Diablo II – PC – Review – PC – Review

I came into a place void of all light, which bellows
like the sea in tempest, when it is combated by warring winds.

–Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Legend has it that after many long, deadly battles, the life forces
of three demonic brothers, Baal, Mephisto, and Diablo–the manifestations
of evil–were finally imprisoned within three separate soulstones.
The soulstones were then implanted into the bodies of the heroes who captured
the demons, and the heroes were buried deep in the earth to spend eternity
wrestling with the demonic life forces, keeping them from escaping back
into the world.

Until:  as we find out at the end of Blizzard’s original, the soulstone
containing Diablo, the Lord of Terror, has found a new home in the forehead
of an adventurer who, seeking to aid the town of Tristram, has had to sacrifice
himself in order to delay Diablo’s return.

Diablo II takes up where Diablo left off, with the Lord of Terror possessing
the new hero and heading east from Tristram in search of his buried brothers.
His ultimate goal is to unite with his brothers and then wreak chaos, horror,
and destruction on the mortal world, thereby swaying the odds in the eternal
battle between good and evil irreversibly in evil’s favor.  Playing
as either an Amazon, a Barbarian, a Paladin, a Necromancer, or a Sorceress,
you must trail Diablo through four distinct areas and prevent him from
completing his quest.

The new character classes in Diablo II represent a refreshing break
from the traditional RPG fare.  Each of the characters feels unique
to play; this is based mostly on the character attributes and abilities,
and on Diablo II’s innovative skill-building system.  For instance,
Barbarians can wield two weapons, Necromancers can raise the skeletons
of fallen enemies to aid in battle, and Amazons can master both ranged
and hand-to-hand melee weapons.  And after leveling up, characters
gain one skill point, which can be applied to picking up a magical, weapon-based,
or passive skill (such as defensive tactics or special abilities, like
being able to find a potion when searching the body of a fallen opponent).
The skill system is Diablo II’s marquee offering, as it amplifies the otherwise
action game’s role-playing elements and sets Diablo II apart from any other
computer role-playing game I’ve played.

Some of the other components completely new to the game are the different
towns, wilderness-exploration aspects, the ability to run, and purchasing
system.  The towns in Diablo II are all noticeably different from
one another, and each plays a central part in the unfolding story of your
hero’s pursuit of the demon.  You start out in  a camp that’s
holed up because of some demonic disturbances in the area.  In order
for you to move onward, you must clear the surrounding wilderness, as well
as separate caves and dungeons, of the assorted creepy-crawlies and the
like that are now freely roaming around due to Diablo’s recent release.
As in the first game, the layout of every area is randomized, although
they all contain the same features.  The monsters are mostly new,
whether in name or appearance and there seems to be more of them per area
than in the original game.  Because you have so much more area to
cover than in the original game, Blizzard has included the ability of your
characters to run.  Each character has a stamina bar that decreases
as you run and replenishes as you walk or stand still.  I found this
feature quite useful, and, combined with the teleporting waypoint system,
I had no problem making my way throughout each area’s (called Acts) massive
landscape.  The purchasing system, on the other hand, presented some
difficulty for me.  Instead of listing what’s available for sale when
you visit the few different merchants in each town, you instead get an
inventory screen that displays all the different weapons and items (magical
or otherwise).  When you move your cursor overtop each item, information
about that item pops up.  Because these item screens are generally
crowded with items, you get an information-overload effect that makes many
of the similar-looking weapons, for instance, seem superfluous and not
worth spending the time to investigate.

This also speaks to the game’s poor play-balancing.  Regardless
of the character-type I played, I found the game to be too easy for most
of the entire first act.  I felt somewhat of an inflation effect–that
is, the devaluation of experience points–because so many different monsters
come at you in the beginning, and they’re all very easy to dispatch (most
requiring few more than 2 hits each).  Also adding to the over-easiness
was the linearity of the story.  Those familiar with the original
Diablo might not mind so much, as this game is billed as equal parts action
and role-playing, but as with the first title I still found myself disappointed
with the limited NPC selection.  Combined with the overuse of unique
and weak enemies and magic items, Diablo II even lacked some of the charm
of its predecessor.

