Someone explain Diablo II to me

M

Montez

So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Diablo II is still huge after all these years. I try to read threads on it, and they are so jargon filled that I can't follow what's going on. I've looked through gamefaqs, and found dozens of character set-up guides, item guides, but still no real explanation for why the game is still so huge. The only thing I can make out is that the main focus of the game seems to be aquiring rare items and making runs to certain areas, which just baffles me - after you've beat the game once or twice, why keep playing just to hunt down a rare item that makes your character a little bit better? I can understand a few people being obsessive completists, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on.

I played Diablo a long time ago, beat it in a couple days, and never had any interest in playing again. Is Diablo II just more of the same? Is there something in multi-player that really makes it addicting? I'm playing through the D2 demo now and it basically seems the same as what I remember of Diablo 1 - mobs of monsters surrounding me while I frustratingly try to click on one to attack it as it zig-zags across the screen. So someone please tell me, what am I missing? What's the appeal?
 
The point of the game is to repeatedly kill Baal with your e-buddies and show off you l337 it4mz!!1 The appeal is that you have a blast while doing the above.

Get World of Warcraft instead.
 
I've played multiplayer D2 for several years. I guess at first it's entertaining like any decent game that fits your taste is entertaining. Then, as more and more resources (the rare stuff you mentioned) become available to you, you want to try out different interesting builds, which in turn creates a bigger need for better equipment.

The fun in it for me, was to get 'wealthy' enough to be able to do almost anything I wanted (character build-wise). While playing, I made some of the best e-friends I have. When I was 'wealthy' (not judged by the standards of the Bnet kiddies) we would just make new characters and play long long sessions together to level them up and talk and you know... hang out, like nerds.

My D2 days were some of the most entertaining, but at the same time crazy obsessive game-times ever. I have yet to encounter something that gives me an equally amazing experience.

That's just me though. :roll:
 
As they said the fun of it resides mainly in the multiplayer thing... meet new people, make friends and to top all of it off... PK (player kill) as in kill other players in pissing contests to see who is best... Recently I got into a small thing called Lineage2 Scions of Destiny and the idea is pretty much the same as Diablo II, just that being designed as a MMORPG it is way more fun to play with your friends... also parties get some xp bonuses from the monsters so it's easier to lvl up in a party... what can I say it's like MiRc with advanced avatars and the possibility to kill stuff... it makes waay more sense after a beer or two and it's more fun too :))
 
clercqer said:
That's just me though. :roll:
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to insult people who like the game - it's just that the game is a mystery to me and I'm trying to figure out if it's something I would enjoy or if I should just avoid it.
 
Montez said:
So someone please tell me, what am I missing? What's the appeal?
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Voice acting, I guess.

I have played Diablo II for quite some time (and Diablo even longer) but never multiplayer (no time for that). I guess it all boils down to sighseeing, once you nkow locations and their monsters, things tend to get boring.

On, and some locations are designed quite inspiringly (like the Pandemonium Fortress of the Durance of Hate).

So, I recommend you run through at least once.
 
Montez, avoid it at all costs: there's nothing more than multiplayer and item hunting (as you got correctly). And should you like it... I spent more time on it than sleeping, if you get my meaning... I almost had to split my disks in two...
Cheers
 
I played Diablo very briefly a long time ago, but never Diablo II. I friend of mine through went through the obsession stage. I will say this about Diablo II: the videos are pretty nice. The friend I mentioned showed me all the storyline videos and they have a pretty cool feel, especially because of the narration.

Sometimes i like to say "Always...into the East"...if i am actually going east and if i know people will get the reference.

EDIT: Here's the opening video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kPXdtz_c4&search=diablo II
 
I've had friends play it. Basically...

You acquire rarer, stronger equipment then kill better, stronger players to show off being more powerful so you can gloat to friends who you travel and fight with to acquire rarer, stronger equipment...

I'm sure some of the combat is fun with many people as is player vs. player combat, but the whole obsessive "Must Get Better!" seems tiresome.

I've played it a little just to see what it was like, but stopped since it was essentially a combat treadmill albeit with nice sound, graphics, and character abilities.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller
 
When I was young... echo echo echo....

I was given $100 as a birthday present.... I went down to my harvey norman store and saw 'Daggerfall' and "Diablo' sitting there on the shelve.

