Diablo II: Resurrected impressions: Maybe not the best time to bring back evil

I would like to be in a universe where my conscience felt clear recommending the quality and execution of VV's Diablo II: Resurrected. This is generally how a Blizzard Classic game should work: faithful to the source material, even to a fault, while sneaking in legitimate quality-of-life options (which players can disable); a path to taking characters from platform to platform (which players can ignore); and a handsome, tasteful, top-to-bottom touch of paint for all characters, monsters, and environments (or players can stick with original 800 x 600 graphics if they really want).

If you can live without LAN multiplayer options and Mac support—and those are both big "ifs" depending on your use case—then Resurrected is the superior edition. Sadly, Blizzard offers no "upgrade" path to this remastered purchase from the original CD key. Then again, to the company's credit, the lack of an upgrade path may be because Blizzard has elected not to nuke the original game as a purchasable option. You can buy the Windows XP version for $10 on Battle.net right now, warts and all, and add $10 more for the "Lord of Destruction" expansion. (This is particularly good to see after Blizzard summarily blew up WC3's original client, sigh.)

Yet I'm shocked—though not surprised—to see Blizzard continue to kick the desert sand of Diablo's Lut Gholein into fans' faces regarding online connectivity. I'll get into that shortly.

This impressions articles lands after 10 hours of delving into D2R's dungeons and hellscapes. We're basing this primarily on the PC version, though I also tested the game on Xbox Series X, base Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch with codes provided by Activision Blizzard. For most of my testing, I favored D2R's Assassin class, whom I shepherded to the end of the game's second act (there are five acts in all). That's further progress than I made during the beta, which ended at Act One with fewer selectable characters, and I'm generally comfortable making a judgment about the overall production. But 10 hours wasn't enough time for me to confirm every design tweak, environment overhaul, or other nitpick possibility.

The best news about D2R is how well Vicarious Visions nailed the mission of leaving the original gameplay and aesthetic intact while giving people better mechanical and visual ways to dive into this ancient-school action RPG.

As a refresher, Diablo II built upon the novelty of the first Diablo in ways that I believe render that first series entry moot. Like in the first game, players pick a magical medieval-hero archetype, then guide them through a procedurally generated isometric adventure that gets more difficult as it continues. Run around, fulfill specific objectives, kill monsters, and pick up new, increasingly better weapons and items. Along the way, leave the beaten path to find more dangerous monsters and better loot while using accumulated experience points to tune your character's abilities.

In 2000, Diablo II blasted off because it expanded on everything that made the first game memorable and fun: more environments, more monsters, more character classes, more abilities, and much, much more loot. It also tightened the animations and response times for attacks and spellcasting—and did so in ways that still feel snappy 20 years later.

That longevity matters, because Vicarious Visions has seemingly left the core data for movements and animation durations intact for D2R. I didn't rig up an older PC with vanilla Diablo II installed in order to compare frame data on every single attack between both versions, which means the Barbarian's "Leap" or the Necromancer's "Raise Skeleton" might be off. But I did run through vanilla D2 footage of a similar Assassin build to mine, and from what I can see, that character's "Fire Blast" and "Wake of Fire" abilities line up in both games. "Fire Blast" in particular is a fun one to toy with, since the Assassin throws it like a bomb—either quickly at nearby foes, or in a long, slow arc at distant monsters. The timing hasn't changed in 20 years.

But if you want to aim and throw your Assassin fire bombs farther away, that's now possible in "remastered" mode—at least, to the left or right.

With the game's new coat of paint enabled, visible action stretches past Diablo II's original 800 x 600 pixel resolution and into wider-ratio territory. How much wider? PC players get up to a 19:9 ratio—which leaves black boxes on the edges of the popular 21:9 widescreen format. VV says this is due to the team bolting the entire remaster on top of original code, and the same wider-screen option doesn't work if you toggle D2R's "original graphics" mode, which remains confined to a pixelated 4:3 box. Switch between old and new graphics, and you'll see the same 4:3 core in the middle of the screen, with the remastered mode adding more screen real estate to the left and right.

