Diablo II – Ten Years Old?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 1, 2010

RPS reminds us that Diablo II just turned ten years old.

I still have the collector’s edition box in my closet. It’s, uh… collecting. Dust.

I make my snide remarks about action RPGs, but I still love ’em – the good ones, that is. And Diablo II is definitely an example of excellence, and is still quite playable ten years later. Well, I assume so. It’s been about two years since I last played, but even then I found myself getting into it and having a joyous time.

My first character, an Amazon, got up to somewhere around level 65. The sad thing is, I got very lucky on a weapon drop around 25th level, picking up a pike that did insane amounts of damage on a hit. She was still using that same pike when I last played her. With the expansion, I’d been able to upgrade it a little bit (and get her name engraved on it), but I’d never found a successor. Sometimes the random number generator was just – you know, nice.

And while the official successor, Diablo III, is on the horizon, the series has left us a pretty awesome legacy in the meantime. Including the indies!

Unfortunately, most games that seek to emulate Diablo pretty much stop there. I’ve recounted the story before, but when I first heard about Steven Peeler’s Depths of Peril, I wasn’t terribly excited. It sounded like “just” another Diablo clone. I was pleasantly surprised. Its successor, Din’s Curse, is one of my favorite indie RPGs (yes, in spite of being an action RPG). These games took the compelling gameplay of Diablo (which is basically good ol’ fashioned hacking-and-slashing mixed with the fun of random loot discovery) as a foundation, and built upon it. These games weren’t just a feature-by-feature emulation of the classic, but rather threw some very interesting ideas, both new and old, into the mix. The results were some of the finest action-RPG dungeon-crawling to be had on the PC, indie or otherwise.

I loved Torchlight, which was authored by some of the original Diablo II team (plus some of the Fate team). Unfortunately, it runs out of gas pretty quickly, and replaying as a different character class doesn’t provide enough of a different experience for me. However, the game is priced at the level of an indie game, which means it still provides more than enough bang for the buck for recommendation. Plus, the soundtrack is by Matt Uelmen, the composer for the first two Diablo games, so it also sounds like a Diablo. Eventually, they plan to turn this thing into an MMO, and I could probably go for that.

No, I don’t consider Torchlight an indie title – but it is occupying a nebulous zone where it doesn’t really qualify as a full-fledged “mainstream” title either. I love that it could be successful in spite of making an end-run around the traditional mainstream gatekeepers. I expect to see this sort of thing happening a lot more as the industry continues to change, partly driven by guys like the indies and Runic Games.

Those are just a few recent examples. All this from a game that was – at one point – planned as a turn-based title. (It’s true!). While I get annoyed at the mainstream industry slavishly aping Diablo for so many years to the exclusion of most other RPG concepts, they were truly landmark games that I enjoyed a great deal. Kudos and happy (belated) birthday, Diablo II!

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,

Torchlight is a mainstream game that uses a non-traditional distribution model: download only. They could have put it in a box and had it on the shelves of Best Buy if they wanted (perhaps as bargain software). I think they chose the download-only option since this was supposed to be more like an appetizer for the future MMO version and they could keep more of the cash. Especially now that the company has one of the biggest Chinese MMO developers investing in it, the “indie” adjective no longer applies in my book.

From recent articles, they say they want “to have an MMO that plays as close to single player as we can get it.” I take that to mean that the single-player game was supposed to be more of an appetizer than the “real deal”. Could be smart, assuming that people who burned through the single-player game don’t shrug and ignore the upcoming MMO version.
Rampant Coyote said,

Besides being Digital-only (so far) distribution, Torchlight also has non-exclusive distribution. They don’t have a single publisher / distributor, but instead are doing it themselves through multiple portals. Steam, Direct2Drive, and their own website (via eJunkie).

I also don’t know the details of IP ownership. If Runic owns the rights to the game rather than their investor, that’s another awesome point (though it was not always that way, sadly).

But yeah, the publisher involvement makes them non-indie in my book, too. For me, being indie means, “Was this game made without the help of publisher involvement?” and the answer was solidly no, as I understand it. (That doesn’t preclude indies from going through a publisher afterwords.)
Andy_Panthro said,

For an interesting indie hack and slasher you should check out Crate Entertainment, who are making “Grim Dawn” a sort of Victorian era game.

The crew is made up of people who worked on Titan Quest, and they’re using the same engine to make Grim Dawn.

Because of this, I picked up TQ on GamersGate, and it’s still a very good game and probably my favourite of the so-called “Diablo clones”. Works well with nVidia’s 3D vision too.

Link to Grim Dawn: http://www.grimdawn.com/
MalcolmM said,

I bought Torchlight for $5 during a Steam sale. I found it to be one of the most boring games I’ve played in 30 years of gaming. I imagine I could have completed the game without playing any attention to what I was doing, just clicking on everything. I played it for a few hours then gave up on it.

I’m glad I bought it though. Now I know I really dislike games of this type. I never played Diablo, and Diablo 3 is now of no interest to me.
Bad Sector said,

@MalcolmM:
Well, not all games are the same. I found Diablo boring but i liked Torchlight 😛
Xenovore said,

Torchlight, while a very well done, polished game, ultimately fails because it’s too derivative, but lacks quite a few of the cool features of the games it was derived from. I got bored with it pretty quickly.

As for a Torchlight MMO, I’m all for that, as long as it doesn’t go the route of games like Guild Wars or DDO and instance everything. And there had better be more to the world than a mine and some tombs…

@MalcolmM: Don’t judge Diablo 3 based on Torchlight — Torchlight, taken as a whole, is extremely shallow compared to the Diablo series. (Torchlight does do a few things better…)

@Bad Sector: Diablo is still the better game, just for the fact alone that you can play it cooperatively.