Where Diablo II differs strongly to its most recent entry, Diablo III, is in its role-playing. The campaign is also not the end of your journey, with additional difficulties incentivizing you to restart and continue crunching enemy skulls for more powerful loot, and so on. The more you progress, the stronger you become, allowing you to deal the damage required to take down incredibly dangerous bosses that provide a challenging climax to each act. These maps have distinct areas and enemy-ridden dungeons you'll need to explore, eliminating scores of enemies that drop all sorts of color-coded loot that help you get more powerful as you go. You progress through the campaign over a series of acts, each contained within their own map. Like all of the games it would eventually inspire, Diablo II is a dungeon-crawler, albeit stripped down to the genre's fundamental basics. But it's also a game that has been drastically improved upon in the two decades since its release, which makes its 2021 remaster a confusing re-release that does very little to address how the genre has evolved since, making it challenging to recommend over modern contemporaries outside of reasons of nostalgia or short-lived curiosity. It's one of those games whose DNA you can still trace in modern ARPGs such as Path of Exile, Lords of Wolcen, and the eventual Diablo III. The original release of Blizzard's sequel in 2000 was an inflection point for the nascent genre, defining the direction all games after it would take. It's impossible to talk about action role-playing games without mentioning Diablo II.

Diablo 2: resurrected release ps4