admirably janky and esoteric? contemporary blizzard's calculated & castrated style of development has increasingly irritated pretty much every type of person I know--storyheads are mad at the sloppiness that has become starcraft/warcraft lore, hardcoreheads are mad at the removal of the legitimate labyrinth and arcane knowledge and dedication required to compete at the higher level of their games, aestheticheads are mad at the pretty homogenous 3d cartoon style that has ran blizzard's art direction for a decade now. overwatch has flipped from a rally point of team fortress 3 to a common point of derision, only relevant in so far as to how quickly the character designs can send hornytime signals to the brain. all of this piled upon a really horrid culture of abuse (not just the sadistic misogyny of contemporary blizzard, but also the labor abuse of the blizzard of past--this game did have about a year and a half of crunch) has pretty much soiled blizzard's reputation, and deservedly so.
picking up D2 then with the context of all of that, I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and whimsical a mess of a game this is. as in, its actively encouraged to trick the game into believing you are playing with 8 players if you're doing a single-player run in order to get better gear. as in, you can and should abuse the town portal spell in combat to literally teleport in and out of boss fights to reup on health and mana potions to have effectively infinite HP&MP. as in, one of the main builds in this game is to teleport into a crowd of enemies, send out some comically small floating hammers, and then watch the corpses pile up. as in, one of the most important aspects of gear in this game, runewords, isn't mentioned at all in the actual game and requires players to look it up, but can turn your painfully average loot drops into gear that can last a whole playthrough.
and underneath all that outwardly goofy design and "is this intended?" mechanics is some really rather ingenious game design--there's this article that I was just reading that breaks down how D2 uses randomness and procgen in a way other ARPGs haven't replicated, and looking at how this game has had several "close, but not quite" imitators 21 years on, you cannot discredit that blizzard north had struck magic. this is blizzard (more accurately blizzard's former employees as most of the talent behind this game would leave the company) being calculated not in PR but in understanding the history of RPGs, of what Y2K PC players were expecting of level systems, of how to reroute the dopamine rush of action games to the frontal-lobe focused role playing genre. even if the status reveals I ultimately bounced off this for now, when this was clicking I felt like a B.F. Skinner rat giddily planning out my build paths and gear progression as I was dripfed items and levels I wanted. each 30 minute trek before teleporting back to base being like a small map of DOOM or a quick level of Mario, in that I progressed enough to have a marked difference an hour ago but not enough to truly feel accomplished, which strangely felt me wanting more instead of frustrated. its a progression loop few others replicated, and when I feel the urge to delve into this tome of weirdness again it'll have me just as captivated. except next time I won't pick such a heavy mouse 1 build like holy fire paladin, man that was starting to get boring.
= http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/RD_D2_2.html
picking up D2 then with the context of all of that, I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and whimsical a mess of a game this is. as in, its actively encouraged to trick the game into believing you are playing with 8 players if you're doing a single-player run in order to get better gear. as in, you can and should abuse the town portal spell in combat to literally teleport in and out of boss fights to reup on health and mana potions to have effectively infinite HP&MP. as in, one of the main builds in this game is to teleport into a crowd of enemies, send out some comically small floating hammers, and then watch the corpses pile up. as in, one of the most important aspects of gear in this game, runewords, isn't mentioned at all in the actual game and requires players to look it up, but can turn your painfully average loot drops into gear that can last a whole playthrough.
and underneath all that outwardly goofy design and "is this intended?" mechanics is some really rather ingenious game design--there's this article that I was just reading that breaks down how D2 uses randomness and procgen in a way other ARPGs haven't replicated, and looking at how this game has had several "close, but not quite" imitators 21 years on, you cannot discredit that blizzard north had struck magic. this is blizzard (more accurately blizzard's former employees as most of the talent behind this game would leave the company) being calculated not in PR but in understanding the history of RPGs, of what Y2K PC players were expecting of level systems, of how to reroute the dopamine rush of action games to the frontal-lobe focused role playing genre. even if the status reveals I ultimately bounced off this for now, when this was clicking I felt like a B.F. Skinner rat giddily planning out my build paths and gear progression as I was dripfed items and levels I wanted. each 30 minute trek before teleporting back to base being like a small map of DOOM or a quick level of Mario, in that I progressed enough to have a marked difference an hour ago but not enough to truly feel accomplished, which strangely felt me wanting more instead of frustrated. its a progression loop few others replicated, and when I feel the urge to delve into this tome of weirdness again it'll have me just as captivated. except next time I won't pick such a heavy mouse 1 build like holy fire paladin, man that was starting to get boring.
