K-SCORE: 65
Developers/Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Writers: Kurt Beaver, Steve Hedlund, Matthew Householder, Phil Shenk, Robert Vieira, Brian Kindregan
Designers: David Brevik, Eric Schaefer, Max Schaefer, Eric Sexton, Kenneth Williams, Josh Mosqueira, Leonard Boyarski, Jay Wilson
Spoiler Level: Minor
A quick preface for this review: I’m not qualified to review the first Diablo and only barely qualified to talk about Diablo III. The reason that I packaged these together is more because the first and third game illuminate my thesis for Diablo II, which happens to be one of the strangest, most broken, most ridiculous long-lasting and fun games I’ve played in my lifetime.
“Diablo II wasn’t a game made so much as it was born. ”
Twenty years ago, Blizzard North released an addictive game with the following premise: your hero is thrust into the demon-plagued town of Tristram and takes up the cause of battling the monsters until arriving at Diablo himself, Lord of Terror, striking down his mortal form thus purging the land of evil. That is, until the rise of all three prime evils, Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal. Masquerading as a dark wanderer, Diablo tricks Marius, an old man, into uniting the prime evils and unleashing their demonic armies upon the world. A brave hammerdin then teleports past these demonic armies to each individual evil, vanquishing him, and obliterating their respective soulstones, but not before Baal, Lord of Destruction, corrupts the legendary Worldstone at the summit of Mount Arreat, forcing the archangel Tyrael to destroy it. With the prime evils destroyed, only the lesser evils, Belial, Lord of Lies, and Azmodan, Lord of Sin become the main threats to humankind. New Nephalem adventures follow Leah, adopted daughter of Deckard Cain, and learn that the only way to defeat Belial and Azmodan is through the destruction of a black soulstone in the possession of the long dead ghost lunatic warlock Zoltun Kulle, who- okay, I’m done. I tried. Really, I did. Clicking. The premise of these games is that you click your mouse to do absolutely everything.
Diablo, the first game, is too old and broken to actually play. But in it the idea was created that you click to move, click to attack, click to cast spells, and click to loot in a game that only has movement, combat, and loot. The stories have never made any sense whatsoever and these games are long lasting only for their addictive gameplay loop.
Diablo II with its expansion is the game I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing in the last fifteen years. It’s a game done in five acts with a big boss at the end of each one, Andariel, Duriel, Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal. Thousands of enemies get in your way and an experienced Diablo II player eventually learns to ignore most of them. That which is killed explodes in avalanches of useless items yet extremely rare and valuable items are literally buried in the masses so the most important skill one can acquire in the game is recognizing when a good item has dropped and quickly picking it up and finding room for it in your jigsaw inventory without missing a beat in your never-ending rampage of the demonic hordes. All five acts can be completed in just a few hours, but after beating them twice, the difficulty spikes severely because of broken and ridiculous game design choices in the “hell” mode. Only in hell can you find the greatest of items - the zod rune - and thus that is where your brave hammerdin must be.
It’s pretty easy to screw up your Diablo II character such that your time in hell is hellish. For one thing, you could choose any class that wields and attacks with a melee weapon, for many of the monsters do so much damage they can kill you in a single hit so the only viable strategy is to choose a class that stands nowhere near them. Second, three of the four stats are borderline useless and so simply giving your character anything other than a lot more life will make him or her far too fragile to safely run around outside of town. Third, easily sixty percent of the skills are useless, for the game is so poorly balanced that to attempt specs that aren’t cold sorceresses, blessed hammer-casting paladins, or lightning javelin-throwing amazons is foolhardy. The first time my first character swung his sword at an oblivion knight in the chaos sanctuary while cursed with iron maiden and took his own attack damage back, which was twice his life pool thus dying instantly, I didn’t say, “That’s not fair.” I said, “What just happened?” I wouldn’t learn for years. Fourth, the game misleads you with information at every turn, so unless your game knowledge is high enough to understand what you’re looking at when you look at a piece of gear, you’ll assume you have equipped something useful when you might as well be running up against the Lord of Terror stark naked.
