Entry No.85e

IT Writers Awards

Diablo II has been billed as the most eagerly-anticipated PC game ever. This is hardly surprising, considering the runaway success of the first game and its hugely popular free online multiplayer system, known as Battle.net. Fans of the series, prepare to be thrilled.

At Diablo II's core is a series of quests and objectives involving the slaying of numerous demons and the retrieval of arcane magical artifacts, segued by conversations with non-player-characters (NPCs). The key to Diablo II's popularity is arguably its extreme accessibility to novice gamers, its highly intuitive interface and the eternal gameplay cycle of acquiring superior items, abilities and gold, allowing players to progressively conquer over fifty levels of skill, spells and powerful enemies. The game is finely tuned to never face you with insurmountable odds - it is always possible to succeed against the creatures that face you, although you may have to strategise somewhat. It is a near-perfect balance between art and science.

This ancient pattern from the original game repeats endlessly throughout Diablo II, which could become repetitive in a regular game - but this is no regular piece of software. Diablo II is positively studded with intriguing gems of interest. Despite the fact that Diablo II runs in the now outdated resolution of 640x480 pixels, the artwork and attention to detail in the game environments is more intense than ever. The game is littered with once-off artwork and animations, and you are continuously encountering new foes that are exotic and interesting. There is even a nifty "parallax" scrolling effect which distorts high walls, trees and buildings so that they scale properly as the player walks around them, overcoming a common visual blight in 2D isometric game perspectives. The graphics have a rich and continuous quality that makes playing Diablo II a total visual feast, low resolution or not.

This feast of interesting gems extends into two key catalogues of the game: the Monsters and the Equipment. The limitless procession of monsters is spiced up by the inclusion form of "uniques". These are monsters with extra abilities, resistance or magical attributes. The uniques are dangerously subtle as they often closely resemble their garden variety cousins, but are far more resilient or lethal in their attacks. Discovering a unique next to your character in the midst of a fracas gives you a great surprise, and promotes some quick thinking to quickly dispatch them or keep your distance. Their special abilities often mean that you must rapidly select an appropriate attack or spell to damage them effectively. Every major quest features many minor uniques and giant boss monsters at the conclusion, which all sport unique graphics as well as super special attacks.

Uniqueness is not isolated to the monster classes. The equipment in Diablo II also contains a stupendously enormous range of normal, special, magical, unique and "set" items. Set items are component pieces of a suit of armour or weapon system and they enhance and increase their special effects when combined with the rest of the set. Whereas, the unique items typically have not only excellent physical characteristics, but a host of magical effects as well. These are too numerous to mention, but they include attack/defence enhancements, fire/ice/poison magic effects or resistances thereof, regeneration of health or mana, damage increases for specific creature types, increases to certain character classes and finally in-built sockets, which can be filled with special magical chips. By using a particular combination of chips you can make a new custom weapon with semi-random effects and bonuses. Midway through the game you also acquire a magical artifact called the Horadric cube, which can 'transmute' special combinations of items into new objects or weapons. The massive range of items with random bonuses you can encounter adds a big dimension to the replay value of Diablo II. Combining that randomness with the five character classes available, all whom wield various skill and spell trees, tendencies and characteristics, and the game could almost be endlessly explored by playing through with different classes, spell choices and reinforcements, item acquisition and selection, all amplified by the single amazing fact that this can all be experienced online with other players. This depth of equipment is not particularly unusual in and of itself- rather it is unusual that it is installed in a game like Diablo II which is simple to play, realtime and accessible to all kinds of players.

Diablo II incorporates vast design improvements over the original game. The most obvious difference is that the interface has been completely streamlined and more control features added. For instance it is now possible to run across the landscape rather than only walk, and a special function allows you to easily locate any item on the ground, whether or not it is stacked underneath other objects. The Diablo II world now features massive, interconnected above ground areas as well as the requisite subterranean labyrinths, and an on-screen map overlay speeds navigation around the various areas you must visit. These new improvements make the game accessible even to action gamers with long attention spans. No longer an infuriatingly slow progression, Diablo II can play at a very lively pace which is especially attainable by players possessing mastery of the controls. The running feature also allows for judicious retreats when the enemy overwhelms your player, so you can recharge and regroup.

Diablo II auto-balances your confrontations - that is, it slyly upgrades your enemies as your skills consolidate. As they become more powerful, defeating them gives you larger amounts of experience points and money, which allow you to gain the equipment and abilities necessary to fight them. In this way Diablo II offers consistently escalating levels of challenge, which remain in the moderate-to-mildly difficult range throughout the game, depending on your speed of advancement. You can choose to be hyper aggressive in pursuing your goals, play with speed and high risk, forever walking a tightrope between life and death. Or, you can take a tactical, pragmatic approach and gradually defeat your enemies making smart decisions and bets hedged in safety.

The game often offers several simultaneous quests that the player can choose from. These usually have a sliding scale of difficulty associated with them - and ambitious players can tackle the most difficult straight away, face an arduous challenge and expand their character skills quickly. Then, because the game auto-skills your foes somewhat, returning to those incomplete lesser quests is not suddenly very easy with your souped up character - the auto-skilling monsters see to it that you are still supplied with a token resistance, at the very least.

The geography of the game world now seamlessly blends from the edge of town into the wilderness, and large above-ground areas are provided to conquer as well as the requisite subterranean labyrinths. You must carry out some rudimentary navigation to find your way between the open areas, which are chained together with clearly defined boundaries and gateways in between, the game loading the new sections on the fly. In fact Diablo II has almost negligible loading time at all stages of the game experience, which is an impressive feat indeed.

Battle.net is a centralised system that sorts players with compatible internet connections into chat rooms where they can launch games alone or together. The excellent simplicity and technical robustness of this service gave the online gaming movement a real shove in the right direction, as it allowed even novice gamers to quite easily find their way online and into a game with minimal fuss. Battle.net was one of the first online gaming services to discover its own social problems - the now familiar player-killer phenomenon was born there, and it was the first multiplayer service to be extensively hacked to allow illegal hikes in player statistics. Battle.net now automatically supplies players with updates at regular intervals to overcome disruptions caused by hacks, such as item duplication and the notorious "Town Kill" hack which allowed malicious players to slay other online players in the programmed safety of the games' town square. Players could collect each others ears as proof of a killing, and loot their equipment. Player killing became a major issue in Ultima Online, which followed the success of Diablo. Free online gameplay is quite a drawcard for enthusiasts of blizzard games, as Battle.net has been serving free games for at least four years, and now hosts games of Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II Battle.net edition and Diablo II. A patch for Diablo II is already available when logging onto Battle.net. Diablo II adds Battle.net new modes - such as Hardcore mode whereby your player cannot be resurrected after dying, Open mode which allows you to play with your single player characters online, and Realm mode where online-only characters fight and advance their skills together.

Overall, Diablo 2 is an entertaining computer game in the most classic sense. It is highly accessible, offers a continuously expanding skillset, has a simple skills framework that is easy to grasp, and never places intellectually challenging roadblocks in the player's path. It has incredible replay value, a large number of quests and environments, features superb artwork and improves on the original game in almost every way. It may disappoint players who expect to find a rising scale of difficulty and complexity, and offers little challenge to advanced RPG gamers, yet it still offers a universally interesting play experience. It is a thoroughly polished game offering fans of the series everything they could have wished for.

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