The developers managed to capture the aesthetic while improving the game in the direction of what gave the original game its replay-ability.
Their development cycle of new content every 3 or 4 months with a league reset is unique and keeps things fresh. They're additionally not too monetized. It's a good company with probably more of a future than a Diablo 2 remaster.
Since then, I have been playing POE non stop. I'd wake up at 3am and play until 8pm. I'd drink alot of water before going to bed so I can wake up early to play.
I stopped caring about work, I just played the game. To complete my work tasks, I hacked together my tasks in 30 mins before the end of the sprint with some of the shittiest code I've ever written.
Somewhere along this journey I decided that the only way I can stop my addiction is to completely finish it. I spent around 12k buying stuff for the game. The way it works is... you play to find and collect "currency" in the game. But instead of spending the time, I buy in game "currency" from other players. Its frowned upon and getting caught will get you banned, but part of me secretly wished my account would get banned so I could quit. I never got banned, so I got bolder and eventually I was spending $800 / day.
This week, I finally feel like I have finished the game. It finally got boring after building my character to the point where I could breeze through everything in the game. I was finally able to work this week and correct the bugs I introduced and get back to focusing on work.
I have yet to digest what happened in the last 3-4 months.
Its crazy how addictive these games can be.
I quit shortly after I bought my first tabs on sale. I'd stalled on mid-tier mapping playing solo self-found and decided I needed to grind currency to continue if I wanted any hope of better rolls. I've never paid into any gachas, so it really caught me off guard when I realized what I had done and how impulsive and out of character it was.
The base game is very comfortable and alluring. I rolled several toons and got to where I could sprint to 80 in a week, then get to high 80s mapping until I hit the natural limits of playing SSF.
I haven't picked it up since, and thinking about how deeply I got into it before has been an excellent deterrent from relapse.
I was borderline addicted to D2 during my high school and beyond years. I'd literally do nothing but play D2 for a solid 4-5 year period.
Then I discovered POE, this was back in the alpha days, I created the wiki (which eventually got sold to Curse which is another story) and played PoE pretty muich daily for a few years.
I'm entirely burnt out now, but just hearing the D2 music has got me in the mood to play it again.
Do you intend to seek professional help about your addiction? From my perspective, it definitely seems this did not happen as a result of some addictive quality of the game, rather your own personality/current situation.
Notably back when Diablo III was still fresh, lots of people suggested PoE. To me, D3 felt more of an arcade-like game that I can quickly jump into and have fun, whereas PoE is more of an efficiency and numbers game. Like it's fun, but I just don't have that sense of being "powerful". I gradually progressed up until Act 5 in PoE (before they added Acts beyond that) and never really felt like I was all that powerful. There were some challenges here and there, but most things just died in some boring manner.
However with Diablo II as I recall, that's pretty much the same ordeal up until a certain point.
I may re-visit PoE at some point this year before D2:R to see if or how things have changed.
First, the non-traditional currency system. There's no gold; instead you have different types of "orbs" of varying rarity. Vendors have different exchange rates for some of them, but the system is generally difficult to grok, especially for a newcomer. To make matters even more confusing, orbs themselves are useful, e.g. they can enhance item stats, upgrade items to higher quality, etc. and you need to be careful to not accidentally continue using orbs yourself when you'd be much better off trading them.
Which brings me to trade. There's no centralized auction house - instead you need to rely on a third-party website where items are listed by other players. The process of listing them is done via an in-game API I think - but then once you find an item you want, you need to whisper that player, then go meet them at their hideout and manually do a trade. Just an absolutely atrocious system overall.
The third one is the zoom level. The game feels like it plays at 800p, or maybe 1024p, and there's no way to zoom out further. Unacceptable for a game that is two decades more recent than Diablo 2, imo.
I am the type of player who starts a new RPG, gets to character creation, and spends 2 hours on the wiki looking at all the classes and races and other options to make the "right" choice. So, obviously PoE appealed to me a lot.
