Diablo 2 Resurrected does not hold up to the modern standard of ARPGs
tl;dr: Game is just not fun. The gameplay basically does not change aside from getting new skills, and there are a humongous number of negative QoL experiences that make the game an extreme slog.
I've always enjoyed ARPGs. I've played quite a number of them - Diablo 3, Diablo 4, PoE, the new PoE, Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Torchlight 1, Torchlight 2, even some smaller ones like Victor Vran. I'm not a hardcore grinder, for the most part I enjoy playing the campaigns the most, but I have reached around the middle portion of the endgame in some of the games (Empowered Monoliths in LE, GR80ish in Diablo 3, Pit Level 90 in Diablo 4, T13ish maps in PoE, etc) at one point or another. I've probably got over 1000 hours in ARPGs over my lifetime.
I thought it would be a super cool experience to play Diablo 2, given how influential it was to the development of all of these games that I loved. I picked it up on Steam and played it entirely on Steam Deck. It ran well, despite Blizzard's fuckery around making sure you log in to validate the game or whatever the fuck that means.
But 15 hours in at Act 3, and I already feel tired of the game. Here's a few reasons why.
Limited Inventory and Stash Space
The inventory in this game is TINY. Since Charms provide passive benefits, and potions are individual items, about 30-40% of your inventory at any time is filled up with these items. Even after getting the Horadric Cube and using it as janky additional backpack space, you have room to pick up at best maybe 4 or 5 non-jewelry items before you need to make a trip back home.
Ok, so why don't we just be more selective of the gear we pick up so we can spend more time fighting and exploring?
Ground Loot Sucks, but Merchant Loot is Good
Good ground loot is very rare. From my brief time with the game, it feels like there are two important things to look for - +Levels to skills you're using, and then resistances. A lot of good loot is actually available from the Merchants. No big deal, right?
Well, buying stuff from the Merchants costs gold. So you need to grab as much stuff as possible on the ground so you can identify it and then sell it to make the gold you need to actually buy the good items.
That means even more trips back home just to sell junk to eventually bank up enough gold to buy good items.
But there's more problems - the Merchant doesn't have any search functionality at all. So not only do you have to make frequent trips home, you also have to sit around hovering over every single item to read the stats on it and see if it's any good. It's a huge waste of time.
Good Loot Doesn't Change Gameplay
Alright, so we've found some items, we're all resisted up and we have a bunch of +Levels in the skills we want to use. Great!
But it actually changes nothing about the way the game is played. I played Fireball sorcerer. My plus levels made the Fireball do more damage. That's it. No changing my Fireball to a different element, no splitting it up into multiple Fireballs, no increasing the area of the explosion, no causing ignited enemies to explode, nothing. You press Fireball, a fireball comes out, it does damage, and it does a bit of splash around the primary target.
The gameplay only changes when you unlock new skills. But the skills behave exactly the same way. I even spoiled myself and looked up what good endgame Unique items are like. And it all seems the same - just more resistances and defenses, and +levels in skills. Alright, so fine, we can just wait till we unlock a new skill to keep having more fun, right?
Individual Skills are Not Particularly Exciting or Fun
After having played so many modern ARPGs, the individual skills simply are not particularly exciting. It doesn't help that a good chunk of them are do-nothing passives, or are very close to having no effect on your gameplay. Mana regeneration. Having Energy Shield. Press a button to get better defense for a minute and a half. An aura for increased damage, or health regeneration. An aura that slightly reduces damage from monsters.
I just don't feel excited putting points into these things. They don't make the game more fun, but sometimes I feel like I'm forced to or else my character just doesn't function properly.
General Negative QoL
There's a lot of parts of this game that just suck for no good reason. Here's a list of random ones.
- The quest log is horrible and barely gives you an idea of what you need to do
- You drop all your equipped gear on the ground when you die, so you need to make it back to your body to actually pick the stuff back up again
- You randomly walk way slower when your character is traversing some kind of elevation change like stairs
- The textures make it difficult sometimes to see where a door is, so you end up running into walls often
- No overarching "world" or "act" map
- No easy way to compare items in a shop with the items your Mercenary is wearing
- No compendium of discovered Rune Word combinations so you're forced to just look it up online
- No information about what prefixes affect what things (eg. I didn't know until I looked it up that "+X maximum damage" does not apply to spells, it only applies to weapon swings)
So yeah, I didn't like it. In fact, I think it might be the worst ARPG I've ever played. I can definitely see how it had a ton of influence on the genre, but compared to modern standards for how ARPGs play, it sucks.