Diablo II: Resurrected

so why Resurrected so much censored?

I'm a huge fan of Diablo 2, hence my love for Hack n Slash. I play PoE because it is the spiritual successor to D2. I once bought a W3 Reforged and the Beta was great, but the full version was inferior to the older original. I don't really believe in the new Blizzard, the only thing they do well is cinematics. First, I will see how people playing Diablo Resurrected, and then I will consider whether to buy it. Remember, no preorders

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Dude I had such a great time. Unfortunately on console there was no zoom control but that wasn't something I had planned anyway.

I didn't know that was going to be a feature either. I was checking out the Controls section of the Options menu just to see how they were mapping everything, and at the very bottom of the list I noticed the Zoom feature sitting above the Legacy Toggle. Given that I normally play D2 in 640x480 with Perspective turned on for maximum immersion, I had to try it out.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

...generally affirmed that this was an excellent little teaser.

Excellent beyond my expectations. I hate that I didn't have enough time to even get to Andi (I bet they made her model horrifying if Blood Raven is any indication), but what I was able to see has me jazzed out of my mind for the rest of it.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

PS here's something interesting I found during the beta that you and other D2 affecianados might find worth a read. The url kind of speaks for itself.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/01/branching-out-how-limiting-skill-choices-made-diablo-2-more-fun/

Thanks for that! I always love reading Dave's commentaries and perspectives on D1 and D2. And after reading this, I feel even more empowered to toss out any notions of min/maxing and just go with whatever I feel like doing, especially for classes I didn't really play much over the years.

I especially liked the bit where a dev said straight up it's not about the item collection or the customising. It's about the clicking. And he was dead right. At the heart of the Diablo phenomenon is the exact same simple compulsion we find in poker machines levers, Pachinko and early simple video games. The primal connection between pushing a button and getting a result.

PoE fails this for me because you have to do so much before pushing that button yields satisfying results. And in that it really is a totally different genre to any other ARPG. But I guess that's old news by now so no need to harp on it.

I also liked that the author pointed out that before diablo most computer RPGs were clunky affairs of party management and stat fiddling. The SSI games are a perfect examplele of this. I loved those but none had the raw addiction that Diablo presented. Although lack of mention of stuff like Gauntlet is a little disconcerting. Maybe the shift to real time was late enough into the development that Gauntlet wasn't actually that much of an influence even though we can see some shared DNA.

Anyway I think they left out the two trickiest classes for a reason. So it'll be interesting to see how Necro and assassin fare without any external testing


As for censorship, it still has inverted pentagrams, which I honestly thought were all but purged from most games these days. The reduction in boob size is amusing but not noticeable really. The changes to the character models are problematic for me only because the voice no longer matches, especially the Amazon.

And honestly we've all hopefully grown up a little bit from back when Diablo and fantasy in general was 100% male gaze and just a wee bit puerile, so I don't mind that everyone in D2 looks a bit more grizzled, a little more experienced. It's all very meta for a restoration of course but eh if it's a deal breaker I'd argue you were probably not the target audience for a D2 update.

I'm not sure I'd even consider it censorship when it's the creators themselves doing it for what seems to be more an aesthetic decision over external influences. But eh YMMV and ultimately it's up to you to decide how you feel about it.

D2r has bigger problems than that though. Much bigger. But only if you want to play it like you did the first one, or...PoE.

I'm for gaze diversity. If I was designing romantic interests for a game, I'd want to include at least four: the straight man gaze, the straight woman gaze, the gay man gaze, and the lesbian gaze. I get that, right now, I might not know a lot about a couple of those gazes, but the point is that I want everyone to get a little happy in the pants with what the game offers them.

I also get that those four don't cover everyone, because some are into That Seriously Weird Shit. Which is cool and all, but at some point I have to admit that some things are beyond my capability to grok.

What I'm not really happy with is gaze exclusion. Such as the idea that big mommy milkers are a bad thing only bad men want. Yes, yes, we don't want to do such a thing to the exclusion of all else — diversity, as I already said, is good. But sometimes I think I get a whiff of sexual puritanism from a game rated M, and that, to me, is sad. It's a fantasy genre; let there be fantasies.

So here's a thought. In order for something to be resurrectable, it must first be dead.

So...Diablo 2 Deceased?

On a deeper level you could make this the springboard for some meditations on how Actiblizz view their predecessor's great work versus how some current gamers might (esp. modders and others keeping that D2D flame burning) but eh, doesn't really matter at this point. I suspect most people concerned with d2r have made up their minds already. Which is good. We could do with more quiet decisiveness in the ARPG community.

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For lack of methadone, I have reinstalled Titan Quest on the ps5.

Yoo-hoo-hoo! Look who knows so much!
You can't resurrect 'em if they're all dead.
But mostly dead is slightly alive.

Liar.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

What I'm not really happy with is gaze exclusion. Such as the idea that big mommy milkers are a bad thing only bad men want. Yes, yes, we don't want to do such a thing to the exclusion of all else — diversity, as I already said, is good. But sometimes I think I get a whiff of sexual puritanism from a game rated M, and that, to me, is sad. It's a fantasy genre; let there be fantasies.

It is the fantasy genre. But it isn't the sexual fantasy genre. "Not including a woman with massive tits" isn't exclusion.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

So here's a thought. In order for something to be resurrectable, it must first be dead.

So...Diablo 2 Deceased?

Probably it is not the same Diablo II. Their source code became corrupted and they have no backup. Blizzard have to recreating everything from scratch. It is probably more of a remake of the same old game with better graphics except they didn't want to call it that. Bad publicity and perplexing unneccessary details.

Resurrected not as in CPR but more like cloning.

So Was Diablo 2 Dead?