I had toyed around with the idea of not buying any new games during Lent and thought “you know what? I should consider doing that too” and then the day after Lent started, Diablo came out. Welp, made it a day and a half. I went into Maribou’s work that night to tell her that I kicked off the Diablo download before I went to the gym and would be able to play Diablo again when I got home and she got really excited and asked me “DO THEY HAVE DIABLO 2?!?!?”
Diablo 2 got Maribou through her Senior year of college, you see. She was studying hard and working at her job and needed a nice little single player game where she could whack some monsters and get some loot between writing papers and Diablo 2 was EXCEPTIONALLY good at providing both.
On top of that, different ways to play with different classes. Diablo only had 3 classes (4, if you count the expansion) but Diablo 2 started with FIVE. And if you got the expansion, it had SEVEN. Sure, you could play with the Mage, Rogue (er, “Amazon”), or Warrior (this time as a “Barbarian”… I was a Frenzy barb, myself) but you could also play with the Necromancer which was a COMPLETELY different way to play! The Paladin was another different way to play (more of a support character, really… but still completely different)! And the expansion had the Assassin! Which was yet another completely different way to play! Or the Druid which was another completely different way to play!
And they fixed a huge number of the problems in Diablo. Like, they added RUNNING. (You’d run out of stamina if you ran too far, but it really helped when backtracking.) They added real quests! Not just “go four levels further down into the dungeon and kill the boss monster” quests. But “go to a novel place and achieve a particular goal” kinda quests (that, sure, involved boss monsters but some of the quests involved flipping switches or retrieving items).
THEY ADDED SKILLS. Like, sure, you could play a barbarian… but there were several different kinds of barbarian you could play. As I said, I enjoyed the Frenzy barb. Other folks seemed to love the whirlwind barbarian. Or berserkers! Or concentrators! Or ones specifically built around the Barbarian Set Items (wait, that’s just a whirlwind barb). But each class had a bunch of builds like this. Necromancers could pick between being resurrection kinda guys or bone spell guys or poison/corpse explosion guys. Mages could be fire, ice, or electricity guys. Druids could be summoners or werewolves or werebears.
I mean, seriously, you’d play and you’d play and then you’d find something awesome and then you’d change your build (you got up to 3 changes!) and completely change your style of play. It was awesome and addicting.
Looking back now, I realize that there’s a trick that Diablo uses that I’ve only just now really caught on to. They manage to give you excitement about drops twice. First, when you’re out and about and fighting, you may hear a rustle or a ding and you know that something cool dropped. And then, when you get it, it’s still not identified. You only know if it’s blue (run of the mill magic, but better than starting equipment), yellow (rare magic, but very likely better than blue), green (part of a set… probably not as good as yellow unless you’ve got multiple items or the whole thing), and BRONZE (unique items).
And THEN, when you get the unique item, there was a range of how good it might be. A sword might have a range from (p-q) to (x-y) damage and the closer you were to q and the closer you were to y, the better. And, on top of that, the sword might have +70%-+80% damage. If you got a sword with 78%, you thought “not bad! (but I wish it were 79%… I mean, due to the bug that prevents items from ever getting the top number…) and if you got a sword with 72%, you thought “I will use this trash but ONLY because it is better than my current sword”.
So you’d fight against the scratch tickets that were monsters and, maybe, if you were lucky, one of them would drop a “Guaranteed To Win SOMETHING!” scratch ticket. And then, you’d scratch off the second scratch ticket and see how good what you won was. And sometimes it’d be good. And most times it’d be something that made you say “but I could get something EVEN BETTER!” and then keep playing.
And, after playing it after downloading it for Maribou, I find that I can’t really go back to Diablo.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is Diablo 2 promotional art.)
There are lots of different ways you can play Diablo II. It can be smoked, snorted, injected directly into the bloodstream….You think you’re going to, what, install it on your machine and then use it every now and then? You know better. It’ll take over your life.Report
Report
That clip inspired me to look up the old build guides and see how many there really were. The funny thing is, I thought I was kidding when I compared the game to a drug, but looking over the guides, I got the itch back. Generally, I play games until I’m tired of them (which can take years), so I rarely look back on a game and want another crack at it. Maybe I have an occasional urge to build a SimCity, but that’s about it. But D2 still feels unresolved. There are too many goals that I never accomplished. Maybe you’re right that they figured out the perfect Skinner box drop system. For me, though, it was always about some kind of build that seemed possible but didn’t turn out that way. The Concentrate Barbarian, for example. Not enough damage, or too slow, or those crazy hp that Hell level monsters have. Whatever the reason, it just didn’t work. But I’m forgetting all the despair and lost hours and the finger pain, and I’m thinking that maybe I could win if I tried again. That says something about the product.Report
Mass Effect 2 did for me what Diablo 2 did for Maribou. The context was a little different, though; I was going through a legit mental health crisis (severe OCD). ME2 gave me a virtual life that was so much better than real life at that time. RPGs have always had that kind of effect on me. They feel so personal, intimate and authentic that it’s almost like you’re living out your dreams on your televisions screen (console gamers FTW). I suppose that’s why I never really “grew up” when it came to gaming. I seemed to have left a lot of my other childhood interests behind, but not that one. Now I’m playing Vampyr, and I must say, I feel like it’s a very underrated game. Not as good as Diablo 2, mind you, but pretty darn good in its own right. The vintage London aesthetics are really attractive to me, and the story is really well done. It’s longer than I thought, though, and will probably take me a while to play through.Report
I *LOVED* Mass Effect 2. I beat it as a paragon, then as a renegade, then as a paragon again because I didn’t want to leave the universe in that state.
Have you checked out Red Dead Redemption 2? It’s got a weird… I dunno. Almost Zen thing going on. When you’re not doing the main mission, you’re hunting and fishing and just riding your horse around in an idyllic paradise.Report
For ten bucks, that’s cheaper than a movie and I’ll get more entertainment from it. See you in the ruins of Tristram!Report
There needed to be a town called Isolde to make it really completeReport
How olde is it?Report
You may want to drop an extra 10 bucks and get the expansion.
Remember charms? Those one or two or three slot items that gave you bonuses to gold find or dexterity or treasure find? Those were in the expansion.
I’m not even level 10 and I’ve found 3 so far.Report
Yeah that’s a good call. I’m now familiar again with the forced choices that the inventory system imposes upon the player, and the frequent “scavenge everything and run back to the waypoint” system of building up the gold. Oh and the cold-enchanted baddie in the cave, way deadlier even than the quest bosses.
Good times!Report
But the expansion set and those runewords is where it got into the one-drop-in-a-billion grind.Report