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DarkMatt posted:This I think is the reason behind Diablo 2's charm: I have varying degrees of opinions on the places we'll go in this game, but they all look and sound very good at feeling empty and hostile. Though, I feel like this approach to atmosphere does get relied on a bit too hard, because we'll go to a real center of civilization and imo it'll still feel barren. I played D2 when it came out, and I remember being impressed with how different each area managed to feel and look. Of course the game play loop is exactly the same, but I wasn't very picky as a teenager. I also never got into the meat of the game, I was happy just beating it on the normal difficulty with a few different characters and calling it a day  So this LP is quite interesting, Diablo 2 mechanics are crazy.
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Oct 13, 2022 12:06
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Explopyro posted:There is a lot of technical bullshit (which I can get into if anyone really wants me to), Isn't that the point of this conversation? 
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Oct 16, 2022 11:36
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Okay, we made it here and I can finally   about that god drat maggot lair. That thing is hands down the absolute worst part about Act II, and there is some competition!As you note in the update, the usual experience is a player-wide sphincter-tunnel, where you are constantly beset by enemies that either vomit lightning balls at you, or burrow underground, or there's poison, or some other absolute bullshit. And you have to murder pretty much everything because of the cramped space, one by one, and you can't see where you're going. And it's three levels of this nonsense. I would like to take this opportunity to contrast this miserable slog with the sewer level that opens Act II. Okay, the sewers are several times larger than the town and don't make a lick of sense, but neither does anything about the land of Diablo 2 the way it is presented. As a game section? That dungeon is also dark, but it's comprised of rooms (sort of), tunnels wider than the Sorceress's shoulders, and the only sort of bull-poo poo are the flaming dead archers. Granted they hurt, and are sort of scary, but that's a good thing at that stage of the game. The player is introduced to a new desert locale, so it's different from the English countryside marsh hellscape, and now there's this vague Egyptian desert theme going on, and there's skeletons that are on fire and they want to set you on fire, too. It's a party down there!  I feel like the Worm level of Spelunky is a parody of the maggot lair, it's a big ol' intestine filled with gross bugs and gross goo. Yuck yuck yuck.
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Oct 31, 2022 00:42
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Act 2 is pretty nice, all in all. It has my favourite 'theme', and the place we're going to see next is visually very cool. Act 2 also has a couple of nasty spots, maggot lair definitely being the worst in my personal opinion. It will make more sense to compare the acts after we've gone through the game once, because I think most Diablo 2 players have a tier list! 
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Nov 1, 2022 16:09
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Diablo 2 is a gross game.
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Nov 8, 2022 06:59
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DarkMatt posted:First off, the spoiler rule is gone. Feel free to discuss all the things about Diablo now, including resurrected things and even content much later on. This LP has been fun to read, and remember all those hours kid me spent with Diablo 2. Some thoughts in general: The game has a few specific things that I still remember and go inside: The maggot lair is annoying to navigate because the corridors are so small, and it's full of enemies on top of that, and you sort of have to go down there. I remember the little dudes (fetishes?) in act 3 being annoying, too, but at least they're sort of fun to kill, right? I'm not exactly a fan of act 1's general aesthetic, either, it's basically England where it just rains all the time, the other acts have more exotic-seeming locales. Duriel is just a dick move all around, game, and playing the game on a crappy not-exactly-2000's-era-computer meant that in some version he just killed you before the level would load.I have never put in the kind of work that DarkMatt has presented here about the deeper game mechanics, and I never got into the multiplayer scene, so all I personally know of Diablo is running it solo as a dungeon crawler experience. And on the whole, Diablo 2 is pretty good just at that, too. The game has some really creative places, like the M. C. Escher stuff in the Arcane Sanctuary, and while the soggy jungles of act 3 are huge, sprawlingly massive places, they feel like a challenge and also a fun place to just poke around in. Aside from the maggot lair, I also like the desert theme in act 2, I don't really understand what the cat enemies are doing there but the rest of it was interesting and exciting. What was perhaps most novel to me reading this LP was DarkMatt's critique of the plot of Diablo 2. Playing the game as a dumb kid, I honest to goodness didn't care about the plot. I had a necromancer making skeletons, and the skeletons killed monsters, and I was pretty happy with just that experience. I don't really care about the plot in Doom (1993), either, I just enjoy the experience of having a demon-killing simulator to play with. As we have seen through the LP, though, Diablo 2 does... Sort of try to have a plot, and it's not exactly great. The game wants the player to have a reason for clicking on monster sprites millions of times, or not in the case of a necromancer, and the game also wants to justify the player visiting all these locales, exploring and running through dungeons and so on. For all I cared back then, or even now, it seemed sufficient that we were chasing after the demon lords forever going east and the player following, exploring new places along the way. The story about a great cosmic struggle does not add anything to the experience, I would say, and DarkMatt trying to make sense out of it very clearly shows how frustrating it is. The single-player Diablo 2 world came off to me as a very solitary place. You are playing the hero, you can have a helper buddy but the helper buddies are never really characters at all, and the core game-play loop is fundamentally about killing monsters and getting loot. It's a very much you against the world-scenario, in that sense.
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Dec 21, 2022 15:43
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 08:12 |
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I don't pretend to know what the circumstances were that made it happen, but the isometric (first two) Fallout games, which were roughly around the same era as Diablos 1 and 2, had a creature that was called a brahmin, and it's a two-headed cow. There's some more or less silly quests associated with brahmin, and if the player character dialogues with a brahmin enough, it will say "Moo, I say!" which I guess is the sort of humour you found in 90's games. And in a very weird tangent, a 90's game called Master of Orion 2, which was a 4X type big strategy game, had one player race called the gnolam, who in Master of Orion 2 were weird star trek type space gnomes. The play mechanic associated with their race was that they had all the money-generating buttons turned up to 11. Anyway, Master of Orion was re-released in 2016 as more or less the same game but with updated graphics, and in that one the gnolams are a race of six-eyed tiny cow creatures.  Moo, I say! indeed.
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Dec 25, 2022 16:09
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