For literal years people told me that Diablo 2 is one of the greatest games of all time and that Diablo 3 is a disappointing hollow sequel. After playing them back to back in 2023, this could have not been further from the truth. No nostalgia nonsense here, and no favoritism based on which was my first since I finished D2 first. Diablo 3 does almost every single possible thing better than 2, full stop.

The most disappointing thing was the lack of skill trees which were amazing in 2. But you will finally swap out your gear more than once every 8 hours, you can finally increase or decrease the difficulty mid-campaign to suit your needs, and the environments are no longer soulless hollow killing floors, it's an improvement though and though. Dosen't mean it's a perfect game or anything of course. The story is still barely even there, "there's a bad man, kill him" is the story of every single Diablo and it will never change, there's very little place for nuanced storytelling with this type of gameplay and you have to accept that going in. Speaking of, killing rooms full of monsters, adjusting your build, and trying different abilities and passives that empower them is fun, it just... doesn't last. After one playthrough of the campaign in coop that clocked in around 35 hours (grinded some extra stuff and took a detour to see the secret level), it became quite monotonous.

There's a good chance I will not interact with the Seasonal content at all because I'm kinda already over this game and we still have the DLC to beat. It's a nice enough time, especially in coop with friends, the QOL that was very much absent from its predecessor is there, but the endgame grind seems so pointless to me in a basically single-player/coop game. I wish the game was a little bit shorter, to be honest, it did feel padded by the end. Still, it was nice enough.

Wasteland 2 is a turn based strategy and RPG game that allows you to create a team of four rangers to play as, and to recruit up to three other NPCs to fight with you. Character creation gives you a very limited number of portraits to use, but you can use your own images, and a lot of terrible options for the game's models, luckily with the top down camera you won't be seeing them that close. Attributes decide how many action points your rangers get each turn, their number of skill points gained when they level up, how far they can move with each action point, health, evade, view distance, and their combat initiative. The attribute system works well enough for created rangers but because of the importance of skill points gained each level, which is tied to intelligence, it ends up making a lot of the NPCs you can recruit almost useless. You do gain an attribute point every 10 levels and this helps make two early game characters a lot more useful. Luck and Charisma (unless you make a character with leadership which is influenced by Charisma) are clearly dump stats and when NPC have a high value in either one they are most likely going to be much worse in combat. Additional negatives about attributes is that certain levels can give your characters no bonuses or +.5 to a skill which is only going to add the +1 when the attribute is raised twice, making some NPC builds even worse. The directors cut adds quirks to the game which can give each ranger a positive and negative passive effect, most are pretty uninteresting but there are two that are clearly the most powerful, one of them causing you to gain one less skill point a level for the first nine level ups but then one more for any future levels (I gave this to 3 of my 4 rangers, I finished the game at levels 44-47, the extra points almost allowing me to max one skill) and another which increases your action points per turn by two but cuts your movement in half (making it great for sniper or assault rifle users).

Wasteland 2 has good skill variety that can give you different ways to solve problems, you may be able to open doors, safes, or chests with brute force, explosives, computer, lockpicking, or safecracking skills. A computer and animal whisperer skill allow you to turn animals or robots to your side to fight for you in battle or can give you bonuses in battle. Three different dialogue skills can give you more conversation options. Skills can be used to avoid certain fights, find items, or to obtain quests resolutions that can only be reached with their correct use. Unfortunately, skills can become somewhat annoying in the later parts of the game where even simple seeming towns may have the highest level locks or computers, where even a ranked nine or the fully maxed out rank 10 skill user may only have a 25%-65% chance to do something, which ends up wasting a lot of time.

Combat is simple but enjoyable, the guns and melee attacks feel powerful with cover being destroyed, kills having the ability to blow off heads, torsos, legs, melt enemies, etc, and critical hits giving loud satisfying hit noise and knocking the target over. Unlike a lot of turn based games you don't have any skills to use in battle, with the exception of using your medical skills to heal your allies or your computer and animal skills to turn or scare enemies. You will manage your teams AP, which is what they will need to move, crouch, stand, throw grenades, and attack with either single or burst fire weapons. While you won't be using a variety of combat skills, the directors cut version of Wasteland 2 allows most of the weapons to aim at different parts of an opponents body to do more damage, inflict negative statuses, or damage armor but at a cost of reduced accuracy. These are useful during late game but the penalty is so high that you probably won't use it for the first half of the game. The new perk system also allows your characters to gain a variety of useful passive abilities, with some perks chaining really well together, such as a ranger skilled in brute force for breaking objects in the environment gaining access to perks that allow their melee attacks to stun enemies. Perks have also made a lot of the games weapons more useful and they feel more balanced now, though the sniper and assault rifles are still easily the best choice. The game also gives you a wide variety of weapons, and while most are clearly better than others, the different AP attack values may mean that you want a ranger to have a weaker weapon if they can shoot it more often.

The quests in Wasteland 2 tend to have more logical conclusions, there might not be happy endings or to get the happiest ending you might have to work with unlikable people, taking away one sides only bargaining chip may lead to them all being killed even though you were promised otherwise. Following your quest book and turning in everything might not be a good idea until you look into a situation more closely.

Dialogue and item descriptions in the game has good detail, and can be pretty funny. As you enter areas, look at people, examine objects, or as you fight amusing descriptions of what happens or what you see are written out for you to read. You can't start conversations with your allied NPCs and I only saw one occasion where they said anything to each other and it was only when I first recruited one so your companions likely won't be talking to each other much, or ever, but they will comment on areas, people, and have battle lines. The three characters I had with me were all amusing (Vulture, Ralphy, and Pizepi). There are stock lines that are written above all the characters when they use a skill with the environment and it would have been nice if the game created different personality types to pick from, it was always really out of character when the little naive kid Ralphy tells someone to, "step aside and daddy will make it better," when he uses a skill.

The overworld map has some great radio transmissions that can either be funny or just give you an idea of what other people or ranger teams are doing in the world. Travelling over the map itself is poorly done though, you run into random encounters and can choose to fight or run, with your running chance being based on whoever has the highest outdoorsman skill in the party. The encounters are stock boring enemies in a few uninteresting custom areas for random fights that you will see repeated fast, you have a chance to run into a merchant who sells some very overpowered weapons for the early game but it is always the same merchant who will keep the same inventory and never restock. The only unique encounter I got was with an arrogant and annoying merchant selling some explosive items who tries to start a fight with you if you don't buy anything, more encounters like this would have made travelling the map entertaining but as it is the entire travel mechanic has very little place in the game and only wastes time.

The game can get tedious with slow movement through areas and needing to go back and fourth to complete things, but the enjoyable combat, good quests design, and entertaining characters all made me enjoy the game. A nice ending montage lets you know what happened to towns, factions, and your party members at the end of the game.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/687667134432849920
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