Saturday Morning Gaming: Diablo II Resurrected

Diablo II came out on June 29th, 2000.

We’ve talked about the original Diablo and its sequel a couple of times before, of course, but it’s one of those “formative gaming experiences” for a whole bunch of us. I mean, my household played it to death in our first year of marriage. It helped us deal with Maribou’s senior year of college. It provided relief during the crazy parts of 2001.

It was a wonderful ARPG/slot machine/skinner box but it wasn’t just that. It had a fun community in the channels, it had a lively Ebay culture, and it had several distinct gaming experiences available. You wanna relax and and play solo? That’s an option. You wanna play massive difficulty that is only beatable with a Barbarian giving war cries and a Paladin swapping auras and a sorceress throwing up firewalls? That’s an option. It was a game that had ways to scratch your gaming itch no matter what mood you were in.

I mean, I’ve played games where I’ve spent $20 on them and walked away feeling like I got ripped off. This is one of those rare games where if I had spent $200 on it, I’d have felt like I got my money’s worth. She and I easily put more than 200 hours into that silly game and given that its original price was probably $50 (and another $25 for the expansion), that game delivered an absolutely *HUGE* amount of value.

We went back and played it a couple of years ago and the first thing I noticed was that the graphics “high” setting was 800 x 600. Jeez. A million years ago, that *WAS* the high setting. It didn’t make the game unplayable or anything like that, but it was jarring to play it again on a relatively small 27″ flatscreen monitor instead of a relatively large 15″ CRT.

“I remember these graphics as being better”, I thought.

Well, Diablo II Resurrected is now in beta. (Beta is available to anyone who pre-orders.)

This game has the graphics that I remember back in 2000.

It even has a fun function where if you press the “g” button, it jumps back and forth between old graphics and new ones.

Check this out.

Here’s the graphics as they happened at the time:

And here’s the graphics as I remember them:

One of the awesome things is that the new graphics give surprises.

Remember wraiths? Those blue floaty butterfly things?

THEY’RE SKELETONS

Seriously, lookit:

So lemme say that my memory of the graphics didn’t include wraiths being skeletons. I just thought they were some sort of spectral winged abomination kinda thing. Nope. They have bones.

I’m only in Act 2 but, lemme tell ya, this game is still giving me new things to discover. 21 years later.

The real game itself gets released on September 23rd. If you want to be part of the open beta, you merely have to pre-order. (At this moment in time, you can’t play the necromancer or the assassin, but I imagine they’ll be introduced in the next week or two.)

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the barbarian in the character selection screen of Diablo II: Resurrected.)