19:9 isn't perfect, but I'm already so elated to have this older game working at 16:9 by default on consoles—and enjoying so much more visibility in frantic combat—that I can't be too fussy about it. Left-to-right visibility matters in Diablo II because characters move faster horizontally than they do vertically, so this is a significant quality-of-life tweak that has never been previously hacked into the vanilla version.

The visual remaster goes a lot further than that, and this article's before-and-after galleries only hint to the overall impact that VV's art direction makes on D2R's playability. For starters, you can't see in those still images how dynamic lighting plays out in the average course of gameplay. Your character's "fog of light" beams from your core by default in dark caverns and dungeons, and even Diablo III doesn't project so many obvious light beams as D2R. It doesn't paint dancing shadows over the static objects your hero runs past, either.

This D2R effect adds a dynamic sparkle to underground runs without pumping unnecessary artificial color or tone into a given scene. And VV takes this Diablo II visual touchstone very seriously and uses it to add life into Diablo II's brown-and-gray default. Go into any of the game's environments, from sun-soaked deserts to demon-overrun cathedrals, and toggle the visuals between old and new. You'll find that VV emphasizes nearly identical color palettes in its touched-up treatments—only this time, lighting and contrast make each scene feel more grounded and, perhaps more important for playability, more visible. Natural glowing sources attached to enemies, ranging from their inherent magical powers to whatever ambient lighting is in a given scene, make D2R's beasts better stand out as approaching threats, all without festooning them with spotlights or WarCraft-like colors.

After spending some time in D2R's updated mode, I found it much tougher to spot enemies and triangulate my approach to them when I reverted to the vanilla version. The original game's artistic direction used fog of war to either hide world detail entirely or jack up the exposed world's brightness and tone, which was fine in an era when wholly 2D art assets had to paint each emerging dungeon path and haunted corridor. Comparatively, D2R does a remarkable job of applying sensible lighting, ambient occlusion, and dynamic effects to easily surpass even the visual makeup of Diablo III. The world of D2R may be bleak, but it also looks alive.

This is all unsurprising from VV, who previously stunned with remakes of the first two Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games that nailed a similar "modern yet faithful" approach.

Similar care has been taken with the score—which you might assume is identical to the original if you're not paying careful attention. However, VV has actually gone to the trouble of remixing certain tracks. All original instrumentation and melody remains intact, except now certain MIDI effects have been processed through new synthesizers with different frequency and EQ modulation. Meanwhile, new ambient tones and volume mixes have been applied—sometimes to draw out an explosive moment with higher-frequency snaps to the drums, and other times to build further tension with background effects.

As a matter of personal opinion, I think this work is tasteful, faithful, and punchy. It supports the big mix of so many monstrous and magical sound effects in the course of an average D2R adventure. (Dialogue and sound effects, I should note, appear to remain unchanged from the original game—if they've been sweetened or touched up, I didn't notice.) But I also think VV should have given players the option to directly select which soundtrack plays while in remastered mode instead of leaving the original, untouched music tied to the vanilla graphics mode.

D2R launches with gamepad support on all platforms, including PC—which is kinda nuts, considering Diablo III's PC version still doesn't have gamepad controls, eight years after its first console version launched. Eight years. What the actual heck, Blizzard?

Ahem.

This gamepad support matters even on PC because of how it addresses one of the most dated aspects of vanilla Diablo II. Play the game with a mouse and keyboard, as Blizzard North originally intended, and you only have two action functions available at any moment—despite characters having far more abilities than that by the time they've leveled up a few times. In the original control suite, you have to tap your keyboard's function keys (F1, F2, etc.) to switch between a bull rush, a magical spell, a smoke bomb, and more. Remember, this merely equips an ability; you still then must tap a mouse button to actually execute the ability. Higher-level play, in which you won't live without jumping from ability to ability, is much clunkier in the original Diablo II than most action RPGs that followed.

