Whenever Diablo 2 comes up, I can’t help but let early 2000s nostalgia overtake me — back when I’d stay up way too late gleefully monster-slaying on school nights. It didn’t matter what demonic horrors awaited me in those dark crypts, there was treasure sprinkled throughout every blood-caked corridor, and I was going to claim it as my own come hell or high water. Tack on a few thousand hours onto this narration, and you’d know the story of how Blizzard North’s seminal action RPG damn near made me flunk out of the 7th grade.
Now, almost twenty years later, developer Vicarious Visions wants Diablo 2: Resurrected to hook me and everyone else that grew up with it all over again. After 18 hours of adventuring throughout the world of Sanctuary in this remaster, I came to adore Diablo 2: Resurrected’s graphical overhaul, rewarding loot progression, and helpful quality of life improvements. However, a lackluster story and dull combat were reminders that not everything about this medieval gothic fantasy works these days. Resurrected is Diablo 2 precisely as you remember it, for better and for worse.
Set mere weeks after the original game, Diablo 2 tells the tale of a mysterious wanderer leaving a trail of death and destruction in his wake. Demons are once again ravaging Sanctuary, and it’s up to you to cut them down by the thousands in search of the culprit behind this burning terror. That, sadly, is about the extent of Diablo 2’s plot — following some guy. Characters do little but dispense expository or corny dialogue, and you’ll see its trite “twists” coming a mile away. Sure, it’s a game from two decades ago, but given how frequently you’ll listen to townsfolk prattle on about lore, the story clearly wasn’t just an afterthought. Even the realistic human eye movements and immaculately detailed demon models of Resurrected’s beautiful CGI cutscenes won’t make you forget Diablo 2’s story has aged like cheese on concrete in 80-degree weather.
Eye-roll-inducing though Diablo 2: Resurrected’s story might be, at least its quests motivate you to get out and explore Sanctuary’s wonderfully horrific landscapes. From decaying forests outside the Rogue Citadel to maggot-encrusted sewers below the city-state of Lut Gholein, Resurrected’s 3D graphical veneer brings an astonishingly haunting baroque vibe that wasn’t possible with Diablo 2’s old 2D sprites. Sure, barreling through dilapidated castles or cobwebbed spider-pits was always fun since procedural generation kept your surroundings fresh, but the stunning new graphics often make exploration even better. I found myself stopping to take sights in on more than one occasion, and it’s incredible how Vicarious Visions have not kept Diablo 2’s bleak tone without over embellishing into something unfamiliar.
That extra visual flair spicing up environments alleviates some of the monotony that comes with item hunting as well, especially since you’ll revisit locations often while out hunting for gear. Diablo 2: Resurrected’s pace when it comes to loot distribution is, well, pretty slow compared to Diablo 3, Path of Exile, or any other action RPG of today. It took several hours of demon-busting before I found a unique item, even — Blood Crescent, a scimitar. Which wasn’t much use on my sorceress. A decent staff for her didn’t even drop until act 2 of the story, and even then, I had to cut through the same boss several times over in hopes of maybe getting it. Luckily, it only took a couple of level re-loads for this particular staff to drop. You might even need to repeat this process several hundred times for endgame gear, with each run taking between 10 to 15 minutes. Yeah, this probably sounds annoying, but that’s how Diablo 2 has always been, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. When good loot is relatively sparse, finding it is a sweet reward.
One regrettable side-effect of the ebb and flow of Diablo 2: Resurrected’s loot progression is it highlights how awful the combat itself has aged. Every fight boils down to spamming your most powerful attacks ad nauseam. In the case of my sorceress, it meant peppering battlefields with the frozen orb spell and nothing else, which is fun for, like, 25 minutes tops. Frost-tinted magic is a classic character build for sorceresses in Diablo 2, one that I had loads of fun with during my tween years. Now, however, it’s boring as sin.
Worse yet, there are monsters immune to certain elements that turn fights into needlessly drawn engagements. For example, I ran into a special skeleton wizard named Bone Ash, and guess what, he was immune to cold spells! So there I am, a sorceress that deals entirely in frost magic, resorting to poking the skeletal jerk with my staff. It took upwards of five minutes to down him, which was a colossal pain. I had the patience for this back in the day, but certainly not now. These sorts of tussles are all over Diablo 2, and I sincerely wish Vicarious Visions had touched up Resurrected’s combat with similar loving brushstrokes that the visuals received.
Thankfully, Resurrected does fix other out-of-date aspects of Diablo 2. Picking up gold, for instance, is simply a matter of running over it, doing away with ye-olde pains of clicking on every single solitary coin individually. Similarly, the days of creating “mule” characters just to hold all your junk are long gone, thanks to a shared stash on your whole account. It doesn’t sound like much, but these minor tweaks make Diablo 2: Resurrected feel modern rather than something from when Limp Bizkit was still popular. I only wish there were more refinements throughout the whole game.
Diablo 2: Resurrected is a bizarre case. It’s as if rose-tinted glasses sprouted arms and lovingly pulled a formative title from my youth into the modern-day, covering its blemishes while not addressing issues beneath the skin. Make no mistake, though: this is an excellent remaster of a classic, but I can safely say Diablo 2 isn’t for me anymore. It legitimately pains me to feel this way about what has long since been one of my favorite video games of all time, but there’s no mistaking how distressingly of its time it is now. Diablo 2: Resurrected is proof that some memories are best left buried.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
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