I looked at them both for about half an hour.. weighing up the pro's and conns of 2D isometric and sprite based 3D. In the end the decision to get daggerfall has haunted me forever more.

Diablo II is like space invaders. Instead of acquiring points you acquire items. The items have bigger numbers and bigger 'perceived' coolness. Unfortunately the perceived 'coolness' wears off ( after many months) as the game scales indefinitely.

Diablo II's characterization/environments/production are good enough to allow repeated viewings. This is fortunate, as finishing the game and replaying (with the same character) on a higher level gives you better 'items' and longer playtime.

however...

Nowadays Diablo II's sprites look really bad compared to any dungeon siege clone. But then again no game has been able to recreate the atmosphere.

ADV
 
Ratty said:
The point of the game is to repeatedly kill Baal with your e-buddies and show off you l337 it4mz!!1 The appeal is that you have a blast while doing the above.

Get World of Warcraft instead.
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The same is true of WoW, just less mouse-mashing. I say avoid both of those games.
 
Someone explain Diablo II to me?
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Basically, it's a stupid rip-off of a stupid game, and the weapons that you use aren't called weapons, they are called skills that you get when you level up, and in some rare items, runeitems, sets and uniques, apparently the game is all about balance, but in truth, it's about everything but. The version changes bring you more fun, more items, and more problems, like how to kill Diablo with a mage that can cast only ice magic and Diablo is immune. :D And all it toke to get this far, was to play at least about 5 hours. Yeah, this is fun.
(Goes back to his room to think about, why to live anyway, and really hard to consider the positive sides of suicide.)
 
Basically, it's a stupid rip-off of a stupid game, and the weapons that you use aren't called weapons, they are called skills that you get when you level up, and in some rare items, runeitems, sets and uniques, apparently the game is all about balance, but in truth, it's about everything but. The version changes bring you more fun, more items, and more problems, like how to kill Diablo with a mage that can cast only ice magic and Diablo is immune. Very Happy And all it toke to get this far, was to play at least about 5 hours.
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Yeah... Jarno is either clueless or once again incapable of expressing himself...
THe thing about skills... In Diablo you had two choices: bash their heads in with a stick or something or use magic (of course you could never find enough of the good spell books). In Diablo II each char has skills, for example the barbarians has special weapons attacks, so in stead of just bashing the mob's head in with just your stick you can use this special attack to give you more power and damage. One thing I liked was that you could now play an archer (Amazon) effectively, she has bow skills and stuff that make her a good archer while in Diablo there was no way to do that...
Now the storyline can keep you going for at least one play through and the cinematics are damn good for their time...
After you beat the game once (kill Diablo if you play D2 or Ball if you play D2 Lord of Destruction; The cinematics in the addon are also cool) your char gets a new title, like Slayer and you can now play the game with that char on the next difficulty level; that means you get a decrease in your resistances and the mobs get stronger and more resistant to magic... there are three difficulty levels; if you beat Ball on Hell difficulty u r teh h4x0r or some shit like that...
What killed it for me was that I played an amazon that used mostly spears and lightning enchantments only to discover that most of the mobs on Hell difficulty were immune to lightning, so after I ended up fighting some lame ass boss for one hour without actually managing to scratch him I gave up... But that was just my lack of foresight...
And Jarno the sorceress is one of the bast chars as she has Fire, Lightning and Ice and can basically kill anything ... you just have to focus on the higher skills and pump them in stead of waisting points in the lower ones.
As for the rip-off bit.. do you know what that means? For example Star wars: galactic battlegrounds or something is a blatant copy of Age of Empires Two, same ideas, tech trees look alike, its basically more of a mod than a new game... now that is a rip-off.
 
c0ldst33ltrs4u said:
As for the rip-off bit.. do you know what that means? ... is a blatant copy of Age of Empires Two...
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So what's AoE2 rip-off of, well lets look trough the history, and we can see a line, C&C, StarCraft pla pla pla, from the original Dune 2, :shock: and of course there is the chest. You should know that when gaming continues, the more sophisticated the rip-offs get, but in the essence, they are still the same games.

c0ldst33ltrs4u said:
my lack of foresight...
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or just bad game design, cause you can go trough the game with your furry little friends, if you have enough, one of each damage type, fire, lightning, ice, magic, normal, poison, I don't have that many friends, that had so good computers pla pla pla.
As if the fire, ice, poison, and lightning weren't magic damage. :o
 
There are a couple of things that turned Diablo into a "winning" series.