If you want to give it another go my suggestion is always to just slavishly follow a fun looking build guide (from the current league! things change fast) you found online. It'll cut a lot of the complexity right out so you can learn to deal with the huge amount that's still left, then slowly add it back in as you customise later.
That said, the second best modern model is probably theirs. They sell stash tab space (item storage) and cosmetic items only.
They do not play psychological games that many free to play games do. I imagine that when their revenue starts to slip, they may go down the more dubious road as is the normal pattern. But for now, it has my approval.
I've really come to enjoy Good old Games https://www.gog.com
They have Diablo 1 (+ Hellfire) available for 9.99 (but goes on sale)
(That said there's a huge "Do not sell my personal information" link on the diablo page)
I have enjoyed torchlight 1 and 2 quite a bit. It's been a while since I played diablo 1/2 so I can't compare in my head. I recall there was more clicking in diablo.
So... You play the game to get loot. The more you play the more loot you get. So of course you wanna save the loot. So you put it in your stash( all players start with 3 stashes) , for safe keeping. The better it gets more loot you get. The moment you start getting the feel of the game (it is one deep game) you discover trading with other players. To trade with other players you discover premium stash tabs.... One tab is around 5 usd. But u need to buy game coins so u always have almost enough for one more stash.
So a premium tab is like a store front where u can display items for sale to other players. So naturally one starts buying more tabs. And more tabs. And then there are the specialty tabs that organize all the loot. Coz why do it manually when u can pay for a stash that auto sorts loot while you gather even more loot...
And suddenly you realize. You have 27 stashes for a total value of 300 usd... Most you have bought one the weekly stash sale.
And that is how PoE is financed. No walls no hidden stuff. Just loot.
yeh also cosmetics in case you wanna look good gathering all the loot.
Namely, stash tabs, as inventory takes up a lot of space. It's not too expensive though.
I'm playing both and in comparison to majority of MMOs around both offers something I'd describe as fair microtransactions.
The recent rereleases of Torchlight 2 for console (even with some QoL additions) that did not support mods were...not good.
Never was a big fan of 3. It felt more like playing some kind of diablo themed version of gauntlet or something with a bit more depth. It didn't feel like Diablo 2. I tried another recent one that was supposed keep the spirit of diablo 2. I think it was path of exile. I never got into it the same way. It was better than Diablo 3 but still didn't quite capture what made diablo 2 so addictively awesome.
As far as atmosphere and everything goes, diablo 1 was always best at that. Diablo 2 brought the series in a different way, but diablo 2 was something else.
The open battlenet games were utterly ridiculous. Hacked items to the point of nonsense. Like you couldn't even see what was happening on.the screen, but it was fun playing with those sketchy editors that were more often than not likely malware.
Mostly though, my memories are from the closed battlenet games. Lots of time spent gaming with random people I never seen again, but we'd spend hours getting through an act or two together, race for treasure and just have good times. Helping low levels run through the game so they can mule for their high level characters and farm, cheap shots from high level characters that went hostile immediately, good PvP duels, item runs, and just generally lots of fun.
I still remember the day I stepped into a game playing my level 84 hardcore(permadeath) character...somebody went hostile immediately, I was somewhere pretty obscure so I thought it'd be alright, stepped through the waypoint...was dead before the screen loaded, of all the places I picked...that's where they were, that game had like 60 way points or something...that was pretty heartbreaking...
I dunno, I've yet to find an online game with the same kind of community. There was hackers, griefers, people really into the game, item farmers, pvpers, it was a varied mix of gamers under a barely moderated environment, yet somehow it worked and it was pretty amazing. At least when blizzard was active with d2. Near the end it started to decline and the hackers took over, still in its golden age, d2's closed battlenet was pretty great and I haven't really gotten into an online game in the same way since.
That experience of trying to mod my character was – I'm fairly certain – what eventually got me into programming! (Unfortunately I was on a Mac, so I couldn't use 90% of the so-called "trainers", much to my disappointment at the time.)
