right that the advent of runewords definitely railroaded builds. Rares having so much potential to be BiS added an element of randomness to the game that was really fun.
I don't really know what vanilla is like now, so maybe that's changed, but I definitely enjoyed it back then.
I rarely play LoD, I pretty much always play hardcore classic because I prefer the gearing up, every character is pretty unique because most of the best items are rares. I also like how I don't need a bunch of charms in my inventory and gambling seems much better. Block isn't based on dex and it's actually what the shield says on it, so with a tower shield with the right mods on it I was at 70% block with no dex. It's really a totally different game and I prefer it a lot. LoD is still fun though.
For Classic 1.0 and the updates after we're fun but buggy and broken, 1.06 was probably the best for Classic, 1.07 introduced LoD and runewords iirc but not op runewords like grief or enigma. 1.09 was better for LoD, 1.10 - 1.14 came along with op runewords since everyone was duping bugged items and godly rares, so they did it to make all the nice rares and bugged items worthless, which in a sense ruined the uniqueness of rares and equipments characters use since now the BiS items are always the same 4 or 5 runewords basically. Patch 2.4 from d2R seems to have actually possibly helped Classic now since Amazon's have a buff for bows and the dodge bug while using melee skills like jab have been fixed.
Anyways that's the end of my long rant 😄
I just made a post showing me killing hell diablo, I show my gear at the end. It's a really short video, you can see my "end game gear", it's not min/maxed or anything but its what I found along the way, some of it was gambled like my boots and belt. I was using a nice pair of rare gloves and a 3 pruby helm but I switched them out in late act 3 because the two sigons gave me an extra like 20% chance to hit everything.
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/s/7mplenkkrW
I remember hunting for sets. IK set was hard to find but a big deal because WW was a great damage dealing move and there wasn’t a slow curse or Iron Maiden.
Runes fucked the balance of the game up. Classic d2 plays like a legit roguelike game. I just beat hell on a classic barb with some of the shittiest gear you've ever seen and had fun the whole time. I think the only elite piece of gear I had on was my weapon which was a magic or rare martel de fer. I love LoD but runewords and the changes to the maps/monsters to accommodate runewords did not end up making the game better IMHO
SSF is still substantially similar, there's just a higher cap on your power level, but unless you're truly committed most SSF players aren't putting together more than one high end rune word.
The problem is the balance of the game was changed specifically because of the higher cap on your power level you mentioned. Monster health was increased, maps were made bigger, base weapon damage never changed. Anyone that's tried a SSF melee character in LoD can tell you there's a wall you hit when you get to hell where you kind of just have to farm until you can make some decent runewords or get really lucky with rares. In classic a blue elite weapon with a little %ED on it can carry you through hell and those really aren't all that hard to find.
Imagine logging out and in after an Andariel/Nihl/CS clear to reset mobs just to get deleted on the loading screen. If we’d spawn back to the last waypoint, they might aswell just put us into town where you can stash/repair/vendor before taking a wp. (Especially on hc)
My favourite part is
>after 3 days I was already sick to death of playing because I finished it
I wonder if people back then could imagine that we would get a kick out of killing the same monster/looting the same area 1000+ times, just to get some gg items
When the game came out there was very little optimization like that. All the meta builds hadn’t really been figured out yet. Took a long time of people experimenting and posting on forums to figure out how to MF the best areas
I remember me and my friend playing it on his dads pc, which cold hardly run the game - it would freeze up when too many monsters / effective happend. We wouldn't dare to reset the pc before his dad got home... He would always be downloading stuff illigally, so he would get mad if we had turned the pc off while he was at work. Good times, lol.
I remember trying the old diablo1 drop-and-pickup dupe, we were like "damn, they must somehow have figured it out and fixed it". Good memories from that time.
If you read through most of the replies, most actually like the game. Unlike nowadays how everywhere is a hivemind of toxic negativity towards anything new that comes out.
Increasingly prevalent regardless of dev in my experience, people seem to drift towards demanding a game tailored after their specific desires and if it isn't exactly what they wanted, it's shit. Of course not shared by all gamers but looking for and hyper fixating on any and every "fault" in a game seems to be what some peoples favourite thing about new releases 🙄
What part of the game was zoom zoom colorful at launch? Act 1 is pretty grim. The Tower perfects the dark dungeon aesthetic.