First of all, it has co-op. Not alot of games give you the option to play through a story line with another player. That gives it "cool points" in and of itself.

Secondly, the frenzy of the game is fun. Everything happens quick. It doesn't take long to get a set of "town portal" scrolls and with those you can sell loot/heal/meet people effortless. You can move from the dungeons to the heart of a city in seconds. Even travel isn't bad. If you get jumped by a set of monsters on the road it takes a few seconds to dispatch them before you continue on to your destination.

Thirdly, it isn't a demanding game. You can jump in, play for 10 or 15 minuets, save and quit. Very few games offer that and definitly no MMOs, you can't even get a group in 10 minuets.

And finaly, it had a fun loot system. Adding runes and jewels to equipment gave you more of a personal attachment to that item than just finding it. Also, you got something everytime you beat the end boss. You didn't fight him 30 times just so everyone in your raid could get the uber-darksor of slaying.

Personaly I think it is a dull game. It has been fun in the past to turn it on once in a while when I am bored with my friends but beyond that there isn't alot the game has to offer me.

I do think there are things to learn from diablo though. I wish all RPGs had a quicker way to travel to and from town. I wish we had more ownership over our in game items and I definitly wish more games had co-op.
 
So what's AoE2 rip-off of, well lets look trough the history, and we can see a line, C&C, StarCraft pla pla pla, from the original Dune 2, Shocked and of course there is the chest. You should know that when gaming continues, the more sophisticated the rip-offs get, but in the essence, they are still the same games.
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1. C&C resembles Dune, true, it does not resemble Age of Empires. In C&C you have no actual "peasants", not in the first ones, you had some harvester thingie and one resource only. Plus in C&C you had to power the buildings in order fro them to work properly.

2. Starcraft came out at pretty much the same time with AOE, if memory serves me right so it would be kind of hard to say one was copied after the other. Plus you once again have a difference in the resource department, 4 types for AOE, 2 types for Starcraft. Not to mention that starcraft was way better from many points of view:
- Different tech tree for each race
- Different units for each race, opposed to the rather dull AOE style where the buildings are the same for any civ and the same goes for the units.
- Starcraft had a much better multiplayer, more enjoyable imo

or just bad game design, cause you can go trough the game with your furry little friends, if you have enough, one of each damage type, fire, lightning, ice, magic, normal, poison, I don't have that many friends, that had so good computers pla pla pla.
As if the fire, ice, poison, and lightning weren't magic damage
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Perhaps, but then again a balanced char is not impossible once you get a grasp of what you should do with your char and how you should develop it. Or maybe this is a way to stimulate players to use the co-op mode.
And just for the record; poison is useless. At best it can be an annoyance, not a viable attack.
Personaly I think it is a dull game. It has been fun in the past to turn it on once in a while when I am bored with my friends but beyond that there isn't alot the game has to offer me.
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You hit it dead on there; the replay value is pretty small, after you have an idea of how every char performs and know the plot it's no fun anymore... unless you go for multiplayer in wich case I like it because it's a way to have fun with your friends. But I can have just as much fun playing atomic bomberman with a friend...
 
I agree about Starcraft, it's far better than AoE. Better than pretty much every RTS that's come out since, for that matter (if you're playing regular maps, not the idiotic infinite money ones- and you're playing on one of the Battle.net alternatives to avoid having to play against people using cheat programs).
Unlike all of them, it came very close to achieving perfect balance, without resorting to unit/building/tech cloning like the AoE series and Warcraft 2. The funniest thing is that the few unique units/technologies/bonuses in AoE managed to completely unbalance the game (especially the gold bonuses and cannon ballistics for the Spanish).

c0ldst33ltrs4u said:
And just for the record; poison is useless. At best it can be an annoyance, not a viable attack.
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Not entirely true. I don't know if it's been changed since, but back when I played (late 2000 to early 2003) the poison monsters used on Hell difficulty was incredibly dangerous (even if you had high resistance)- and even on some monsters in Nightmare (like Mephisto and Radament). In PvP, every intelligent non-spellcaster carried quite a few high damage poison charms, because they was so bloody good- there were more than a few instances where I only hit another character once with my Amazon, Barbarian or Werewolf Druid, and the poison wiped out their entire health bar within a few seconds- most players concentrate on elemental resistances so they can stay alive against Sorceresses, Oblivion Knights and bosses, but neglect poison resist. Huge achilles heel.