I recall meeting one specific player on Open Battle.net (their username was "iceblizz", I think) whose hacked sorceress was unbelievably OP. They also had a super-cool personal website -- and both of those things really kindled my curiosity ( ... "How on Earth did they build that website?" ... "How are they so strong with negative 2 billion HP??")
Though no two were alike and some people somehow had even more hacked shit than the pitiful programs I found could create.
It did definitely introduce me to the world of being able to modify programs and playing with the data files of games.
I feel like these days with the high stakes surrounding online gaming and.cheating and everything and just the money involved in the game industry sometimes fun gets left by the wayside.
Blizzard used to make some quality games. Both the blizzard north and blizzard teams.
This is just my, possibly unpopular and also likely cliché opinion. But I blame world of Warcraft and Activision. WoW gave them ridiculous amounts of money and Activision gave them Uhhhh...'corporate refinement' that combination led to them becoming much like most other big name game companies. Money over fun. It's sad...but it is what it is.
Again, that's just my opinion, i'm sure lots of people have enjoyed post Warcraft 3 blizzard games, but for me, that was their last one where gameplay came before profit.
When people talk about Diablo 2, they are always referring to the version including the expansion.
D3 was almost a cross between a cookie clicker game and D2. It's a good game if you ignore its name.
It's not a terrible game, I just found it very shallow. It removed most of the element of choice from character builds and streamlined things in a way I just didn't really like very much.
Path of exile had the opposite problem, it tried too hard to be like diablo 2, while focusing too much on random loot and excessive choice.
Diablo 2 managed to walk that fine line between pointless loot clicker and mindless progression clicker and kept it fun by giving players agency, but not drowning them in choices.
It’s so meta and interesting. It almost single-handedly cured a friend of mine of his video gaming addiction.
It’s also a great meditation on exponential economic growth models.
I still haven't found anything quite like the feeling you get when you die in Diablo II hardcore.
Oh Blaster Master...someday i'll complete you...
Diablo II is easy compared to Nethack. I love them both, but at least in D2 you know what a potion does when you pick it up and none of the equipment is cursed.
There's no feeling quite like being surrounded by too many monsters and looking at all the unidentified potions, spell scrolls, and wands in your inventory, choosing one, and hoping that it will magically teleport you out of trouble. (Only to discover that it was a cursed scroll of fire and now EVERYTHING is on fire.)
Except most of my deaths ended up being from internet outages - your characters are generally nearly invincible when attacking enemies, but if they just stand there dumbly they die in seconds.
So I stopped playing after that.
Which gauntlet game is your point of reference?
But it was cartoony, which was my issue with D3. I was done when the ultimate gear farm was running around clouds and rainbows hunting unicorns.
I played path of exile as well but found it too manipulative, and though QOL the mtx were too expensive, I found within a few seasons of game launch I'd spent too much, and that was with running ladders for items to sell.
I'd rather just own games outright. I remember when DLC started on 360 we joked about how long it would be until reverse gear in a car was DLC. Didn't think it'd be quite so soon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_(2014_video_game)
That came out in 2014. I played both that and D3 around the same time. That version of gauntlet feels heavily inspired by diablo 3 to the point where I was playing them interchangeably when i'd get bored of one or the other and it was only ever really my girlfriend and I and our roommate playing together quick rounds at a time like an arcade game.
Wonder how intense the rewrite was; David Brevik said that much of the game relied on the precise resolution and framerate for everything to work. It wasn't a matter of just upping the resolution and everything worked fine.
I swear though, if this is anything like Warcraft Reforged, I'm truly done with this company.
That's how most RTS games are built. Company of Heroes for instance has a low fps deterministic simulation which provides the multiplayer game logic, and high end end 3D mapping with physics and particles etc layered on top to make it pretty.