With D2R, attach a gamepad to your PC, or play the game on console, and its suite of "ABXY" buttons can be assigned to any of your abilities. You can tap them in rapid succession like in any other modern take on the genre. (Hold the left trigger to unveil a second row of assignable abilities, so that you can effectively juggle 12 abilities at once.) This update is great if you like gamepads, and D2R feels pretty good with them. There's just one massive exception: you cannot manually aim certain abilities. Fire Blast, one of the Assassin's best starter abilities, can only be thrown at enemies' current locations, which you pick by gesturing your joystick toward it.

But because Fire Blast gets tossed in a high arc, it usually needs to be aimed elsewhere, in order to lead moving targets. This is impossible for gamepad players, since D2R doesn't include any "manual ability aiming" options for gamepads. So that's a bit of a bummer—and, depending on my build, it's reason enough for me to prefer playing the game on PC using keyboard and mouse going forward, with gamepad options being an OK alternative in a pinch.

D2R switches back and forth between a mouse and keyboard interface and a gamepad interface whenever it senses either control method. Tap your gamepad's joystick on PC, and the entire menu system transforms into a gamepad-friendly array of button assignments. Tap your keyboard, and it goes back to the old-school UI. This implies that VV knows how to bolt custom button commands onto the original code at any time. Yet D2R does not let players assign instant ability-shortcut buttons to keyboard buttons. When using mouse and keyboard, D2R continues to display the original PC version's "rebind" menu, which still requires the whole "equip, then activate" clumsiness. At the very least, I recommend rebinding abilities away from the F-key row and toward, say, one of those 10-button mice that MMO fans love. But I also don't understand why this part of D2R couldn't be sweetened to make PC players' lives a little easier.

Speaking of QoL: I spoke at length about other D2R tweaks after playing the game's beta earlier this year, including a new toggle to have your character automatically pick up piles of gold when walking over them. VV is generally mild about these touch-ups, so if you're more used to games like Diablo III, you might not care for D2R's default clunkiness. As a lapsed, classic D2 fan, I think VV nailed this project's control balance between authenticity and convenience, keyboard binding quibbles notwithstanding.

Yet the above mix of praise and complaints may be overwhelmed by one aggravating issue with D2R—an issue that could singularly tank this game for anyone who might otherwise overlook this review's entire first page: the online component. Activision Blizzard, simply put, doesn't seem to trust or respect how you might play its 20-year-old game, and the results are draconian and sucky.

You can play D2R in three ways: "offline," "online," and "ladder." The ladder system may work the same way that it did when the original game launched in 2000, with players having their progress tracked for leaderboard purposes in either "normal" or "hardcore" modes. (In the latter mode, if your character dies once, it's game over, no restarts or rushes to recover loot from your dead body.) But ladder play wasn't unlocked ahead of the game's launch, so I can't say for sure—and as a reminder, WarCraft III: Reforged still hasn't debuted its own online ladder system since launching 21 months ago. So I'm making zero assumptions about D2R doing better until its ladder actually ships and I can play it myself.

In my prerelease tests on both consoles and PC, "offline" mode worked after I booted the game at least once and attached my Battle.net credentials. This, if you're wondering, is why my review's earlier section about performance includes a big goose egg regarding Nintendo Switch. Ahead of D2R's retail launch, Battle.net's servers refused to acknowledge that my Switch copy of the game was legit, so I couldn't get past the "press start" opening screen. Be warned: if you download D2R on Switch, then boot it for the first time while offline, you'll likely run into the same issue.

Still, in the event of Blizzard's servers going kaput after your one-time login, its offline modes will work. Sadly, the catch here is that any character created in this mode is locked out of ever connecting to any form of multiplayer. Unplug from the Internet, and you're stuck with a character who can only play the game by themselves—no co-op, no PVP. (Though I haven't mentioned it much in this review, multiplayer is the heart and soul of Diablo II's longevity, especially since many of its character classes can be tailored in ways that are pretty much only useful in co-op—and are a blast to play that way.)