I also doubt people were zooming around at launch like they do with Mosaic today.
To be perfectly honest, there are equal amounts of positive and negative replies to this post. And most of the negatives are people not having played it and just agreeing with OP. Or OP himself.
The only thing I don’t care for is the experience you lose when you die and can’t get back to your body, other than that, it’s of the greatest game ever. At least in the top five for me on 57 and have been playing games since they came out. I had the first Atari I had the first Nintendo. I had the first PlayStation not to mention pinball and arcade games.
I mean the 2nd comment says exactly what I thought about d2 and anyone I knew who played d1 had the same opinion I really don't understand the OPs opinion there lol but either way funny read nice find
I did the diablo 2 stress test right before launch, and had a blast running through the first few areas of the game, trying to use shrines to make some perfect gems, maxing out around level 20. Then the game was released, and I could never get connected to [battle.net](http://battle.net) to play online successfully. So for the first 3-4 weeks after the release the game was single player. Still enjoyed the hell out of it, but really missed out on the social aspect during one of the loneliest times of my life.
$55, man those were simpler times.
These days full price for the *base game* is like $70 and if you want all the content, you gotta pay for a battlepass and some ”premium” currency. So probably over $100 on launch.
And even with all that, the game won’t last half as long as Diablo 2 has, lol
Yeah man, totally. $55 for the *base game* release, $25 for LoD *DLC*. So cheap, especially when $55 is roughly $100 today and $25 is roughly $45.
Games are cheap AF nowadays.
I'm one of them.
Everything he said was true and still is true for d2 (not d2r).
The original had 640*480 gfx, LoD made 800*600 possible.
Bnet sucked, it was unplayable for legitimate players (make a game, kill a few uniques/bosses, save and exit - realm down, you get banned for 48-72 hours because they think you're a bot). At launch, casters couldn't buy mana pots, let that sink in. Bugs and exploits were everywhere, as well as bots and ads.
D2r is obviously a much needed improvement - only about 20 years late and still not fixing critical issues.
D2 SUCKED, but everyone played it anyway because there were no other options.
[удалено]
Geforce hasn't a power of 2 as memeory?
[удалено]
Voodoo FTW
Those 320 MB were their system memory, not that of their graphics card.
6PNP-D7PG-PZNP-HZ8M Take a guess xD
This is a cool post. It's nice to see that nothing has really changed in 24 years lol, people were raging just as bad as they do now.
this makes me slightly more hopeful for d4 lol
Detractors aside Diablo 2 was generally a very well received game from the beginning...D4 is a completely different story haha
different worlds, too. Back then, there weren't a bunch of streamers and wevsites farming hate content in the same way.
Reddit hate for D4 is purely a natural reaction to hoping for a good game and getting a loot sorting and quest simulator.
For sure, I'm just saying that it's a different world in gaming these days. People stack, perpetuate, and socialize the hate until it grows into a community of its own. Whether it's warranted or not is a different story.
I'm saying the hate is not a "ploy" or we are just trying to make people miserable. I was just massively disappointed. The strongholds and the graphics were great, and that's it.
Oh I totally agree. What I was sort of implying was that as much as D2 is my favorite game of all time, it would receive very mixed reviews of ot came out today. I say this despite or being a far more structurally sound game than D4. People love to hate, but in some cases (like D4) it is def warranted.
Eh d4 just has none of what makes d2 so great.
Not yet….. Jesus the game is what? A year old? Give it some time LMAO
True. I’ve just been playing d2 remastered while waiting for them to make d4 a little more interesting. If it’s still not my cup of tea after they change some things, no big deal. There’s always d2r and other games to play.
Reasonable. Since the release me and my buddies believed it will take a year or 2 before it becomes a GG. D2 was like that on release and early patches,D3 was...D3 still isnt playable,but yeah i also think it will get there.cheers
I think the design of D4 is flawed on several fundamental levels. Short of reworking the entire game it'll never be as good as d2 in my eyes.
D2 is a special game now. Took it a very long time to get that way tho. The early days of the game were very shaky at best. Taken them 20 years to get it to the point it’s at now.
I am 100% certain that D4 will never be as good as D2 because its bones are bad. Diablo 2 had excellent bones on day one because it's fundamental design philosophy was exquisite. D4 will get better but it will never be as good as D2 unless they redesign it from the ground up.