Which is to say that despite some of the innovations and improvements,
Diablo II suffers a bit from overkill (a quantity versus quality effect).
As groundbreaking as the original Diablo may have been, this style of role-playing
game has been easily outdone by the likes of Baldur’s Gate and Planescape
Torment, which concentrate more on integrating the character(s) with the
story.  Although I appreciated that Diablo II acknowledges that there
was “a hero” who battled Diablo recently (as there were many of us, all
across the world) and incorporates that information in the story and cutscenes,
this story ultimately ends up feeling secondary to the game’s arcade action
(albeit, FUN arcade action).

Despite my few though legitimate gripes, Diablo II is definitely one
of the must-have games this year.  Blizzard’s production values are
far and away the most stringent and smart, as demonstrated by this massive
and relatively bug-free (be sure to download the latest drivers for your
video card) title from them.  I say smart, because they carried over
a lot of what was good from the original game, such as the point-and-click
combat interface, and they even added more support for both mouse buttons
(such as left-click to swing your javelin, right-click to throw it!) and
more hotkeys.  I highly recommend Diablo II to everyone, young or
old, male or female, as it represents a true continuation of what made
the original Diablo so original.

Installation:  Medium. Three discs, and, to do a full
install, about a gig and a half of hard-drive space.  Where’s the
1-disc DVD version?  Also, downloading and installing new drivers
for your video card (and probably sound card, too) will likely be a requirement
more so than an option for most gamers.

Gameplay:  10. Seamless.  The mouse-driven interface
has been refined to perfection.  Movement around the gameworld is
fluid, load times have been minimized, combat is extremely easy to carry
out, and the new skill system makes the game that much better.  While
there were some minor hiccups, such as with the occasional (though easily
remedied) crash bug, and with what I felt was a less-than-adequate purchasing
interface, I thought that such shortcomings were generally balanced out
with innovations and improvements.  For instance, while the game offers
up too many magic items to mention and over-limits your character’s personal
inventory space, you now get a stash chest in each town, which allows you
to hold onto more than enough (like, say, that backup bow, crossbow, and
two-handed sword you can’t bring yourself to sell).  The run feature
is also very helpful, but, in keeping with the game’s sense of overkill,
the waypoint teleportation system makes covering a lot of ground in short
amount of time even easier.  Also, the hire-a-mercenary feature (another
innovation) was helpful in terms of fighting off the more massive pygmy
onslaughts, and I liked that it gave me another person to worry about the
livelihood of, so to speak.  Maybe Diablo III (or whatever it’ll be
called) can include single-player parties, where you can actually control
more than one character.

Graphics:  8.5. If games were judged on cutscenes
alone, Diablo II would get a 10+ across the board.  These were easily
the best cutscenes I’ve ever seen; I could’ve watched an entire 2-hour
movie of the game’s cinematics.  Unfortunately, as Blizzard’s production
costs require it to reach the widest possible audience, the in-game graphics
have been limited to 640 x 480 resolution.  There are still some stunning
visuals, such as the weather effects, and some of the landscape, and you
do get to see every piece of armor and every weapon on the actual character,
so despite the slightly blurred characters (can’t see their faces too well),
there’s still not much to complain about.  I would’ve liked some more
variety in how the monsters were drawn (many different monsters, most notably
the zombies and skeletons, were duplicates of each other in different colors),
but some of the new monster types, such as the Fetishes (little tikki-looking
creatures who sometimes stack one on top of the other and who shoot at
you with blowguns), were highly original.  The game’s lighting effects
were also impressive:  trapped chests bursting into flames after being
opened, realistic shadows, characters turning blue when blasted with a
frost weapon, and of course the many spectacular spell effects.  Some
slowdown did occur when the battles got to be too big, with too many things
being drawn on the screen at once, however.

Sound:  8. It says a lot about a game if it’s almost
as much fun to watch and listen to as it is to play.  Even though
it would be easy to say that the voice-acting in the game is better than
most, because a lot of the voice-acting in games is very bad, I should
point out that Diablo II’s voice-acting is really superbly done.
Few actors provided the voices for more than one or two characters, and
all the characters sound distinctive and authentic, whether gruff, nasally,
British, or exhausted.  The music is not quite on par with the voice-acting
and sound effects, however.  Whereas the last game had a consistent,
medieval-strummed-instrument sound to it that did a very good job of setting
the mood and atmosphere, Diablo II’s music reflects a bit too much of a
rock influence.  The percussive, quick-tempoed music seems more geared
to get you into jamming or “rocking out” while slaying, and doing so in
a quick-paced multiplayer-type of way, than to taking your time and applying
thought to the game’s challenges (and relatively non-existent puzzles).
The sound effects were as good as in the original, with crisp, identifying
sounds for each of the monsters, weapons, spells, and characters (voice-overs),
although I would’ve liked to have seen (heard) better use being made of
environmental audio features.