Lots of remakes aren't very impactful, but that doesn't mean they're unsuccessful. All they intend to do is reawaken some love for a franchise, and provide a more accessible option for people who missed the original game. I can only think of one (recent) example where it went really badly.
My experience has been you should always do BootCamp for Windows gaming due to performance losses. But for something like DII Re I guess it could be good enough.
Notably, every major game before this point that had a native macOS version, also supported an OpenGL renderer on the Windows version. Specifically in my case, my experience with Wine back then wasn't ideal, and I believed that if SC2 had just had the OpenGL renderer, I could have gotten along fine with it.
I don't expect D2:R to be using Vulkan on any OS, or else that would have made x86 macOS support relatively easy. With my limited macOS usage in Mojave and Catalina, two MMORPGs (Guild Wars 2 and FFXIV) used Wine wrappers. Can't quite remember what GW2 did, but if I recall FFXIV, it used D3D11 -> Vulkan -> MoltenVK. Surprisingly worked well, but I don't know if that was something any random user could have done with any other game easily (not sure if there were pre-compiled solutions around).
Bootcamp should be fine, at least on x86 Macs. I've heard some initial work being done with M1 Macs, but I doubt anything ideal will exist by the time D2:R releases.
- It doesn't work on Linux
- It doesn't work on Mac
Mac has 10% - 20% Market with 100M+ Active user, and judging from the M1 sales it should finally cross the 110M by late 2021.
Asking for Mac support isn't ridiculous question like it was in the 90s.
I played a couple months of evenings of D2 during the pandemic: the online experience was quite a mess. Got temp bans several times for switching characters soon after login. Rampant botting to the point that people made bot services that would give you waypoints upon request as they spam their d2itemz4sale.biz or whatever URL. Seems like there is no moderation budget so they just have a bunch of blunt automated rules.
Lots of quality of life issues remain in the game, like potion management after death, managing projectile consumables in the inventory, friend system is a bolt on through the chat system. I wonder if they made any changes to address un-fun parts of the game or if this is functionally identical.
Still had quite a bit of fun. Was able to tank Uber Diablo with a Zeal paladin to drop annihilus.
To me it seems like the entire point of these remakes has been to kill off the classic Battle.net and get everyone on to the new Blizzard Launcher. The WarcraftⅢ remake made this especially apparent due to how much was promised but then cut before release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sURZZkQxru8
I'm guessing with the "cross progression" system (whatever that means) that games will have to be on Blizzard's servers at all times to allow syncing and avoid cheating, hacks, and piracy.
When that turned out to be completely wrong and WoW Classic turned out to be a smash success, chances are Blizzard shifted development priority toward more nostalgia.
I think Blizzard are well aware that there's plenty of us who have grown up with their core franchises, and are now at the age where nostalgia is an easy sell.
(Also interesting to note they have Future, Mobile and Nostalgia releases of the same franchise all on the near-future map. They're not going backwards, but they're certainly spreading out.)
Corporate is pretty much the death of innovation and creativity.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/ewdija/a_list_of_...
I know it wasn't profitable but that just kind of says it all. When I was a kid and fell in love with Warcraft and Diablo, I really don't know how much of that soul of the company remains today.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/9xg8w3/t...
[1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/gamesnosh/status/1232731118354550...
I know they were thinking about making D2 a 3D game at first, like Runescape, but then went with 2D, because 3D technology wasn't at a point that allowed them to carry over the gritty and dark theme they wanted for Diablo. And then went on to make D3 look as cartoony as it does... They used photos of clay figurines for Diablo 1, would be fun if they remade that with 3D scanning techniques. Do check out David Brevik's post mortem on D1 from GDC by the way, it's fantastic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc
I guess cashing in is supposed to be cheap, and D2 was good enough that I might still play it.
This is important to keep all the old game mechanics the same (e.g., for builds aimed at hitting a specific number of frames per attack/cast/recovery). But I wonder how jarring it would be if you're running on a 144hz monitor.
