"Hours of playability, tons of bugs, and a little lag..."

In the beginning...
Over the past 3 years thousands of gamers have been waiting and wandering where Diablo 2 has gone (at least they had 6 months ago). Blizzard kept on putting out release dates, and then pushing it back, and back, and back. Finally the 3 year wait is over, and Diablo II has been released. But does it live up to all of its hype? Yes and no.

Is it just me, or am I playing Diablo 1.5?
For a game that has been worked on for 3 years you would expect a bit more in the graphics department. While the graphics are not bad, they could use some serious improvement. The character models aren't what I was expecting, they're a tad too grainy. The monsters are the same, except with less attention to detail. I was impressed with a few dungeons in the game though. They look quite good, but that's still not saying to much. The CGs and very well done, They really let you know that Blizzard at least put some effort into the graphics. And another thing, the game is still stuck in 640 x 480 resolution, just like the original. This is the major reason why the graphics are so bad. If only Blizzard allowed us to change the resolution to at least 800 x 600.

Am I listening to a movie?
The sound is extremely good, as was the original. The voice-overs are very well done, and each character and NPC has there own unique voice. All the NPCs have several lines of speech, which is quite impressive, since there are at least 15 NPCs in the game. Along with the NPCs speech you also have your 'WHACK!' and 'THUD' noises from weapons and spells. Even these are great sounding. The sound track adds to the atmosphere Most of the time, though it starts to become repetitive once you've listened to it 6 million times. Overall the sound department was exceptional, though they should have spent more time in some of the other areas of the game rather then the sound.

The big question; Is it fun?
The game play is what truly makes or breaks a game, most of the time. The control is very similar to the original. It works very well for this type of a game, and there was nothing wrong with Blizzard using the old control scheme. The only problem I had was due to a serious glitch, which wouldn't allow me to use my items and use any skills. This glitch occurred to me very often when I played with a Barbarian. The glitch was finally resolved little less than a month ago. But it still took them nearly 6 months to fix it. Way to go Blizzard!

It seems that Blizzard also skimped out on the end of the game, the last act (out of 4) was to short compared with the other acts. Instead of having 6 quests like the other previous acts there were only 3 quests. It also seems that in acts 2 and 3 were finished as fast as possible also. There were also few times that while doing one large quest some other smaller quests were necessary for you to do, making it feel like a quest or two was left out. There were also 2 cases that finishing the one quest would also finished another quest for you. The only act that actually felt complete was the first act. And they left out class specific quests, which really could have added to the game play.

The Characters
Unfortunately there's only 5 character classes, and you can't customize them in anyway, other than giving them the skill points and stat points.

The Necromancer is the 'evil' class out of the five. He's able to summon monsters to do his bidding for him. His skills revolve around summoning monsters and curses with a few magical attacks. His biggest weakness is his low strength and dexterity. He pretty much relies only on his minions to do his biddings for him. And with the minions AI this isn't always the best idea. The minions aren't very fast when it comes to killing baddies, so he tends to level rather slowly compared to the other classes.

The Barbarian is the strongest character out of all the classes. His strength is unmatchable and he has masteries of weapons, which allows him to do more damage and gives him a better chance to hit monsters. The only bad thing about him is that he needs to get in close to monsters, but even that isn't all that bad when you look at his power. His skills mainly revolve around war cries and special attacks. When compared to the other classes he is ridiculously over powered.

The Amazon is the 'chick' character. She's supposed to be skilled in the use of javelins, spears, and bows. The only two weapons that she can use effectively are the bow and the javelin. Her spear skills are way to weak to be able to used effectively later in the game. Her bow skills are totally unmatched, she is extremely effective with them. Her javelin skills are a bit on the weak side, though a javelin based Amazon can work out very well if done properly. Her only real weakness is the inability to be able to go both melee attacks and ranged attacks. She can only concentrate on one or the other, trying to blend them together just makes a really big mess of an Amazon.