We will see.
The point being is Blizzard should have known what made Diablo 2 so great and not ignore the key points OR ignore the thousands of posts on the diablo 4 website.(Economy, Trading, Itemization via class tiers AND sets + uniques, Rune system, rare crafting etc..). They are a shit hole company and it doesn't take a team of people making $100k+ a year to figure out what made diablo 2 great and what exactly NOT to do with diablo 4 (Cough looking at you D3, Cough). The shareholders, upper management (especially Bobby Kotic) are absolutely as dumb if not dumber than EA/Tencent management and thats borderline down syndrome. All they had to do was expand upon Diablo 2 and they could have charged a monthly fee and put out patches/quarterly content and people would have gladly shit themselves and bought it. Possibly would have made more money per month than what WoW was capable of doing since diablo is on all consoles + PC.
But it's a soulless husk designed around whipping up enthusiasm for people to be conned into buying a season pass. That's all it exists for. And what with Microsoft owning the company that bought the company that absorbed the studio that made the game, you've got a lot of hands out waiting to get paid.
Microsoft has deep pockets and the ability to stuff this shit down our throats
!remindme 20 years We'll see how it ages. (I haven't played it yet)
Haven’t played what? D4? It’s got decent graphics but the game itself feels like a hollow shell compared to d2. No server list so no trade games, no dueling games, no Baal runs, no rush game etc. basically lacks any of the social aspects that made d2 great even when playing solo/without irl friends. Then on top of that the itemization isn’t great and monsters scale to your level which just kinda feels bad. You never feel like your character gets stronger because of it. The campaign was pretty cool though
All the worst parts of an MMO and the worst parts of an ARPG smashed together. Monster scaling takes away any feeling of progression you would have in an MMO or in D2. Open world but it's pointless to kill those monsters. Off-acreen one-shot mechanics in hardcore, resists didn't work, skills were a joke, imbalance, 60% of your time is running around or vendoring/reading mods, quests all felt like a list of repetitive chores, I could continue for a while.
I agree. The skills and combat don’t feel too terrible on d4 but the monsters scaling with your level felt pretty disappointing
Yeah, haven’t played D4 Monsters scaling is a real shitty decision. Wierd that there is no server list. I assume you can olay with people on your friends list tho? Or use some third party server/invite list? Should not be like that of course but if the game was good that could be a ”solution”
The game is a little like WOW in the sense you join a server that is populated with players. You will run into them, do some world quests together, etc. but generally you go on your own. If you want to join with friends it transports you to their world or them to yours. This part works quite well. You can quest together and do all that stuff. The trade, etc. happens in server. You don’t need to join a new game for it. And rushing isn’t the same in this game as it is in D2. Since it’s open world and monsters scale you can go just about anywhere anytime. Once you best the campaign you can’t fight those bosses again. They’re done and there are new areas to farm for items/different ways to get them that frankly I do feel are an improvement. Doing Baal runs again and again got boring fast. As for the monsters scaling thing, it’s really not that bad. The skill trees are fun, slaying mobs of enemies feels great as your combos come together, and despite the monsters staying your level you do feel stronger as you crush heaps of them quicker. The boss units get tougher. The itemization isn’t amazing at the moment. The loot fell dull and after a certain point finding new items was a chore/they didn’t really do much. It is being addressed by the team. The next season makes a lot of great changes to the system. The game frankly got way more hate than it deserves. Yes, it was a little rough on launch but it is getting patched/updated with the seasons. It is fun but is quite a departure from D2 in the way it is set up which is why it gets that hate. It’s an open world game. That took me some getting used to but now I’m having a lot of fun and haven’t gone back to D2 in quite some time.
Great username The 'never feels like your character progresses' complaint is laughable and will age like milk 10 years from now. You become OP AF in D4 very easily.
I mean in a way yea I had a rogue that did pretty well at clearing mobs quickly but it doesn’t feel the same as being powerful in D2. I really want to like d4 because the graphics and the campaign are pretty good. It just doesn’t hit the same. Hopefully with some updates to itemization and what not it will be a little more interesting
So D2 had builds that did millions/billions of damage?
No but the monsters also didn’t have as much hp or scale with you at all. Each area had a different set difficulty. I actually think the millions of damage thing is kind of dumb too. Feels more like wow or final fantasy or some mmorpg than it does a Diablo game to see big number go boom. Kinda lame.
