Where do you stand to separate art from artist? Maybe you’ve thought about it when you’re considering whether to watch a Roman Polanski movie or listen to a Michael Jackson album – and god knows, if we strip art history from all its monsters, it does become abysmal. There is never an easy answer. Now that’s a question we have to ask ourselves about Blizzard games, too, after the recent horrific revelations about the studio’s “frat boys” culture.
In some ways, this beautifully crafted Diablo 2 remake is unfortunately Blizzard’s first since California filed a lawsuit against the studio. Much of its work has been done by Vicarious Visions, a blameless outfit that only integrated with Blizzard earlier this year. (In fact, its former studio head, Jen Oneal, was recently named co-head of Blizzard, a new kind of broom likely aimed at leading the reforms there.) What’s more, the original 2000 game was Produced by Blizzard North, an in-house studio distinct from SoCal. mothership. Diablo 2 is at best an adopted child of Blizzard culture. But Diablo also helped set the tone for Blizzard, with its non-metal aesthetic, kitchen sink lore, cutting-edge online multiplayer, and endgame of abysmal depth and complexity.
It feels important to lay this all out, but as a critic, I shouldn’t tell you what it’s like to play a Blizzard game in 2021. This can only be a personal choice. Personally, as someone who loves studio games, I’m conflicted and still undecided. But I made it irrelevant to the rest of my comments.
That’s not to say I don’t have mixed feelings about Diablo II: Resurrection for a Different Reason. Diablo 2 is a beast of a game that still casts a long shadow after 21 years – the painful development of its successor (Fate Diablo 4 doesn’t seem to have escaped either), as well as the action RPG genre It defines. As influential as it is, it is a unique, bloody, almost awkward work, and a very unmodern one.
The great thing about Diablo 2: Resurrection is that it hardly does anything to change that, for better or worse (spoiler: both). You’ll get some small but important quality-of-life changes, including a shared storage room that lets your characters trade loot, automatic gold pickup, and – since the game now has a console version – well-implemented gamepad support. But that’s the limit the developers allow themselves, because they’re afraid to change its features too much. You’re still playing item Tetris in a tiny inventory grid. You still come home empty-handed, heart in your mouth, running to your corpse to retrieve your armor, weapons and cash when you die. If you want to play online, you’re still browsing public game listings in the lobby with garbled titles like ONLYDURIELPLS. You’re still limited to a single aspect per difficulty level – if you end up with a character build you don’t like, it’s hard. This sheer attitude is certainly the right choice, but it comes at a price that goes beyond difficulty and game balance. For example, local co-op on consoles, so enjoyable in Diablo 3, is unfortunately not implemented here because it would overly distort the game. In fact, it requires a fundamentally different approach.
To understand why, you need to get a behind-the-scenes look at this unique remake. Luckily, Blizzard allows you to do it with one click, instantly showing the look of games from 2000 – pixelated, grainy, isometric, low-res and very 2D. This isn’t the most well-known remake of the moment: the original assets of the game, updated or repainted to run with higher fidelity on modern hardware. It’s not exactly a remake either: the original game’s content has been remade from the ground up, more or less faithful to an all-new engine. It does exist in the latter form, but only as a silly 3D audiovisual overlay that mimics the output of the original game’s 2D game logic running underneath. This is the game you actually play.Your detailed 3D avatar reaches out to attack the monster next to her, but it’s the chunk of pixels underneath (or rather, the math running underneath them) to determine if the blow is connected.
It’s an engaging approach to very faithful entertainment. Aesthetic achievement is one thing: to my amazement, the artists managed to evoke the dirty, gritty textured, twilight vibe of the original pixel art using clean, modern rendering and lighting, with grim details in the dark Flickering in the dark. More notable is the feel. By retaining the original game logic behind the scenes, Diablo II: Resurrection retains every feature of the 2000 game, from your character’s fast, stiff sprint to the speed of whiplash and the binary flatness of interaction.
Diablo 2 is quickly. Despite all the complexity of its character building and dizzying array of item games, rune words, and more, it plays with brutal simplicity. When using a mouse and keyboard, you’re still limited to two skills at a time on the mouse button, and are forced to use the function keys to switch other skills. You’ll rarely do this, relying on a single attack for the most part and optimizing your character build and gear around it. Besieged by flying creatures, you’re banging frantically, using junk potions to maintain your health and mana through tougher battles. (Console and gamepad games allow you to assign multiple skills to the face buttons, Diablo 3 style, it expands your combat flexibility and relaxes your playstyle a bit; I recommend trying it out, but wouldn’t call it game – change.)
The action can still be exciting in its ferocity and tenacious in its bite. Of course, there’s a lot of math going on in the context of this emergency mania, though for some reason (and to be fair, other Diablo games do too) the ever-rising tower of numbers tends to go from a simple, painless state In the blink of an eye, the carnage to gnashing of frustrations collapsed.
This sums up Diablo 2 – it’s a very binary game. It’s one thing or another: easy or difficult, gluttony or minimalism, mindless action or deep theoretical tricks. I’m glad it stayed the same in this almost flawless and well-designed revival. (This isn’t Warcraft 3: Reforged – it’s a complete remake of CG cutscenes, remastered audio, cross-format cross-production, production.) But I dare to question whether it’s aged that well. Diablo 3 was heavily criticized for not being Diablo 2, and it wasn’t. It features fluid, resilient, rhythmic combat that emphasizes situational awareness and a complementary set of skills. Its character building gives you the freedom to tinker, explore, and express yourself, rather than having you go online and find an optimized build for fear that you might go wrong and ruin your character for another dozen or so hours. It even has some wink self-awareness to Diablo’s tormented fringe lord style.
Diablo 2 starts to look like a relic: a beautifully crafted, historically significant relic, meticulously polished and restored here, but still a relic. I think I can put it back in the velvet lined box.