On the other hand, outside of the high level PvP and high level monsters described poison IS quite shitty. The skills that specifically cause poison damage are mostly terrible (Necromancer's dagger enchantment, Druid's poison creeper, Assassin's venom claws, etc.) The Druid's Rabies skill is decent at high levels, but the points are much better spent elsewhere (like on Fury, Lycanthropy or Oak Sage).

You hit it dead on there; the replay value is pretty small, after you have an idea of how every char performs and know the plot it's no fun anymore... unless you go for multiplayer in wich case I like it because it's a way to have fun with your friends.
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True, though most people tend to avoid single player completely in favour of going straight for the Multiplayer- Single Player is boring as sin in comparison. What replay value Diablo 2 has is in actually raising all of the different characters and types of skill builds up to a decent level (75+), because it's hard to tell what they're really capable of before that point. That goes along with what you said, though.
 
c0ldst33ltrs4u said:
And just for the record; poison is useless. At best it can be an annoyance, not a viable attack.
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You clearly haven't played, poisonmancer, or what ever it's called, my near 50 level char could do 2000 poison damage per poison nova missile, and there are more than plenty cast of them with that spell per cast, and the next missiles are just a click away, no waiting time(except the few decimals). :roll:

If there are 6 damage types in the game, you should never make 100% immune enemies to one type of attack(nor you should have one that can take every but one type), never, you can make 20/90% DT/DR like they could do in Fallouts, but never 100%, cause there will always be a circumstance that make a player to chose only one damage type, just cause they can, and cause it is impossible to be able resist an element with 100% certainty.
 
Ok, back on the poison thing: what I meant was that poison was useless against mobs seeing how they have at least 50% resistance on Hell dif.
Yes poison can be dangerous if you don't have resistance but when I went for resistances I tried to balance them out not leaving weak spots. then again I haven't done much high level pvp so I'm far from being an authority in the matter...
I did try out multiple chars but the one I took the furthest was 66 level amazon based on spears and javelins. I had some cool javelins from the Nightmare dif, act five the Maya quest to kill Nighlatack (or something like that, never got his name right; I also found his betrayal to be a nice twist in the story). Then on hell difficulty, act 2 I found some beetle boss in the oasis I think and he was immune to physical and lightning so I couldn't touch him as I had maxed jab and lightning fury. I fought that thing for 1 straight hour, consumed half a stash of full rejuvs and just got pissed. The jab thing sucked because before the add-on that used to be a quick attack but afterwards it was crappy. The lightning Fury still rocks but too many monsters became immune to lightning, plus the lightning enchanted ones have some good res...
My second favorite was a sorceress that used mainly ice and had chain lightning and meteor for back-up but eventually I just got tired of the whole thing and decide it took up too much of my time.
I also had a necromancer general :) but he can have some a tough time with the bosses if he doesn't manage to kill them from the first try because later on he doesn't have anything to resurrect for his undead army :roll:
You clearly haven't played, poisonmancer, or what ever it's called, my near 50 level char could do 2000 poison damage per poison nova missile, and there are more than plenty cast of them with that spell per cast, and the next missiles are just a click away, no waiting time(except the few decimals).
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I never tried the poison branch, went for curses and resurrect with bone spear/spirit and an emergency attack. Usually I just sat behind the troops and cursed away, resurrected etc.
 
Pardon the gravedig.

As I mentioned above, I really enjoyed the Diablo 2 cinematics. I was unable to find all of them online before, but now they are all out there. Even if you've never played Diablo, or don't like the genre, I think you'll find these videos enjoyable and well made. Spoilers though...

ACT 1 (intro) YouTube or Google Video
ACT 2 YouTube or Google Video
ACT 3 YouTube or Google Video
ACT 4 YouTube or Google Video
ACT 5 (ending) Google Video only
ACT 6 (expansion) YouTube or Google Video
 
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