![]() Especially as you progress to the harder difficulties, the gaps in its challenge become more apparent. Diablo II's balancing hasn't been changed at all, which makes this a necessary routine. Having these layouts change whenever you log back into the game gives each one a small degree of replayability, but only if you're looking to shake things up as you grind towards your next level in order to make more meaningful progress. These acts are also incredibly meaty, with numerous quests, both mandatory and optional, to undertake, many of which require you to scour the expansive procedurally generated hubs that make up each act. These blend seamlessly with each other in a way that may make you question how they were sold separately to begin with, given the events of the original game's finale and how the expansion acts as a satisfying epilogue to the entire journey. It includes the base game and its four acts, as well as the Lords of Destruction expansion as a bonus (and lengthy) fifth one. At its heart, it's a pure recreation of the original release, idiosyncrasies and all, with every bit of content that launched in the early 2000s. This is an early indicator as to what type of remaster Diablo II: Resurrected is. ![]() This can be initially counter-intuitive to how you imagine each point invested will play out, with established Diablo II players already knowing that the majority of these points need to go into vitality and little else if you can already equip all the items you need. Points in each mostly determine what gear you can equip, and not necessarily how much damage (physical, ranged, or magic) you deal. ![]() You additionally need to manage staple role-playing attributes like strength, dexterity, vitality, and more, although these don't function as you might expect. My Necromancer, for example, focussed on summoning the dead over dealing out curses and magical damage, which led me to invest most of my skill points in only one of the three trees. Here you're given three separate skill trees to invest points into, each of which will go a long way in defining what type of style your chosen class will take. Where Diablo II differs strongly to its most recent entry, Diablo III, is in its role-playing. The campaign is also not the end of your journey, with additional difficulties incentivizing you to restart and continue crunching enemy skulls for more powerful loot, and so on. ![]() The more you progress, the stronger you become, allowing you to deal the damage required to take down incredibly dangerous bosses that provide a challenging climax to each act. These maps have distinct areas and enemy-ridden dungeons you'll need to explore, eliminating scores of enemies that drop all sorts of color-coded loot that help you get more powerful as you go. You progress through the campaign over a series of acts, each contained within their own map. Like all of the games it would eventually inspire, Diablo II is a dungeon-crawler, albeit stripped down to the genre's fundamental basics. But it's also a game that has been drastically improved upon in the two decades since its release, which makes its 2021 remaster a confusing re-release that does very little to address how the genre has evolved since, making it challenging to recommend over modern contemporaries outside of reasons of nostalgia or short-lived curiosity. It's one of those games whose DNA you can still trace in modern ARPGs such as Path of Exile, Lords of Wolcen, and the eventual Diablo III. The original release of Blizzard's sequel in 2000 was an inflection point for the nascent genre, defining the direction all games after it would take. It's impossible to talk about action role-playing games without mentioning Diablo II.
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