> In the Blitzchung controversy, the company withdrew the prize from the winner of an online game tournament after he wore a mask and spoke in support of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests in a post-game interview, stating "Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times". The company is partly owned by Tencent. In August 2020, Activision Blizzard removed imagery of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests from its trailer of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
I clicked the beta button. I probably don't need another game I won't play (or play for an hour once every 5 years). So the beta is probably just about right. A couple hours of gameplay will satisfy my needs.
That is sort of my Path Of Exile habit too. About once a year I will get a hankering for a good old slaughter fest. Except POE keeps adjusting their skills tree, and destroying my characters. Or so it seems, since I can never remember the exact builds for some of these 5+ year old characters.
Also the Diablol 2 series does cause some flashbacks, especially the soundscape... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ru-UM1nYJQ&list=PL0QrZvg7QI...
Choose a random date with enough years into it, done.
Other than that, good to see it, I have most of the original editions in special release boxes. Spent endless hours playing them when they were new.
The screenshots and small snippets of gameplay presented look familiar and fun. There's going to be controller support on PC as well (was one of my favorite things about D3). And cross-platform progression sounds interesting.
I'm not entirely happy about what happened with WC3:R, but I'm assuming some kind of lessons were learned with that, and with D2:R being made with a different team with closer interactions, I believe it will end up in a better state at launch.
(of course I'll also back-up my old copies of D2 and its installers as well just in-case)
* There were a variety of ways to duplicate items online. One really popular and well known one involved spamming bone wall on a necromancer + meteor on a sorceress which would cause the server to lag to the point that your ping would exceed 1000. At that point, you could join a game with the same character, stop spamming the skill so your original character didn’t lag out, thus creating two ephemeral copies of your items. This eventually got patched
* One commonly duplicated item was called a stone ring of Jordan (SOJ). They were so commonly duplicated that blizzard added an event that if you sold ~100 to an in game merchant, everyone connected to a given server would spawn an Uber version of Diablo that dropped a unique small charm.
* Another way blizzard got rid of duplicated items was something called “rust storm” where they’d take the servers offline and go through every item in existence, deleting duplicates.
* Botting was extremely common. There are a bunch of weird quirks added to the game to try to prevent botting, though none of them worked. For example, if you spin the mouse wheel while hovering over a skill, it’ll cycle through your skills. That would immediately get you kicked from the game because the person who programmed the server thought only bots could switch skills that quickly.
* There was a feature in the game that if one person in your party got a quest, the whole party got the quest. Players regularly abuse this to “rush” level 1 characters into act 5 in the hardest difficulty so that they can expedite leveling up.
* There are ethereal items that get a 50% bonus to their core attribute (eg. Armor). If you used the cube recipe to socket the item, that 50% bonus would then get applied again. There were an entire class of items called “ebugged” that were overpowered.
* There was an event added much later for a unique large charm. Someone figured out that you could trap Mephisto in a building such that he would never path out of it, continuously trigger him to summon minions, and kill those minions to grant you massive experience with low risk of death. Thus uber leveling was born. You’d do this in a party with a fully equipped character handling the minions and could go 1-80 in like 5 minutes. This later got patched.
* There are still a small group of people who maintain items from previous patches that no longer spawn. A good google search term for this if you wanted to go down a rabbit hole is “1.08 valkyrie wing”. These are commonly duplicated and at risk of disappearing in a rust storm, so these players maintain a genealogy on forums of their items to prove they’re “legit” and not going to poof on you.
* Servers would drop you after like 30 minutes of inactivity. However, there were pathing bugs that could be exploited to make your character bounce back and forth between squares on the grid effectively preventing you from disconnecting. No mouse clicking scripts needed.
There’s probably more but this is getting long
So far ther remade: StarCraft, warcraft 3, World of Warcraft (classic mode) and now Diablo 2.
Whay happened to the best gaming company?
So many great memories, and such high level of addiction. Temping...
Still nice game, amazing soundtrack, same as D1.
