Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

"Lord of Destruction Weakens Blizzards Great Expansion History."

I must admit, I held off buying the expansion for Diablo II for almost nine months. I asked myself, why should I pay thirty dollars to get a glorified patch? Well, after a while all of my Battle.net playing friends had moved to the expansion, I went out and bought it.

Amazingly, what did I get? I glorified patch.

The Lord of Destruction expansion adds a single act. Sure, it's pretty big and all, but it's not thirty dollars of good. It's not like other Blizzard games where the expansion is almost the size of the original. No, Lord of Destruction was in fact just a quick add-on. In addition to the single act, Lord of Destruction added two new character classes; the Druid and the Assassin. Neither class is all that great though, at least, for PvM. In addition, the Lord of Destruction expansion added hundreds of new items and item classes. Some of these changes were really cool. For instance, Unique items are now somewhat good, at least, the elite unique items. Set items are decent as well. In addition to the new items, the expansion has made socketting items worthwhile. Runes were also added. While powerful enough to socket into an item alone, Runes inserted in a certain order on certain items make powerful (this is debatable) new items. The remaining new items are charms. Charms give you powerful bonuses for being inside of your inventory. The drawback is you need to be able to hold them to use them.

As far as upgrades from Diablo II go, Lord of Destruction has increased the size of the stash for players, doubling its size. This is good as small stash size was always a complaint with the original. Another new feature is absorb. Absorb is similar to a resist, but you in fact can gain life rather than take damage. While this seems good, it makes both the game, as well as online dueling, incredibly unbalanced.

Rejoice! Finally there is closure to the story which was left so wide open by Diablo II. All this talk which was built up from Diablo and Diablo II is finally shed light on by the expansion. In fact, the expansions story is far better than Diablo II's was. While it’s still a rather simple and very short story, it does now have a decent ending.

One phenomenal thing about the expansion is the music. From the harrowing theme of town to the frightening theme of Baal’s minions, the music is just wonderful. I would venture to bet more quality time was put into sound and music than any other aspect of the game. New monsters have better attack sounds than in Diablo II. Many of the things characters said have been changed too. The Assassin has a particularly nice voice, though the Sorceress still says the lamest things with the most over acted voice I personally have ever heard.

The graphics, for an expansion requiring 64 Megs of ram and a 233 processor are less than you would expect. There was one big improvement; you can play in 800 x 600 resolution now, a large step up from 640 x 480. While it's still a pretty pathetic improvement, it's better than none at all. The Act 5 monsters look cooler than the ones from the original Diablo II, but with the exception of Baal’s Minions no enemy really comes to mind. The biggest graphical improvement in the Lord of Destruction is the wonderful background artwork. If you ever look around at the detail that went into making the Arreat Summit, take a moment to admire just how small you are, in such a large place. The graphics seen therein are the biggest wow the expansion gave me.

The controls for Lord of Destruction are really no different from Diablo II. You get a few more hotkeys and an added ''retreat'' button. That's pretty much it. There is the aspect of feeding potions to mercenaries, which are now permanent hirelings which you can equip and level up. But these are very small changes.

The replay factor on Diablo II: Lord of Destruction depends greatly one two things; 1. Do you play the game online and 2. How much does online cheating bother you? If you don't have long term internet capability, Lord of Destruction, like the original, gets very dull, very fast. If you do have internet capability and online cheating is an issue, avoid this game. Blizzard has very limited control over the duped and hacked items which litter the realms. While they ban accounts all the time, they're very ineffective at stopping cheaters.

Furthermore, online play is currently one of three things; dueling, Item hunting, and power leveling. There are a very limited number of players online who actually play the game, in order. This gets old; frequently you have people to lazy to pay for a rush through all three difficulties bothering, if not harassing you to do it for them. The lack of any decency in the online setting combined with weak single player entertainment has really been the death of this game.

Scores:

Music: 10/10
Sound: 8/10
Graphics: 6/10
Control: 8/10
Gameplay: 5/10 online, 7/10 single player, you don't have to deal with annoyances and battle.net outages
Story: 6/10
Replay Value: 6/10 online, 2/10 single player

Overall Score: 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/28/03, Updated 04/28/03