I should state that before I get too far into this blog that I didn’t start playing Diablo 2 until about 2004; if you’ve followed my rant to this point, you’ll probably remember that overbearing parent who destroyed the Diablo CD my step dad brought home? Well, Diablo 2 required me to have one of my older friends go and buy it for me. I had wanted to get a hold of the game for years, and after me and all my friends from high school got into it, it was the birth of something amazing. I had always been a solo gamer up until this point. Diablo 2 online multiplayer changed my perspective of PC gaming.
If anything stands as a testament to just how great of a game Diablo 2 is, I still play it to this day. I consider it to be the origin of the gaming community me and my friends have built around us over the years as well as the point in time when I started becoming interested in what the future of video games were. Diablo 2 triggered a large number of life decisions for me, among those was the goal to one day be involved in the development of video games.
Aside from the just incredible cooperative multiplayer aspect that I had only ever experienced in Warcraft 3 custom maps up until this point, Diablo 2 has one of the most entangling story lines of any game I’ve ever played. The dark nature of the cut scenes coupled with the overwhelming sense of dread that the people of this world experienced sucked my young mind in and has never let go. Deckard Cain’s “back in my day” themed stories were always good for a laugh and helped break up the over arching dark story line. While the game’s character progression system just continued to bring you back day after day to keep on playing, keep leveling, keep getting new gear, a theme that I feel was greatly lost upon the dev team for Diablo 3.
Things are just getting interesting. Be sure to check out Part 5 of my blizzard rant for some good old “vanilla WoW is best WoW, so get over it” ranting!
Published: Apr 30, 2013 09:45 pm