Impressions …. FROM HELL!!


Role-playing survival game is willing to take risks

Well that was my dramatic entrance for the day. Anyway since my recent entry on Diablo 2 and the recent release of a patch that removed the cd requirement, I once again hopped on the train to Sanctuary to do a routine cleaning of hell. First off from my first entry some of my impressions were behind the rose tinted glasses of the past, but that doesn’t mean Diablo 2 is in anyway bad.

As I updated in the entry, purple colored or super rare items don’t exist anywhere in Diablo 2, so you’ll just have to settled for gold color. Also being stuck at 800×600 resolution does take the sheen out of all that uber loot. One thing that I really miss from Titan Quest is the ability to auto sort your inventory so it’s back to tetris again.

Yet the game play still hits that perfect blend of great classes, and rewards for players. In Diablo2 I know that at anywhere at anytime I could stumble across something amazing such as a rare item, or a new rune. In Titan Quest I was always left wandering hoping for a drop at a boss fight. The item variety is just staggering to behold, with new items added in by Blizzard and new rune words for ladder play. I would love to know the total number of rare,magic, and unique items in the world of Diablo 2 as just from playing with a few friends I’ve seen a huge variety.

Then we have the classes which are as diverse and amazing as they were 7 years ago, and I still think no one else has managed to create classes as great in that time. Building up my necromancer has been fun,as I watched my army lay waste to the minions of Diablo while my curses assist. Each skill point in Diablo 2 can have an huge effect on your skills and sets up a variety of diverse characters.

The only nitpick I have with Diablo2 is that re running the game on the higher difficulties does get boring after awhile, but with the amount of loot plus the randomization of the maps keeps things from getting too repetitive.

With the supposed (and hopefully true) announcement of Diablo 3 this week I know that I may have to call up the show “intervention” for my friend as he’s already been obsessed with D2 for all these years. I’m not going to tell him this in game however as his character with all the best loot will wipe the floor with any of mine.

Josh