Last weekend’s taste of Diablo IV was really, really good. Good enough that it dislodged Diablo III from my mind as the version of the game. Good enough that I stopped playing early on Sunday because I was starting to really sink into it. I decided to save that for when it releases.
I played the original Diablo when it came out, but for some reason, I missed Diablo II. I think I thought it was more of the same, and so wrote it off at the time. I came back into the franchise through Diablo III, but only years after it had been released, and I picked everything up on sale. Again, I thought it was more of the same, but I was wrong. I was expecting an isometric dungeon crawler masquerading as an RPG, and instead found an amazing action role-playing game, arguably the genre definition.
So, when the Diablo II remaster came out, I thought I’d check it out. But again, my expectations were different than reality; I was expecting that the remaster would be a reskinning of Diablo II, updating it with the new systems put in place for III, the systems I was used to. Instead, it was a faithful remaster of the original, with updated graphics for modern systems. It’s a beautiful remaster, actually, buttery smooth on my console, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. I was put off by what seemed to me at the time to be a cumbersome, antiquated interface that didn’t, in my opinion, need to be there.
Playing Diablo IV forced me to learn a new system for the game, but I was fine with that, because it was a new game. Well, it turns out that if you treat Diablo II like a new game and don’t expect it to be a reskin of an existing game, it’s pretty cool in its own right. So that’s what I’m grinding away at now, my low-level barbarian out on the Cold Plains.
I think that maybe I can blame Diablo Immortal, the franchise’s red-headed gacha step-child. I was able to dive into Immortal easily, because for the most part, it was a re-skin of Diablo III. And honestly, it works. I played a lot of Immortal when it came out. Diablo III is a really well-designed game, and it makes sense to build upon it. It was seeing how the entire formula had been reworked in IV that convinced me to give II another shot, and I’m really glad I did, but I need something to do until IV comes out in June.