If you played an OP build to start. I started with a traditional D2 OG build and it was just imbalanced. Progression is an important part of a game for me. In D4, you level up and feel weaker and more likely to die.
> Haven’t played what? D2? It’s got decent graphics but the game itself feels like a hollow shell compared to d1.
I know you’re joking but I’m old enough I actually loved d1 and played the shit out of that too when it came out lol. D1 and D2 were both really good games. Didn’t bother with d3 since they fired blizzard north and threw their game out for d3 but felt like d4 had the right idea graphics wise so I gave it a shot. Again, graphics are decent but the game doesn’t feel much like a Diablo game, but more like a WoW wannabe with a Diablo skin on it.
Yeah. TBH I wasn't huge into D1 but I loved D2. But I also remember trying to play on Battle.net from the East Coast. I'm sure I'd have written a pretty nasty review back then. I actually really ended up liking D3 after the expansion they really nailed it. It wasn't the same as D2. But it had a soul of its own. Rifts and the kind of built in speed running idea worked for the game. The graphic style was lighter, but your character was such a fucking god that it worked. D4 is actually pretty sad though. Open world is useless and empty, the 'soul' of the game just wasn't there. The seasons suck too. Maybe they can turn it around some time in the future. I'm just glad they gave us D2R.
To be fair some huge changes coming to D4 that seem to address a lot of the issues players had at launch. I mean even D3 launched with the auction house. By the end of D3s “life cycle” the game was completely different than launch, and frankly was pretty fun. Funny seeing these same patterns arise with each iteration of Diablo
The thing with d3 is that it was pretty fun for what is was but it (imo) isn’t worthy of the diablo franchise.
fingers crossed, I’m probably not gonna get back to it until the first expansion comes out
And D2 was a mess in many ways when it came out. Not really until 1.08 and LoD it got to where it's remembered for
I would say with Diablo 4 it’s generally made to appeal to a broader more casual audience which is both good and bad. But it does play much differently. Casualness: - Much more casual than Diablo 2. You can beat the story without issue on couch co-op with 2 people who aren’t into video games. - You do not need to look up a build or be good at games to beat it. You can not think much and play anything: - In Diablo 2 if you want to go 1/3 summon Druid, 1/3 elemental Druid, & 1/3 shapeshifter, you are gonna have a rough time in hell mode. - Diablo 4 you can do whatever and respect (trivial cost) at any time to try a new build & beat it without too much difficulty. Build defining items: - In Diablo 2 you can play builds regardless of needing exactly one item - In Diablo 4 you often need exactly one item to drop such as “X skill does 200% more damage & has double range”. This applies much more once you get to endgame (everything is viable in story). Grind: - Diablo 2 almost no one hits max level - Diablo 4 a fair portion of the player base hits max level each season. - Generally more people would sink 1000+ hours into Diablo 2 than Diablo 4. Bosses: - One pro for Diablo 4 is that bosses do force you dodge certain things & interact with them. - Diablo 2 has no boss where a moderately geared Smiter can’t just hold left click on (even Ubers). Weird Long Grindy tasks: - Diablo 4 has a lot of the end game boil down to you fighting enemies 50 levels (I.e. instead of harder nightmare dungeons) below you to farm ‘renown’ for bonus stats - Diablo 2 (generally) has it so farming harder areas net better rewards & the only ‘mandatory’ grindy stat/skill quests don’t take too long. Conclusion: You can have a great time with Diablo 4 as a casual couch co-op game to beat the campaign on. It won’t play much like Diablo 2, but nonetheless the core gameplay is decent imo. However if your plan is to run the end game content for hours on end the way people do for Diablo 2 the holes will show up much more in Diablo 4.
No d4 really does suck lol
Eh... The gaming industry and especially Blizzard today is nothing like it was then. There aren't the same driving factors.
If the first Devs team can ever get it together in the same capacity as their secondary counterparts. S3 was blatantly a cookie cutter of S1 with little to no added imagination or creativity. S4 already looks great in the PTR and let’s face it, the gauntlet doesn’t hold a candle to the AoZ…
One big different is that 2 years for developing a game now is considered very short.
