When I first heard about the announcement I was like “Meh, I loved that game and played it for years but I don’t think I would want to play it again now even with better graphics.”
Then I watched the trailer and now I’m thinking I the visual improvements will be bigger QoL upgrades than I thought so I’ll probably jump into it. I’m particularly interested in the improved lighting, higher resolution/aspect ratio and dramatically improved frame rate.
I hope they have the guts to not modernize the gameplay. More recent games (such as Diablo III) have made some big mistakes in the name of “balance”, like making everything level with you, and seriously nerfing team buffs.
And on a side note, I wonder how they’re going to handle the Arcane Sanctuary and its Escherian stairways in a 3D environment.
It is weird. The remaster looks like how I remember Diablo 2 looking. Based on the legacy graphics mode, my memory is very kind to the game. Otherwise, it is Diablo 2 with a few very minor quality of life changes. That’s kind of a problem with it too. Twenty years ago is a long time. Game design got much better.
Maybe it is particular to the beta, but there is a weird lag. The in-game ping is fine though. It is like the engine update date is poor. Maybe it is just lagging. Maybe Diablo 2 was just always like that.
I pre-purchased it, but can’t play the beta because I get an error every time I try. I’m redownloading it right now.
I fear that, even with updated graphics, it will feel too dated. I guess what I really want is for D4 to have the best of D2 and D3.
I want D2’s runes and runewords.
I want the option to automatically pick up EVERYTHING, even if I have to earn and/or train a pet to pick stuff up. (eg. Feed him 100 whites, now he has a taste for whites and picks all of them up.)
I want my follower to stay with me, even in a group game. (They make a multiplayer game, but keep giving more reasons to play alone. [Recent enhancements to the followers mean that when you play alone, you get double death drops, double get-out-of-death-free opportunities, double pylon time and they spawn bosses, etc…])
In what ways? The atmosphere and story were better for sure but D3 plays better imho. It allows me to play the game and experiment with every class without having to regrind brand new toons and not feel locked in to a play style. I also think the approach to seasons in D3 is much more fun. The seasonal buffs make it worth jumping back in each season for née gameplay twists. I played the hell out of D2 but can’t remember if they had any sort of seasonal/ladder gameplay shakeups from season to season.
The biggest difference in gameplay between the two was that D2 rewarded team play, while D3 did not (at least, as of when I stopped playing it). In D2, you could have eight players on a team, and one of those players could be someone who tripled everyone’s HP, or doubled everyone’s damage output, or the like. In D3, you had a max of 4 on a team, and their idea of a “team buff” was like 3%.
D3 also made the mistake (which I had thought Blizzard had learned better from the Warcraft RTS games) of thinking that balance consisted of sameness. When everyone has two stats, mainstat and vitality (and ignore those meaningless other two), and mainstat has exactly the same effect for everyone, and everyone’s damage output depends only on their weapon, most of which are available to everyone, and every weapon has a single number that completely describes its effectiveness, you don’t end up with six balanced classes: You end up with, effectively, one class with six different cosmetic skins. And why were they even worried about “balance”, anyway? PVP has never been a major part of any of the Diablo games.
And D3 also ended up with a terrible number-inflation treadmill, where by the time I finished playing, all players were doing 100 times as much damage as when I started, and all monsters had 100 times as many HP to compensate. Now, number inflation is a thing to some extent in all games, but that’s just ludicrous: If I wanted that, I’d play Cookie Clicker.
It’s worse now. For some reason, in D3 your follower was never allowed to follow you if anyone else was in your game. They recently buffed the followers, so that they can wear Nemesis Bracers, gear that double the DB’s that drop, double the time that pylon effects last, etc. Now, if a “friend” enters my game, I’m like “Crap!” But, hey. A least you can set yourself to showing up as offline, so that you can be even more antisocial.