So I mean, I get it: yeah, no shit Diablo II is one of my favorite games. It’s the video game equivalent of saying you like Rumours or the White Album.
But recently I bought the Diablo II: Resurrected remaster, and it was uncanny how quickly I fell right back into it. I’m realizing I didn’t just play Diablo II, I was completely subsumed by it.
Strictly speaking, the first Diablo had a bigger impact on me. It was my first exposure to so many different things: roguelikes, procedurally generated levels, action RPGs, and narrative (more or less) in non-adventure games. Even more strictly speaking, it was the Hellfire expansion that had the biggest impact on me, by introducing the Monk character class. I had completed the first game a few times over before starting another play-through with the Monk, and I’d gotten to be level 10 or so before I tried unequipping his weapon. His attack power shot way up! Which made sense, because monks are supposed to excel at hand-to-hand combat. It’s one of those times I was shown how much a game can do not with a pre-determined story, but with interconnected systems.
But realistically, there’s no way that I’m ever playing Diablo again, even if they do come out with an opportunistic cash-grab a spectacular new remaster. With the sequel, it wasn’t even an option whether I’d play it again or not. I felt compelled to.
So now here I am with a backlog of dozens of Steam games built up over the years, which I’m ignoring to go back to playing a game that came out 20 years ago, for what might be the tenth or fiftieth time.
One of the most hilarious aspects of playing the remaster is the character selection screen, which gives you a button to toggle between the remastered presentation and the original. This is a pretty standard feature in video game remasters and re-releases, but here it’s used only in the pre-game screen, not the game itself. (At least, that’s the only place it’s easily accessible). I say it’s hilarious because without it, you might believe that Blizzard hadn’t actually done much of anything besides make new versions of the cinematic sequences — which shouldn’t be understated, actually, since they’ve improved the character designs a lot from the bafflingly ugly originals. Otherwise, the game looks exactly like you remember it. You need the button to be reminded just how generous your memories have been to a game that was still using turn-of-the-century technology. Oh no. That’s not what I remember at all!
Diablo II is my favorite of the series because it takes all the lizard-brain-dopamine-dispensing mechanisms of the original and expands on them in all the right, insidiously clever ways. I haven’t yet gotten past the first act with the remaster (because I keep starting over with new characters), but I’m still hoarding all the gems and jewels I find along the way, practically rubbing my hands together at the prospect of getting access to the Horadric Cube. The game has always been a ridiculously fancy and expensive overlay on a random number generator, but soon I’ll get a whole new set of random numbers to see!
I don’t know what other game are going to be in my “my favorite games” list, because I’m thinking of them as I go along. But I would bet that Diablo II is the game I most resent liking. I didn’t get nearly as obsessive as some others did — min-maxing has never been my thing, and I think I only played online a total of twice, quickly discovering I only enjoyed it as a solo game — but I still think of it less like a player and more like an addict.
I hate how it so perfectly doles out rewards so that I’m always looking forward to the next hit, turning over every loose boulder and opening every chest inexplicably left in the middle of an open field. I hate how it makes me carefully weigh the pros and cons of the bonuses of any two pieces of armor, even though I know it doesn’t actually make that much of a difference. I hate that I look forward to entering the next area, even though I already know what it looks like, or unlocking the next skill, even though I already know what it does. It annoys me how it’s such a brazen system of repetitive habit and exposed mechanics, and I find it so completely satisfying.
My disappointment with Diablo III is probably a good indicator of exactly what Diablo II does so well. None of these games are particularly remarkable for their storytelling (although you can tell that some of the people at Blizzard are very fond of the lore they created), but Diablo II has just the right balance. Enough so that you’re not just looking at a scroll of random numbers, but not so much to get in the way. When I was a couple hours into Diablo III and learned that the main story would have me traveling the world assembling the pieces of a magic sword, I could hear the low, raspy groan as part of my soul left my body.
I don’t have a ton of experience playing the smaller, simpler roguelike games out there, but of the ones I’ve tried, none have had exactly the same feeling of satisfaction as advancing through Diablo or its sequel. I’ve got no doubt that Diablo 4 will be huge and bombastic and meticulously crafted and balanced (full disclosure: I’ve got a friend who’s working on it), but I’d like to play something again that gets that simple feeling of risk, reward, and exploration.