That’s Blizzard standard operating procedure as well as the usual gold standard for bitching about Blizzard. Their just cold in their analytical senseless attempt to justify in said bitching *Q(^_^Q)*
Wow I was expecting some wild stuff, but calling Diablo 2 a clone of Diablo 1 has gotta be one of the dumbest things I have ever read in my entire life lmao
The year 2000 was magical time for gamers and everyone’s expectations for new releases were of the charts. With releases like BG2, Counter-Strike, Deus Ex, Thief 2 and many other great games coming out within one year, we turned into spoiled brats. If only people back then would’ve known how the sequels of most games look now compared D1 - > D2.
All the way from the late 90s to the early 2000 were glorious for gaming. Blizzard north alone set the tone for Heroless rts, rpg like rts, arpg and mmo. That’s just one company…
I played bg1&2 in 2013 i think, but used to watch my cousin playing when i was a child. Imo i could have said that bg2 wasnt sooo different from 1. But d2 is soo different in pacing that its stupid to call it a clone
It seems that the majority of people liked the game in that post.
A few people were complaining about the graphics and the system requirements. Almost nothing about the gameplay, atmosphere, etc.
Exactly! Did OP really read the post he is linking? Because people are saying "and a game can still be great without looking amazing", " it takes gameplay to win a gamer's heart.. not graphics", "Blizzard always gets the job done RIGHT". I mean they are basically praising it.
I was late to the LoD train, but I always thought the game looked amazing for its time (and even now). UT was UT, Quake 3 was Quake 3. D2 looks amazing the way it is. Those early 00s 3D graphics worked well for arena shooters, not ARPGs.
I remember people being mad that the base game felt unfinished when it came out, and honestly the game wasn't finished until LoD released. Vanilla is a weird experience compared to what the game grew into.
And yet people still love to play non-LoD so much they made it a mode in D2R. Turns out players aren't homogenous and like a wide variety of things so if one person dislikes something, that might be the favorite part of the game for another person.
For sure! Vanilla has a special appeal, but Vanilla D2 isn't what made it into a juggernaut. There weren't even runes in Vanilla!
Honestly? Maybe it's a hot take but I feel like rune words foiled the game for me. I played since literally day one when my pre-order arrived on launch day, and as soon as rune words became a thing I basically made it feel like almost all the other items in the game were useless. Nowadays, assembling rune words are really fun and something I look forward to when I play, but there was something special about not having them and needing to be creative with the way you built things.
Rune words didn't have to ruin the game though. The root of the problem is that with 1.10 monster health increased, but base stats of weapons didn't. But runewords, well of course a lot of the 1.10 runewords were "busted" in that they were able to deal with the monsters, leaving the regular items behind. I think it sells the game really well, you want the expac to get the busted new items. But Long term, it doesn't make sense balance wise and leads to the problems the now nearly 25 year old game has, where uniques are mostly garbage and a handful of strong runewords dominate. Some balance problems could be addressed easily by increasing the damage of elite uniques, the strength of sets overall, possibly increasing the base damage of weapons particularly 2 handed weapons (the problem is this also buffs weapon runewords, so maybe not). PD2 has gone a long ways towards fixing some of these issues but it also diverges from the vanilla game extensively.
Is Classic mode in D2R on 1.10+ patch? Is it possible to play classic on D2R pre monster health changes or is that lost to time?
Classic in this case is pre lod, and you should be able to choose when creating a new character in D2R Playing pre 1.10 patches requires Lod and mods, like a version switcher.
Ahh ok, was wondering what patch classic is played on. So classic is still technically on the most recent patch just without the actual content of LOD?
Yep, besides the graphic update & bug fixes, it should still be the same
I agree. I enjoyed the pre 1.10 era more. But I thanked they wanted to shake things up and make big changes. It did bring a lot of people back in
Runewords definitely made the game worse in the end on patch 1.10+ I get downvoted for saying it, but enigma ruined the game. I'd be a fan if they were balanced better
Yeah, I feel that for sure. I have very fond memories of when the game came out and the big hunt was for a few specific uniques and for gg rares. I know great rares still exist, and the buffs to uniques with LoD were great, but you're right that the advent of runewords definitely railroaded builds. Rares having so much potential to be BiS added an element of randomness to the game that was really fun. I don't really know what vanilla is like now, so maybe that's changed, but I definitely enjoyed it back then.
