Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Publisher: Blizzard
Developer: Blizzard
Genre: MMO
Release: June 29, 2001
Platforms: PC, Mac

Reviewer: Dan

What I should be doing is warning you to never play this game. It's seriously the crack cocaine of the MMORPG world. In fact, Blizzard needs to release a patch that only allows you to play for two hours at a time, because once you start to play Diablo II, it will take you a very long time to stop playing.

I can remember back when I first saw print ads for Diablo II and later the box art when it came out. I actually had no idea what it was. It came out during the time when I was obsessed with Jane's Combat Simulations and their Uber-Realistic (for late 90's) combat flight sims. I just thought it was like Doom or something. So for me, this game went under the radar and out of mind for years. Then sometime after I graduated from college, Eric convinced me to start playing this game. At times, I curse him for doing that to me, but it's usually at about 4:30 in the morning when I've been playing the game since 6 in the afternoon the previous day.

I guess there's a story to this game, but I've really never bothered to pay attention to it. Since I've only ever played the expansion to Diablo II, Lord of Destruction, I can't really comment on the back story. All I know is that there are evil demons out there that we have to stop. To stop them, you must complete various quests throughout 5 acts to beat the game. Once you've beaten the game on one difficulty, another difficulty level is unlocked for you to do it all over again. Once you've completely maxed out one character and done all of the quests, it's time to make another character and do the exact same thing all over again. I know it sounds horrendously boring, but you'll find yourself playing for hours at a time.

If you play the expansion like me, you have your choice of 7 character classes each with their own abilities and styles of play. There's no wrong choice in class, just wrong ways to level up. See, that's the beauty of Diablo II. Unlike regular RPGs or MMORPGs, you can really screw up many hours of work just by choosing to apply skill points in the wrong areas. Each class has 3 different sets of skills they can learn, and different types of skills within each set. Usually, you should only ever concentrate on one or two sets of skills, otherwise your character will be too weak to effectively defeat enemies. There are also combinations of skills that tend to work better with each other depending on what type of character you're building.

But getting those levels can sometimes be a pain in the neck. Early on in your character, it doesn't much matter if you go on "runs." The experience requirements for each level is low enough for you to just run around killing things. However, once you're on higher levels, you must start doing Runs, which are basically games created to go through a certain level and kill all of the monsters to gain a decent amount of experience. Players at this point have them down to a science. There are exact level ranges your character must be in in order to get the most out of a Run. Just because your level 5 Barbarian goes on a Baal run doesn't mean he'll get a lot of experience. The updates to the game were written in such a way that you can't just rush your character through the entire game without leveling up at all. You have to be at at least level 20 before your buddies will speed your character through the entire game in about 20 minutes.

There are a few nice aspects about the online play of this game. Generally, people are pretty helpful with moving your character along. I haven't encountered any real big asshats online, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. There's also an overall effect when people join a game in progress. The difficulty of the game actually increases depending on how many people are in it, but so does the amount of experience your character gains. So, it promotes you to enter games with multiple players to at least make it a challenge and to make your character stronger. It also helps that many people have been playing this game regularly for the past 7 years, so there are a lot of people who know how to complete each quest.

There are, however, a few drawbacks to this game that can make it a bit annoying. For one, you'll notice that the graphics on this look extremely dated. You can't fault it too much since the requirements for this game are 233 MHz Pentium or better, 32MB RAM, 650MB drive space, 4X CD-ROM drive, and a DirectX compatible video card. You can probably find computers in the trash that will run this game without a problem. I also once stopped to think about what you actually do in the game. Create a character, rush it through the game, go on various runs, go to the next difficulty, rush through the game, go on various runs, go to the next difficulty, rush through the game, go on various runs, create a new character. That's really it. But then again, Pac-Man was just running around eating pellets and avoiding ghosts, but people still played that one constantly.

Final Verdict

Despite the few drawbacks and the availability of newer alternatives, Diablo II is still just as popular as ever. In fact, Blizzard is planning a new patch sometime in mid-2008. Other patches had big impact on how the game was played. Will version 1.12 make the game better? Who knows, but what I do know is that Diablo II is so painfully addictive that it's nearly impossible not to put in an hour or six a day. This MMORPG classic gets a 9 out of 10 from my aching right index finger.

Official Trailer