Diablo 2 Resurrected Beta landed over the weekend and boy did it bring back memories.
When the game was first launched, I was in the first year of university – young, idealistic, and had loads of time on my hands to play the masterful action RPG back in 2001. And over the following two decades, I continued to play it, on and off, because of the sheer replayability of the game.
I made the pre-order when it was available and had my hands on the game over the weekend. I only played about three hours of it over the weekend and made it to Nightmare with my Druid Werewolf. But I’ve seen and played enough to say one thing: Blizzard delivered.
The developers promised that they were not changing anything meaningful in the game. Instead, all they wanted to do was to tune up the graphics from 2001 to 2021. And it worked like a charm.
The game’s graphics are stunning. The fireballs light up the ground as they pass through the screen; skeletons crumble as your hammer smashes the last of their bones, while the halls of hell look a devilishly chaotic place.
It also included a nifty little short-cut (default with G) that toggles between the current version and the legacy version. At one glance, you will immediately see the difference between present and past.
Other than that everything else great, and bad, about the game remained.
The skill trees did not get a rework – the synergies between skills that made the game a pioneer in the action RPG space remained. The old fan favourite builds such as the Hammerdin and Javazon remained, meaning old veterans like us can get into the game straight away.
The music quality also seemed to be much clearer. The soundtrack was the same but it felt more ominous, dark and foreboding: exactly the tone that you should be hearing when confronting the world’s greatest evils.
Gamers did complain about servers crashing and games not starting because of the problems with Battlenet. That was a bummer – but even that reminded me of the good old days when you had to wait several minutes just to get into a game.
I still hate the archaic trading system in the game – it’s a laborious process when you have to join a trading channel, start a game and then walk to the person to trade said item. I know the devs say they aren’t fixing the gameplay but surely quality of life improvements don’t fall into that category.
I also can’t help but hope that they continue to make some tweaks to things like runewords and items. There will be the usual ladder system that has been in place for the past 20 years but it feels like a fresh start, so I’m hoping that a patch 1.14 will drop with a few new runewords or even sets for old and new D2 players to hunt down.
The remastering of the best ARPG is excellent. But it was also a sad reminder of just how far Blizzard has fallen. Diablo 2 was a masterpiece back in the day, a game that was years ahead of its time, to the extent that even 20 years later, the game remains a wonderful experience.
But the company? Well, sandwiched between sexual harassment claims, failing titles and botched launches, Diablo 2 Ressurrected could be the last – and great – reminder that of a gaming development company that once ruled the world in its own Sanctuary.