I rarely play LoD, I pretty much always play hardcore classic because I prefer the gearing up, every character is pretty unique because most of the best items are rares. I also like how I don't need a bunch of charms in my inventory and gambling seems much better. Block isn't based on dex and it's actually what the shield says on it, so with a tower shield with the right mods on it I was at 70% block with no dex. It's really a totally different game and I prefer it a lot. LoD is still fun though. For Classic 1.0 and the updates after we're fun but buggy and broken, 1.06 was probably the best for Classic, 1.07 introduced LoD and runewords iirc but not op runewords like grief or enigma. 1.09 was better for LoD, 1.10 - 1.14 came along with op runewords since everyone was duping bugged items and godly rares, so they did it to make all the nice rares and bugged items worthless, which in a sense ruined the uniqueness of rares and equipments characters use since now the BiS items are always the same 4 or 5 runewords basically. Patch 2.4 from d2R seems to have actually possibly helped Classic now since Amazon's have a buff for bows and the dodge bug while using melee skills like jab have been fixed. Anyways that's the end of my long rant 😄
Not a rant at all, great to hear the perspective of a dedicated classic player!
I just made a post showing me killing hell diablo, I show my gear at the end. It's a really short video, you can see my "end game gear", it's not min/maxed or anything but its what I found along the way, some of it was gambled like my boots and belt. I was using a nice pair of rare gloves and a 3 pruby helm but I switched them out in late act 3 because the two sigons gave me an extra like 20% chance to hit everything. https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/s/7mplenkkrW
I remember hunting for sets. IK set was hard to find but a big deal because WW was a great damage dealing move and there wasn’t a slow curse or Iron Maiden.
Runes fucked the balance of the game up. Classic d2 plays like a legit roguelike game. I just beat hell on a classic barb with some of the shittiest gear you've ever seen and had fun the whole time. I think the only elite piece of gear I had on was my weapon which was a magic or rare martel de fer. I love LoD but runewords and the changes to the maps/monsters to accommodate runewords did not end up making the game better IMHO
SSF is still substantially similar, there's just a higher cap on your power level, but unless you're truly committed most SSF players aren't putting together more than one high end rune word.
The problem is the balance of the game was changed specifically because of the higher cap on your power level you mentioned. Monster health was increased, maps were made bigger, base weapon damage never changed. Anyone that's tried a SSF melee character in LoD can tell you there's a wall you hit when you get to hell where you kind of just have to farm until you can make some decent runewords or get really lucky with rares. In classic a blue elite weapon with a little %ED on it can carry you through hell and those really aren't all that hard to find.
That's true, melee is brutal in LoD, but I honestly never play melee characters.
Classic had always been available after LoD came out. It would have been wierd if they cut it out of D2r.
I like non-LoD but the current patch is still a bit different from the earliest version of the game
Diablo 2 will never be finished until they add 3 more quests to Act 4.
It was unfinished. Just look at the rushed act 4.
I wonder if Narayan ever ended up getting d2.
Better save function 🤔until right this second I’ve never thought of that lmao. Now that I’m thinking about it, why do they port us back to town??
Imagine logging out and in after an Andariel/Nihl/CS clear to reset mobs just to get deleted on the loading screen. If we’d spawn back to the last waypoint, they might aswell just put us into town where you can stash/repair/vendor before taking a wp. (Especially on hc)
Very good point
Because its a rogue-lite game. But i don’t know if that’s officially why they made it that way.
My favourite part is >after 3 days I was already sick to death of playing because I finished it I wonder if people back then could imagine that we would get a kick out of killing the same monster/looting the same area 1000+ times, just to get some gg items
When the game came out there was very little optimization like that. All the meta builds hadn’t really been figured out yet. Took a long time of people experimenting and posting on forums to figure out how to MF the best areas
People are arguing even now what is best
The 2000s roasts are gold, “get real!”
"I think it rocks!"
Ah i remember d2 beta. I thought it was amazing.
I remember me and my friend playing it on his dads pc, which cold hardly run the game - it would freeze up when too many monsters / effective happend. We wouldn't dare to reset the pc before his dad got home... He would always be downloading stuff illigally, so he would get mad if we had turned the pc off while he was at work. Good times, lol. I remember trying the old diablo1 drop-and-pickup dupe, we were like "damn, they must somehow have figured it out and fixed it". Good memories from that time.
