Im waiting for an AI upgrade to MOO next!
Not that it will ever happen, but Id pay a good bit for one.
Remnants of the Precursors is pretty dope.
I like it, but theres something missing for me in rotp that moo still delivers, and im not even sure exactly what it is.
Its like caster of magic vs master of magic. While being the same games, they deliver wildly different experiences.
It may be that the crazy asymmetry coupled with a less than stellar AI provides loopholes that a player can discover and exploit, and that that provides a more enjoyable experience than a game against a more competent AI that follows a wise course.
Dunno, but the games sure feel distinct for sharing the same underlying races, units, etc.
If all they’re doing is updating the graphics (and it seems like that’s it as far as I can tell) then as much as I enjoyed Diablo II back in the day I can’t imagine me sticking with it very long. Aside from the nostalgia aspect, which would be great, you would start running into a lot of the design decisions that have been since iterated upon and improved over the years of ARPG releases. Heck, I remember build guides that said to save up like 20 points and invest them all in certain skills. It was magic in its time, for sure, but the world and ARPG design has moved on.
They’re also overhauling the control scheme for a controller as well. If you’ve played Diablo 3 or Grim Dawn with a controller, you know how different that feels from playing an ARPG with a mouse.
I think most of those were before the big 1.10 patch which was released around 2005 or 2006 late 2003 that added synergies, so lower level skills boosted higher level skills.
As someone who has the actual original D2 still installed, I can say that it holds up really well, at least for me. There are certainly a few things that can be annoying, but the core reason the game had great hooks is still there.
If Blizzard weren’t so…Blizzard right now, and there wasn’t ROT, I’d be pretty tempted by this.
If the game had couch co-op, this would be a day one for me. As it is, I’ll likely pick it up on a deep sale. I want to play it but no rush to add it to the backlog. :)
I think some sort of respec is in the game? I recall they added a respec potion a full ten years or so after release. I’m old, so I might be crazy on this one.
edit: here it is - repsec added in 2010
No idea if they plan to make the remaster an earlier patch than than this one though.
Huh. Clearly the last time I played d2 was before 2010!
E: lol, they took Iron Maiden off of Oblivion Knights. What kind of lollipop carebear babymode is this anyway when melee builds don’t instagib themselves for a solid third of an act in each difficulty?!
The one thing that would make me replay D2 is in act three will you run into the fetishes. For some reason my son, who was around eight at the time, called them ‘fertishes’ and we had such a great time talking about killing the ‘fertishes.’ So playing D2 would remind me of that time which would give a lot of warm fuzzies.
I never played the expansion and didn’t play a ton of the main campaign, so I may be up for this. That said, I haven’t even played diablo 3 yet, so maybe not. I did play about 1000 hours of Diablo 1.
Out of curiosity, you obviously liked D1 to play it that much, why didn’t you play D2? Two was the much better game, at least in my mind.
I did play D2 - a lot of it, although nowhere near as much as D1. Probably 100 hours of D2. I reviewed it for GameSpot. I just didn’t play the D2 expansion pack. I also played the D1 campaign literally hundreds of times for a strategy guide I wrote (and I loved the game, obv), while I only played the D2 campaign maybe 8-10x – still a lot, but not by comparison. I was pretty burned out after all that, so I haven’t really spent much time with any action-RPG since, including D3.
They both have elements I prefer, but the character development options in D2 are much better - I liked the graphics and style, for the time, and especially the creatures, of D1 better. I also didn’t like the more complicated loot system of D2, although for other people that was a big plus.
Desslock’s strategy guides - dude is legend.
/bow
Sorry, I misread your post, but thank you for the explanation.
I am sure these will be popping up all over, but Ars Technica will be live-streaming today.
If it helps or means anything, I vividly remember thinking Diablo 2 was “okay” - the technical beta for it was honestly a big let down, but when the full game finally arrived it was much better, but I never really clicked with it for a very long time, preferring as well the original. However, when the expansion came out (and it helped the resolution got a bump; it was imo a worse looking game than the first before the expansion came along) it really blew the roof off Diablo 2 for me as a whole and I started to really, really like. Maybe that was also due to not being in the mood for it when it first came out, it’s hard to say, but the expansion is why I actually ended up calling Diablo 2 my favorite ARPG.
The Expansion pack brought amazing changes, especially to those like me and my friends who only played hardcore. Before the expansion, we had trouble beating the game on Normal, let alone make any progress on Nightmare. But the expansion made it so that your hirelings had enough hit points so that they didn’t die instantly, and could be resurrected, and you could equip them with armor and weapons. Plus the difficulty was much better smoothed over for hardcore in general. It was still really dangerous if you didn’t have resists maxed out, obviously, but if you did then getting through Normal difficulty wasn’t ultra hard anymore. And getting through Nightmare was tough but fair. Getting through Hell was only for those who had some of the best equipment though.
We killed a looooooot of hardcore characters before we had the equipment and experience necessary to start kicking ass on Hell difficulty.
(When a character dies, the rest of the party can loot their corpse. So everything in their stash is lost forever, but anything that was on them when they died can be looted. So we used that to loot the dead player’s corpse and pass on that equipment to the next character that person made. So even though the character died, their best equipment was inherited and lived on. What’s funny is that Diablo 3 and Grim Dawn have the reverse situation. In those games, all of the stuff you put in the shared stash lives on, but anything you were wearing or have on you when you die is lost forever. I think I prefer the Diablo 2 system, because come on, it’s hardcore, you’re going to be wearing the best stuff).
Hell Nihlathak was legendarily overtuned. Dude would chain Corpse Explosions that hit a screen away for a hojillion damage. IDK if I ever killed him, actually.
I feel exactly the same way, on every single thing you wrote above! The technical beta was a big let down, and the game was in development for what, at the time, was a long time (although now would be trivial), so the 640x480 resolution it came out at was badly outdated, especially since monitors were starting to notch up in size at the time. But the graphics actually just looked worse as well. The creatures also had less character in most of the game, and it definitely felt like some sections of the game were more polished than others.
I also felt the D2 expansion seemed to solve a lot of issues. The 800x600 resolution was still low, but much better, and the additional chapter just seemed a lot more inspired and innovative (the artillery at the beginning, etc.). I also really liked Hardcore mode. But by that point I was just too burned out on Diablo and I was already deep into my next obsessions, Gothic, and especially the other “Baal” – Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal (for which I also did a big strategy guide).
So going back to play D2: LoD, and generally giving the game a fresh shake, has some appeal. Probably more so than Mass Effect Legacy, to be honest, as playing each of those games twice feels like enough.
Thanks for this!
It looks like it’s just starting now.