Diablo 2: Resurrected Review in Progress

That awful laugh still creeps right up under my skin.

---

“

In the “aged, but mostly gracefully” column we have the arc of Diablo 2’s story, which is good, but it’s not as good as I fondly remembered. The first two acts are really fun, and each quest is a dark, gothic fantasy vignette, while Act 3 is a great sprawling jungle crawl with lots of little dungeons sprinkled around. Act 4, however, is boring as dirt. The NPCs don’t have any flavor dialogue, let alone personality, while the quests and the areas are entirely linear. I have no idea how a story about invading Hell itself could be boring, but Diablo 2 somehow did it. Thankfully, things pick up again with the Lord of Destruction expansion’s Act 5. It’s a bit rushed, but it’s a good time.

I chose a Paladin from the seven available classes as my first character for my grand return to Diablo 2. This is because for two decades I’ve maintained a personal grudge against the dung beetle soldiers in Act 2 – you know, the ones that poop lightning when you hit them. The Paladin’s lightning resistance aura allows me to laugh in their faces and kill them in humiliating ways, and it’s been everything I thought it could be.

That’s part of the charm of Diablo 2, and it’s still great design today. Some enemies are just immune to certain damage types, forcing you to diversify your build (or your co-op party). Others will burn out your mana in seconds, meaning spellcasters have to keep their distance while melee has to figure out how to win without active abilities. There’s masochistic joy in overcoming the escalating challenges, especially when the escalation goes exponential as you break into Nightmare and Hell difficulties for character levels 30 to 99 or so. There’s no shame if you’ve had your fill before then and tap out, or start a new character for a fresh run, but Diablo 2 keeps on giving if you do.

The heart of Diablo 2 is still the multiplayer. Singleplayer is a fun dungeon crawl, but the difficulty and action feels best when you’ve got others along. Cooperative PvE runs to defeat bosses and farm good loot are where Resurrected shines most. The loot system is unreliable and random, assuming that players will trade items across games and characters to get what they need. The new, larger shared stash helps you do that, a small update that supports the original game rather than changing it. Building synergetic characters with a regular group is really rewarding, and classes like Paladin and Assassin only truly shine in a crew.

There’s also PvP, a niche and extremely hardcore Diablo 2 scene that’s already starting to reestablish itself with its winner-take-all brawls. Personally, I fear these people, but I’ve already seen some impressive collections of ear trophies and unique weapons on social media.

Some of the mechanical ideas feel old-school relative to how things are done in action RPGs these days, but that doesn’t make them bad. For instance, you only get two active skills at once. It seems archaic – and it is – but what was a technical and game design constraint at the time is pretty fun when you get past the clunkiness. You have to choose skills carefully, as having too many might just give you a huge toolkit you’re not fast enough to use. There’s a lot of juggling between powers. I like to smash my Paladin into the enemy packs with a Charge before switching to Zeal for a series of rapid blows, or Vengeance for elementally infused strikes that take down monsters resistant to physical attacks. For tough elite groups, I’ll switch weapons and throw gas grenades to weaken them before I head in. All the while I’m swapping auras from attack speed to elemental resistances as I need them and keeping my holy shield buff up every 30 seconds.

Part of the delight of Diablo 2 is that it has a skill tree system you can use to build some truly strange characters.

---

“

There’s no shortage of options for skills and abilities, and part of the delight of Diablo 2 is that it has a skill tree system you can use to build some truly strange characters. It’s flexible enough that you can make ranged builds for the melee characters, like a crossbow Paladin that shoots explosive bolts. How about a Barbarian focused on the War Cry skill, who just runs around shouting until everything dies? How about a Sorceress who enchants weapons rather than nukes enemies from a distance? I’ve always wanted to try and make a Necromancer tank, personally – maybe I’ll finally get around to it.

There’s a ton of freedom… that is, if you’re willing to discard 20 years of accumulated Diablo 2 wisdom and take your chances. In many ways this game is “solved,” in that the best builds and their precise itemization have been thoroughly sussed out over the years. In other words, there are right and wrong decisions, but you won’t know that unless you look it up or spend a lot of time failing.

You’re welcome to play like it’s 2000 and not search out optimal builds, especially when playing on Normal. You can clear the campaign with pretty much anything if you’re dedicated enough, though once you’re in Hardcore or Hell difficulty melee characters are very dependent on getting good items to progress at any pace other than a snail’s.

However, while I’d normally encourage you to go in blind and experiment for yourself, I won’t in this case because some of Diablo 2’s design falls squarely into the “hasn’t aged well” category. For example, there are copious skill traps for new players, meaning that some abilities you might be tempted to choose don’t scale well past the early game, or aren’t useful unless you understand their synergies with other skills you won’t unlock until much later.

Additionally, some straight-up broken things, like the infamous Next Hit Always Misses bug, have been retained in the name of keeping the flavor of Diablo 2 the same as it’s always been – but that’s something few people know about unless they do their homework. Unfortunately, this faithfulness to the original’s bugs seems to be without limits: Skills like the Amazon’s Fend and Druid’s Fury are still bugged, breaking when interacting with other common mechanics. These are known, documented bugs that have locked off entire character skills for 20 years. Why are they still in this game? Wouldn’t it have been wonderful and fresh to let us explore that still-undiscovered country?

To its credit, it’s worth saying that I’ve encountered barely any new bugs specific to Resurrected, and those I have seen have been minor graphical glitches that don’t affect gameplay – things like doors that don’t change visually when opened but can still be passed through, or an object overlaying a texture strangely. Nothing out of the ordinary for a modern game.