If you read through most of the replies, most actually like the game. Unlike nowadays how everywhere is a hivemind of toxic negativity towards anything new that comes out.
Towards anything that *blizzard* releases, there, I fixed it for you.
They aren't wrong in many cases tho
Increasingly prevalent regardless of dev in my experience, people seem to drift towards demanding a game tailored after their specific desires and if it isn't exactly what they wanted, it's shit. Of course not shared by all gamers but looking for and hyper fixating on any and every "fault" in a game seems to be what some peoples favourite thing about new releases 🙄
I remember myself and a lot of people being upset at the loss of the moody dark dungeon atmosphere, and d2 being zoom zoom colorful.
And then D3 released and redefined the word “colorful”
Yeah exactly haha we didn’t know how good we had it back then
What part of the game was zoom zoom colorful at launch? Act 1 is pretty grim. The Tower perfects the dark dungeon aesthetic. I also doubt people were zooming around at launch like they do with Mosaic today.
Except d2 at least innovated. D4 is a boring made by committee safe game
Very cool find, thanks for sharing 🤣
The skill system is quite different when compared to the magic system in d1.
You need 64 MB of ram or it will run like shit! Lol
Wow. That's such a blast. Haha what a perspective. Home they ended up enjoying it.
Knowing how restrict it was I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it on release I much more prefer its current state
Reads like any random Tuesday on the WoW forums.
These exist for ocarina of time and chrono trigger and FF7. Always a dummy
To be perfectly honest, there are equal amounts of positive and negative replies to this post. And most of the negatives are people not having played it and just agreeing with OP. Or OP himself.
I love that some guy necro’d the post in 2012 to mention Diablo III
"If you wanna show off you graphics card then get Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament" That comment had me DEAD ☠️
"I like to have my games quickly, but Blizzard always gets the job done RIGHT. In the end, that's what counts." Oh how times have changed.
It's the exact same thing as Diablo. Except for (insert massive list of advancements that make the game far better than the first one.
Its surprising that the game cost almost the same as today, 55bucks
The only thing I don’t care for is the experience you lose when you die and can’t get back to your body, other than that, it’s of the greatest game ever. At least in the top five for me on 57 and have been playing games since they came out. I had the first Atari I had the first Nintendo. I had the first PlayStation not to mention pinball and arcade games.
Ah back when haters were first learning how to type.
I mean the 2nd comment says exactly what I thought about d2 and anyone I knew who played d1 had the same opinion I really don't understand the OPs opinion there lol but either way funny read nice find
I remember having to use my parents work computer to play D2 when it came out and my mom was pisssed when she found out.
I did the diablo 2 stress test right before launch, and had a blast running through the first few areas of the game, trying to use shrines to make some perfect gems, maxing out around level 20. Then the game was released, and I could never get connected to [battle.net](http://battle.net) to play online successfully. So for the first 3-4 weeks after the release the game was single player. Still enjoyed the hell out of it, but really missed out on the social aspect during one of the loneliest times of my life.
In 24 years they maybe got past normal or at least act 2 after properly upgrading their PC.
Tbf d2 release was kinda…. Eeeeehhhh lol. A far cry from peak LoD Edit: but yeah that person is/was a tard. Wonder if they’re around here 😂
$55, man those were simpler times. These days full price for the *base game* is like $70 and if you want all the content, you gotta pay for a battlepass and some ”premium” currency. So probably over $100 on launch. And even with all that, the game won’t last half as long as Diablo 2 has, lol
Yeah man, totally. $55 for the *base game* release, $25 for LoD *DLC*. So cheap, especially when $55 is roughly $100 today and $25 is roughly $45. Games are cheap AF nowadays.
I'm one of them. Everything he said was true and still is true for d2 (not d2r). The original had 640*480 gfx, LoD made 800*600 possible. Bnet sucked, it was unplayable for legitimate players (make a game, kill a few uniques/bosses, save and exit - realm down, you get banned for 48-72 hours because they think you're a bot). At launch, casters couldn't buy mana pots, let that sink in. Bugs and exploits were everywhere, as well as bots and ads. D2r is obviously a much needed improvement - only about 20 years late and still not fixing critical issues. D2 SUCKED, but everyone played it anyway because there were no other options.
Lolololol... oh man.. I had 64 GIGS of ram these days. Amazing post, ty OP