“Blizzard provides no help with navigating these mechanics because no one working for them understood how they meant. ”
Diablo II is a game of pure randomness. Those still playing it today assuredly have a great deal more knowledge about how the game’s mechanics work than any designer that ever worked for Blizzard ever did. Even expansion items, rune words, things added in the very last of patches, have stats and abilities that simply do not do anything but take time to read. A weapon for a caster that says, “Adds 3-15 cold damage,” will not add any cold damage. Basic understanding of the functionality of this stuff demands outside research and lots of RL experience. Don’t be deceived if your bone wand says, “3% mana regenerated per hit,” for it’s not regenerating any mana. If it adds mana after kills then it will, but that wand is not going to scale well as you fight tougher enemies. Opening your character page to view a breakdown of your attack values, defense, resistances, and whatnot will blind you with lies. There is almost no way to know truly how much damage you're doing, taking, have to do, or can reasonably take. To know what skills are valuable to pump more skill points into is confusing to say the least, as synergies are a factor, as are increased mana cost, and inconsistent buffs. Horadric cube recipes, mercenary skills and equipment, charms, socketed items, ethereal items, rare item suffixes and prefixes, hidden i-levels, monster buffs, curses, auras - it’s cumulatively barbaric. Blizzard provides no help with navigating these mechanics because no one working for them understood how they meant. Diablo II wasn’t a game made so much as it was born. It’s taken the community decades to work through the kinks and only a handful of people in the world, still hooked on the loop, can claim to be experts in matters such as the Anya resistance scroll bug, advanced amulet crafting, and maximizing magic finding opportunities in secretly treasure-prone areas. Diablo II has imprisoned the souls of men like Mr Llama where they’re forced to wrestle with these demonic mechanics forever. All in a game where you just click to do everything.
Oh the clicking. The clicking speaks to the game’s most serious and prevalent problem, which is that frequently one will mean to run away and accidentally run up to a monster and attack it, or mean to attack and accidentally pick up a two-handed axe, or mean to pick up a rune and not be able to because that goddamn axe is taking up eight precious slots.
It’s all about the loot. Dumptrucks worth of shit explode forth from every monster slain. It is because of these games that Path of Exile had to up the ante to the point where third party filters need to be installed so you can literally see the screen when staring at the items on the ground. These are the first hack-n-slash lootsplosion fests. The best and worst part of this is that the gear matters. A level ninety character with all the right stats allocated, a viable spec, and a talented clicker will get obliterated by the game’s monsters without the best of items the game has to offer. Somehow, through all the swords and shields and armor spilling out over corpses at all times, it often feels like you’ve gone a long time without something dropping. Because you need the best of the best items to be decent by the very end. Sometimes this means collecting runes, fractions of future gear instead of just gear, and slamming them together in specific unknowable orders to create godlike upgrades to your existing stuff. And the drop rates on the best of things are low. Low is somewhat of an understatement. The way it works is loot tables expand with increasing levels. Low level monsters can drop all items up to a certain point dictated based on their level. All items have a chance to drop from the very highest level enemy in the game, Baal on hell, but by then his loot table is so massive that the chance of any one item, a particularly useful end-game amulet for example, dropping is cruelly low. Worsening matters is the game randomly decides what type of item to drop and then rolls to see whether that item will be a magic item, rare item, set item, or unique item. A stat that takes up valuable space on gear reads “X% better chance of getting magic items.” There’s no way to know this, but what this does is increase the chance that the pre-selected item from whatever type appeared roll into better versions of that item. To find better gear, Blizzard makes you use worse gear, and all there is to do in the game is find gear, so it’s something of a catch 22. Runes are unaffected by magic find entirely. And Blizzard put in drop rates for high level runes that are just ridiculous because, well, they didn’t understand what they were doing. A zod rune has the greatest chance of dropping from Hell Baal at 0.0003%. If all you did for eight hours a day was run to Baal, kill him, reset your game and repeat, you’re likely to see only one zod rune drop every nine months of your life. There’s an item in the game rarer than a zod rune.
