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Review: Diablo II: Lord of DestructionReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: September 3, 2001
Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, is a dark, edgy retelling of the stories of Beatrix Potter. In it, Peter Rabbit descends into a heroin hallucination to find that Mr. Tod has tortured and twisted... Sorry, I had all these jokes saved up for Alice, but Hiner reviewed it instead. Lord of Destruction (LoD, not the legendary wrestling tag-team) is the expansion for the wildly popular Diablo 2. In it, you play a hero trying to stop the three Prime Evils--Mephisto, Diablo and Baal--in their mission to bring Hell to earth. And you keep failing! More on that later. First, the mechanics. LoD is a huge install, almost as large as the original game. This is because in addition to a new chapter in the story and two new character classes--the assassin and the druid--the game has experienced significant changes in its most important area...equipment.
As for the new classes, both the assassin and the druid represent two new styles of playing D2, with surprisingly little overlap with the other classes. The assassin is presented in the back story as part of a sort of secret police force of leather-clad women who go about punishing corrupted mages, which makes me think that being a corrupted mage must be a pretty sweet life. While able to use a wide variety of weapons, the assassin specializes with the new claw-class of blades. In addition to being able to fight with these two-handed, one of the skill sets available to the class consists of charge-up and finishing moves. Charge-up moves power the assassin's weapons when scoring a successful hit, and a finishing move releases that power, along with its own effect. The assassins are also skilled in creating traps, really more like ranged weapons that spring out at enemies, and "shadow" skills which affect enemies' resistances and their ability to see and harm you.
And you'll get all the opportunities to kill you'll want. Unfortunately, unless you're a hardcore, online player of LoD, you won't get to experience most of the new equipment in the expansion. As players of the original D2 know, you can place certain items in the Horardric Cube you get in Act II of the game to create new items. This has been expanded in LoD to the new "crafted items" category, which allow you, if you can discover the recipe, to create rare and powerful items on your own. If you play online. LoD also includes two new item types, runes and jewels (not the familiar gemstones, mind you) which can be inserted into socketed items. Place the correct runes in the correct order in the correct weapon, and you'll create powerful Rune Items with powers beyond those of the component stones--again, if you play online. At this writing, Blizzard has promised to bring these features to the solo offline games, but has not yet given a date. I'd also like to point out that practically none of the "recipes" for these items are known, so prepare for a lot of trial and error. Not a problem for the hard-core player, but for the guy who just wants his game to entertain him...
Also new are charms, items which give your character bonuses when carried in your inventory. Though they eat up space, they can give some really sweet bonuses: increasing your stats, mana and life, or even adding additional damage to your attacks. Be prepared, however, to do a lot of spring cleaning on your inventory section, as you try to figure out which charms you really want and which ones are just leaving you with only four inventory boxes. The new chapter of the game takes you to the northern highlands. And as any fan of the fantasy genre will tell you, if you're in the northern highlands, that means barbarians. For some reason, tropical climes just don't produce your Conan types, even though they run around in loin cloths. Go figure. Once you arrive, you are promptly informed that they really, really don't want you there. Turns out their entire culture has been established for the purpose of keeping demon lords away from the mystical Worldstone. And now that one of the demon lords (Baal, the eponymous Lord of Destruction) has shown up looking for the Worldstone, they're a bit hesitant to let some glory-hound muscle in. Understandable. If I'd crossed Middle Earth to drop the One Ring into the Crack of Doom, I'd be miffed if public relations told me they'd managed to get Kevin Costner to do the ceremonial duties. You horn in anyway, since most of the barbarians have been wiped out by Baal's army of demons, and it turns out there's treachery afoot. But you overcome this, find your way to the mystical Worldstone, defeat the last of the Lords of Terror, and save the world... kind of. Let me say now that I love Diablo 2, and I love Lord of Destruction. That said, this is not a game to boost your self-esteem, because unlike...well, pretty much every other game you've ever played, defeating a boss monster doesn't lead to congratulations and a ticker-tape parade, but usually to admonishments about how you didn't get there quickly enough to stop the events of the game from proceeding as if you'd just stayed at home, reading a conservative journal and writing strongly-worded letter to the editor about how the town council should do something about this demon problem. Not to spoil the ending, but you do save the world. I would not be surprised, however, to find out that Diablo 3 will being coming out in a few years. No, I wouldn't be surprised at all. Blizzard, thankfully, spares us a William Castle-esque "The End" followed by a sudden "????," but that's about it.
The graphics are good, especially with a decent card backing them up. I was playing with my discontinued Voodoo 5500 and my 9600/350, and this ran fine and looked great, until I tried to run it at the newly available 800x600 resolution. Things slowed down to a crawl, so I switched back to the 640x480 standard. Users with higher-end systems shouldn't have this problem. Also, let me say the cut scenes are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Not only are the cinematics beautiful to look at, they're, well... cinematic. My hat's off to Cinematics Director Matthew Samia and his team for creating highly dramatic pieces which really contribute more to the game as a whole than just eye candy. They really have a feel for camera use, mood, and character. The bit where the army of Baal arrive at the city gates of Harrogath (the barbarian city) has to be one of the most entertaining short film pieces I've seen in a long time. Should you buy this expansion? Yes, if you're a fan of Diablo 2. But then, a fan of Diablo 2 already has the game, and was salivating for it the moment it was potentially rumored to possibly be announced. You won't get the most out of the new equipment additions unless you're a committed online gamer, but even for those of us who just want more Diablo 2, it's a worthy addition. But now I have to figure out how to use all these stored-up Alice jokes. But I guess a dark retelling of Peter Rabbit is kind of silly. Especially when you consider that all the characters were named after dead people.
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After installing, you have the option of converting your original D2 character into one compatible with the expansion. The advantage of this is that if you've completed the original game, you can proceed directly into the expansion. You also get access to the new equipment in LoD (below), and a stash that's twice the size of the original, along with the ability to create a second weapon set for your character (creating one, for example, that's more effective against the undead). Switching between the sets is as simple as a keystroke. The drawback is that LoD and original D2 characters can't play in the same multiplayer games. The conversion is one-way and permanent. If you don't want to convert a favorite character or want to try the new classes, it's back to the beginning.
The druid specializes in summoning spells and shape changing. What's nice about this is that LoD doesn't jerk you around and make you wait to do some neat lycanthropy; you can change into a werewolf with your first skill point, and the werebear is only a few levels after that. It's mostly a façade, though, because apart from an increase in certain stats, your druid is still using his weapons to attack and his armor to defend himself. More interesting are the summoning skills, including the plant series. Basically you create a carnivorous--and in some cases poisonous--plant tendril that follows you around, attacking your enemies from below and consuming them. Japanese schoolgirls, be forewarned. You can also summon spirits to increase your health and those of your followers, and animal friends with whom you share a deep understanding...of how much you want to kill, kill, kill.
It's not a complete bust for the casual gamer, however, as both jewels and runes do add another simple element to the socketed item with different bonuses from the familiar gems.
You may note I've classified LoD as an action-adventure game. This is because after playing Deus Ex and Baldur's Gate, I don't feel right putting it in the role-playing game (RPG) genre. There's no role-playing in Diablo 2. You kill everything in sight. That's it. There are no puzzles to solve, you can't kill anyone you need to talk to, even the quests consist of killing some specific monster, or finding a treasure guarded by said specific monster which you must kill. There's no interaction with the townspeople, save for the specific, plot-related info they give you. It's the quintessential dungeon crawl.