I chose a Paladin from the seven available classes as my first character for my grand return to Diablo 2. Thankfully, things pick up again with the Lord of Destruction expansion’s Act 5. I have no idea how a story about invading Hell itself could be boring, but Diablo 2 somehow did it. The NPCs don’t have any flavor dialogue, let alone personality, while the quests and the areas are entirely linear. The first two acts are really fun, and each quest is a dark, gothic fantasy vignette, while Act 3 is a great sprawling jungle crawl with lots of little dungeons sprinkled around. In the “aged, but mostly gracefully” column we have the arc of Diablo 2’s story, which is good, but it’s not as good as I fondly remembered. That awful laugh still creeps right up under my skin. There’s a wealth of detail in every scene, in the monsters, and in character models, that really makes me appreciate the ability to dynamically switch between the old and new graphics to see the contrast. Locations like the Monastery Gates in Act 1, an outdoor area that was always a bit weird from an isometric point of view, now have visible roofs on the buildings instead of just a black sea beyond the walls. The completely redone graphics of Resurrected do so much more than a simple homage to the original game, adding a whole third dimension as well as 4K-friendly environment details that were just out of the question in the 800×600 2D graphics of 2000. In the face of concessions that modern games have made towards fun, Diablo 2’s insistence on grind and unforgiving systems and 20-year-old bugs can just make me feel… tired. At the same time, it’s blatantly a game from an era where the demands on our time were very different than what we’ve seen in the past decade. As someone who played more than my fair share of Diablo 2 between 20, Resurrected absolutely scratches an itch for the golden age of this genre.
After a hundred hours smashing demons, I’ve kicked Diablo to the curb a couple times and I’m thoroughly reacquainted with the good and the bad that the most revered game in Blizzard’s action RPG series has to offer. Nothing more than a coat of fresh paint over the old masterpiece, Diablo 2: Resurrected is a curious piece of video game restoration. To learn more, please visit our timeline as well as our in-depth report on the subject. Activision Blizzard is currently facing serious ongoing allegations of harassment and mistreatment of marginalized workers.
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