Difficulty:  6. Here’s where an otherwise perfect
game fell apart for me.  Probably in keeping with Diablo’s huge multiplayer
appeal, Blizzard made the game a little too easy and little too much of
an overly-magic, “monster bum rush” gore fest.  I can imagine a
conference room whiteboard somewhere at Blizzard HQ that has a meter shaded
heavily green for glitz and sheer quantity and dead red for meaningful
dialogue and character interaction.  It goes without saying that the
Baldur’s Gate games leave the Diablo games in the dust when it comes to
dialogue and story.  I do have to keep in mind that Blizzard is really
creating the product that they want to create, aimed at that in-between
arcade and RPG audience, but that they bother to spend so much time on
moving the story along, and especially on the character skill development
features, indicates to me that they could just as well have done their
dialogues and story lines better.  Many of the game’s NPCs have very
little back story to them, even when they’re relatively important characters,
such as Jerhyn, the prince of Lut Gholein, who has a one-room palace on
which he stands idly about on the front steps of until his dialogue sequence
has been activated.  As for the free Battle.net service, I consider
it to be one of the easiest to use, best (and free!) services available
for matching players up, and the improvements to it, such as with the actual
players’ characters being graphically displayed like little figurines at
the bottom of the screen are exceptional and worthy of commendation, but
unfortunately there are still a number of kinks to be worked out in terms
of the servers being able to support the number of people currently trying
to play online.

One last drawback (and yes, this does deserve a separate paragraph)
is actually the game’s most significant one:  the save feature.
You cannot save your game in any other way than to let the computer save
for you.  This might not be so terrible, except that your position
does not get saved, so, starting again in town, you have to go back to
wherever you were when you quit the former session in order to continue.
Also, this system is flawed in that it doesn’t always save the fact that
you eliminated every monster on a particular dungeon level, so you sometimes
have to go through and kill everything again.  This makes completing
some quests redundantly challenging.  Also, because the manual Save
and Exit feature also starts you back in town when you begin again, you
no longer have the opportunity to save before a big battle and then retry
from that save-point should your character die.  Similarly, the game
makes it difficult to save before choosing a particular skill advancement
(should you decide it’s not what you wanted after all), or before making
a particular purchase (say from one of the “Gamble” merchants, who sell
unidentified magic items at extreme prices) that you might not have wanted
to make after all.  I have my fingers crossed that Blizzard will adjust
the save feature with an upcoming patch.

Concept:  10. Diablo II remains true to the original’s
“groundbreaking-ness.”  It might seem as simple as giving an arcade
game some deeper role-playing elements, or vice versa, but the people at
Blizzard somehow manage to pull it off like no other.  A perfect balance
is achieved with Diablo II; one moment it’ll remind me of the arcade classic
Gauntlet, the next it’ll bring my favorite computer role-playing
game of all time, Pool of Radiance for the Commodore-64, to mind.
While I may have done so recklessly with some of my comments in this review,
I’d generally hesitate to make suggestions for improvements to a game that
gets so much so right.

Overall:  8.5. Just as the original was much imitated,
I suspect many developers will try to imitate what Diablo II has to offer
in terms of character skill development, graphics, and playability.
Sure, even more improvements could be made to the game (see especially
my comments under the Difficulty category, which represent why I took off
points Overall), and it could have been differentiated from the original
in even more ways, but not once did I get the impression that Blizzard
was just trying to capitalize on a new franchise.  There’s some real,
sincere effort demonstrated by this game; you get the sense that the developers
really wanted to create something new, fun to play, and important to the
gaming world.  As gaming continues to rival the movies in revenues
and entertainment value, many of Blizzard’s titles, Diablo II definitely
included, would stand as good representatives of what this medium has to
offer.