= http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/RD_D2_2.html
5 Comments
it is fine, maybe even admirable to be a crazy backloggd user 👍 great writeup as per usual man
yes, maybe i should embrace the crazy...every fighting game character gets a tier bump when they go crazy anyway
but seriously i do appreciate the words g, thanks for reading!
but seriously i do appreciate the words g, thanks for reading!
Your first comment threatens to eclipse the quality of this already-great review. Two insightful short pieces on Diablo 2 for the price of one!
Aw, thanks! I think the D2 community is endlessly interesting because of how much it (accidentally?) mirrors some of the most rigid parts of our society, especially around learning and what it means to be apart of a community. There's a lot tied up into who gets to teach who, and what gets taught! I do wish I could find something in the text of D2 that makes the D2 community like that, but I had a hard time finding connective tissue haha.
SimonDedalus
2 years ago
maybe this is too far of a stretch, but there may be some merit into looking into how this game's hardcore community is similar to frat culture and I guess by association the actual abusive culture formed at blizzard. by this I mean that D2's community really prides itself on treating D2 as The Master Text, and that anything less than a full submersion into its intricacies is viewed as a grand disservice. its cultish, in other words. its fascinating if you browse the D2 subreddit, for example, that suggestions of adding in-game guides for runewords will be shot-down with a resounding 'no'; the argument against this and other player-friendly suggestions being that it draws the game too close to the 'casual experience'. to be a Diablo II head is to be someone who must learn to swim rather than sink, and while there is merit in approaching D2 as a Thing To Figure Out, there's a certain comical irony to what all this hubbub means. The end result of being a D2head, of the research, farming, magic finding, trading, PvP, and modding, is to make a character that is literally an identical copy of someone else's build made 10 years ago.
its an eerie analogue to how actual frats work, in that you grind through the hazing, parties, dues, and networking to arrive at the same career and life paths of the alumni of 10 years ago. and it's like, lol what's the point of all that grinding? isn't the point of traditionalism and ritualism to make our lives easier, to take the wisdom of the past and avoid their suffering, to increment and optimize? its curious that the initiation into some communities isn't "here's what we have so far: how do we make this better? is this solved? what do you think?" but instead "can you reinvent the wheel?".
one of my teacher friends said the hardest part about teaching isn't lesson-planning or grading or disciplinary behavior but getting students to believe you know something that they don't--to convince someone that not only is their world deficient but that you, as a teacher, can actively make it better. obviously one way to persuade someone of entering this teacher-student/master-servant relationship is to exacerbate how deficient their world is--and in here might be the logic of the "sink-or-swim" initiation in D2's community and in frats. being in a foxhole can make anything that takes us out of the hole our master. and of course, surrounding all this initiation talk are the ripe elements in which abuse & stress form: the "necessary evil" of suffering, a work ethic that says enjoyment is secondary to the result, and a belief that the goal, of beating the endgame, of having a secure suburban life, of having the world as-is keep spinning, is unquestionably worth it.
but idk idk the thought needs more work i'm equivocating loosely here and making some big jumps. i do think there is a worthwhile equivalence here though, abuse cultures aren't as randomly formed as D2's loot drops, and its worthwhile to investigate the logic and values that are similar (to me at least) to be in actual frat culture, frat-esque culture at blizzard, and the hodgepodge D2heads that congregate on the internet. even if publishing it in draft form puts me in the crazy backloggd user category. i also really needed to just exercise that thought from my brain because it distracts me from thinking about other things lmao.