In some ways, this is what gives Diablo II its longevity, its replayability, and its fun that the other games didn’t have. It’s so insanely rare to receive great things, yet the opportunities are so numerous, and the upgrades are real. You can feel your character becoming much better instantly. Also, nothing is bound to any specific character, so you can find something really useful for a different character entirely, perhaps one you haven’t even made yet, start from scratch, and work your way up the ladder faster than before with all the stuff you collected previously. Gamers love starting new characters. Much of the magic of video game experience happens at the beginning when you’re just setting off on an adventure. In Diablo II this is especially the case given that the late game is so horrendously imbalanced. In spite of all the broken classes and abilities, broken stats, broken gear modifiers, broken loot tables, broken enemies with broken immunities and broken curses, a broken gold economy, ridiculously limited inventory space, and a story that appears to, like everything else, have been randomly generated, all packaged up in a game that won’t say how to help you because it genuinely doesn’t know, Diablo II is really fun.
“A choice without consequence isn’t a choice at all.”
Diablo III is not. I played through the game with a monk and found the experience boring every step of the way. Blizzard makes you tune the difficulty to however well geared and skilled you are literally every time you log on. The real life auction house implemented with the game initially created a system that would be most fun for professional economists but no one else. The very best “players” of Diablo III never played the game at all, but just understood the gear and accumulated wealth through trading until they could afford to buy the very best things for their character, but at that point, why bother venture into the world at all? Blizzard eventually recognized this problem and ditched the system, which, my understanding is, created a weird quality of gear vacuum and desperate need for rebalancing. Their always online feature made no sense for a single player game and frustrated millions when servers failed. The abilities weren’t locked in at all once chosen, allowing you to freely swap around anything you liked, which emphasized an ultimate Blizzard failure in philosophy. A choice without consequence isn’t a choice at all.
What caused me the greatest ire, however, was Blizzard’s arrogance in thinking they could announce and tease a game for five years prior to its actual release without infuriating and alienating its fanbase. So certain, they were, that Diablo III would be a big hit, that they spent more time turning it into a platform than a fun game. I saw the potential in Diablo II and saw all its problems too when I was teenager and thought a sequel could fix those issues and keep what worked and thus ramp up the enjoyment. Then I stared at a “Coming Soon” web page with class descriptions, gameplay mechanics, and concept art from early 2008 to late 2012.
“just because you steal concepts from other games that work, doesn’t mean your game will”
That was a long time ago. I’ve had no shortage of fun games to play since, plus World of Warcraft, also made by Blizzard, ate a nice chunk out of my life because Azeroth was more fun than high school. But my point in all of this is we have to sometimes accept the insanity of artistic creation and the reality that despite endless analysis it’s impossible to definitively know what makes something great and something terrible, even by the creators. Since gameplay takes years to refine, it’s a tremendous shame whenever a good game’s next installment is even arguably worse than its predecessor. There are many lessons to learn from the story of Diablo III, but most importantly is the idea that, just because you steal concepts from other games that work, doesn’t mean your game will. You need many original ideas as well and that passionate wonkiness of new projects that exists before everything the developers do is about a desperate struggle to balance and rebalance behind-the-scenes mathematical formulae.
In Diablo II, all the fives look like sixes and it hasn’t been patched in over a decade. Why would the makers of the game want more numbers looking like sixes. It’ll drive you batty until you realize that it’s only to increase the odds that a weapon’s damage randomly rolls 555 or 565 or 655 or 665 or 566 - whatever, they all look like 666 because the game wasn’t created by man. It couldn’t have been. The only real candidate is - el diablo.
UPDATE: The first version of this review mistakenly claimed that Leah was a Nephalem, when, in fact, it is your player character in Diablo III that is a Nephalem. We at Kyle Reviews Everything sincerely apologize for this grievous error. We let ourselves down. We let our families down. And we promise to take extra precautions in the future so as to avoid such terrible mistakes.