The Sorceress is the pure magic caster in the game. She relies solely on mana for her spells, so most of your stat points are going to end up going to energy to boost the amount of mana you have. Her skills are almost all spells, all of which revolve around fire, ice, and lightning. She is one of the most difficult characters to play as early on in the game, though she eventually becomes very strong. She has very few hit points, so staying away from all monsters is a must. Her strength is also very low, so being able to find good armor might be rather difficult.

The Paladin is the holy character in the game. His melee attacks are easily out matched by the Barbarians, and most of his spells are very weak. The only way he can stand a chance against other characters is by his auras. Auras will give him and his party members special abilities like extra damage, faster speed, higher defense, etc. The downfall to the auras is that he can only have one active at a time. His dexterity also needs to be raised quite a bit, since he has no way of increasing his chance to hit through skills other than auras.

The Lag Monster Strikes
Despite all the skills and the different character classes most people, including me, wouldn't play through the game by themselves a second time. That's the beauty of multiplayer though! Playing with other people from all over the world adds so much more to the game. The more people you play with the harder the monsters will get, so it won't make the game too easy. Playing with 3 or 4 people who are all different character classes alots for a ton of new strategies. There's still one problem with the multiplayer aspect of the game.

The battle.net realms are extremely laggy. The game at times is totally unplayable. Even with a fast connection you can't expect your ping to be below 1000 during tye peak hours. During the early morning hours the servers aren't all that bad, but most people can't stay up until 3 or 4 A.M. playing a game. Even with the servers being updated once every few months it's still very laggy, and it looks like Blizzard won't have the lag problem resolved any time soon.

If you want to play in a more lag-less environment you can always play on open battle.net. The big problem with open battle.net is that there are cheaters everywhere. You can't join a game without at least seeing one cheater unless you're playing in a password protected game with people you know and trust. It's really to bad that there's so many cheaters, in the end they're the ones that are going to suffer.

The big problem with the game...
The biggest problem with the game is not the graphics, or the characters, or anything else that I've mentioned so far. The biggest problem is the bugs and glitches in this game. All games have bugs and glitches, there's no way around it. But this is just ridiculous! I can stand the minor bugs, like walking backwards for no reason, and even some of the more dangerous bugs, like not being able to use any items after using a certain skill. These are very annoying, and have killed me before, but there is nothing that compares to having battle.net not save your data after several hours of play, or worse.

Most of the bugs occur on the battle.net realms, including the hacking of characters that took place less than a month ago. Due to Blizzards splendor beta testing of its products and patches there was a very serious loop hole that would allow you access to other peoples characters and do as you wished with them. Thousands of people lost items that took them weeks and months to get. While all the characters that were hacked had got to flag there characters to be rolled back to a date 3 weeks before that, it still pissed a lot of people off, including me. I lost all my Amazons equipment due to some hacker, though I did eventually get it back. I still lost 3 levels, and tons of experience due to the rollback.

There have been many other bugs and glitches, none of which have been as bad as the one listed above, but they were still very bad. A few other bugs that have been found include 'bone farming', where a Necromancer casts a lot of bone walls to get items to drop, duping, a 'hostility any where' hack, and a speed hack. All of these have been used to exploit the battle.net realms, and so far Blizzard has been able to stop it from continuing. The 'unhackable' realms Blizzard has set up for us has proven to be quite a big failure.

There's also tons of other bugs that have not been fixed, and many of which have been around since the games release. Blizzard honestly needs to start hiring beta testers, they have lost many faithful followers with all the bugs that are present with the game.

And finally the conclusion!
Even with these problems the game kept me coming back for 6 months for more. The game is still a good game, and is definitely worth a look. The game is EXTREMELY addicting, even more so if you can get passed a lot of the annoying bugs and glitches, and the low resolution the game is still extremely good. Blizzard managed to live up to the hype that it was at.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/14/01, Updated 05/14/01