If you'd prefer to devote your playthrough to a character who might eventually team up with friends or strangers, you are—at least as of press time—required to pick "online" mode. And all characters that you use this way can access a "shared" item stash, which is an appreciated perk. But even if you play by yourself, you must be in constant contact with Blizzard's servers during any "online" mode sessions. According to my tests, it takes roughly seven seconds from an unplugged Ethernet cable or lost Wi-Fi signal for an online-connected D2R session to desync and come to a screeching halt. Worse, when you bring that session back online, you're back to whatever hub town is closest to your current questline. All of the nearby progress you'd made is wiped in favor of a wholly new, randomly generated world.

In my prerelease tests, despite a meager player population of select members of the press, this Battle.net ping requirement didn't go unnoticed. I didn't run into any freak disconnects, but I did see the game stutter roughly every 15 minutes. My character might be walking in one direction only to suddenly warp a few feet in the opposite direction with all enemies standing elsewhere. Usually, this hiccup was inconsequential. But during one frantic battle, my character warped in such a way that she became pinned in a crowd of demons. The fight was low-level enough that I could chug health potions and scramble out, but I can't even begin to imagine what rage I'd feel if that happened with a "hardcore" character at much higher difficulty.

Blizzard can hem and haw all it wants about how such online check-ins are meant for "player security" or "gameplay integrity." The original Diablo II code includes ways to spoof high-powered items, and while I can't speak to whether those vulnerabilities have been patched, I'm sure Blizzard wants to have some form of control over any random matchmaking population—especially a carefully tracked ladder of ranked players. (I could not test random matchmaking ahead of the game's launch, by the way.) If Blizzard wants to offer a tightly controlled online option as part of the total package, I get it.

But maybe I don't want to do any random matchmaking or verified ladder progression. Maybe I want to either play offline (with no servers having any impact on my session) or directly connect to friends (and not have to create a deck of varied characters). Maybe I'd rather have my offline and friends-only time devoted to the same magical, medieval warrior who I have named something stupid like "TheRealSamShady." Additionally, I assume that the hardest-core hardcore players would rather not live in fear that a single server snafu might lead to an inadvertent run-ending death. And I'm left wondering how the online environment will perform once it has a bunch of retail customers flooding the service, as opposed to a few critics who couldn't access the matchmaking menu. During my testing, I conducted one online test with a friend using two Xbox consoles, and it seemed to work fine, at least.

These complaints blow up the otherwise very good time I had during my 10 hours of testing, in which I forgot about the rest of the world and felt like I was back in the year 2000. I suspended disbelief for long enough to fall deeply into the things Diablo II did so well back then—particularly its restraint in doling out loot. Each major dive into a dungeon and each massive battle felt good because of the game's balance of abilities and combat, not because of the promise of a brand new shiny trinket every three minutes. (Though, obviously, discovering a unique claw with two sockets and massive bonuses to mana was sweet.)

I don't know who hopeful D2R players need to plead with: a stubborn producer at Vicarious Visions, or a bullheaded executive at Activision Blizzard who obsesses over piracy and exploited online sessions. Whoever it is, the request is simple: let anyone who buys this game generate a slew of "do whatever you want" characters who can freely alternate between offline modes and private, friends-only co-op campaigns or PVP romps with friends. Then let them go crazy. If players directly connect to each other without straining your servers, that's super. If they figure out how to spawn a sword that looks like a cow and shoots Horadric Cube bullets, and it doesn't intrude on anyone else's D2R time, then you should salute them and say, "Awesome. That sounds fun. Go ahead."

Until then, I'm not convinced that D2R's online requirements and networking backbone won't enrage at least a few genuine Diablo fans. And I'm concerned that a healthy matchmaking ecosystem and competitive ranked ladder might not be ready for launch just yet.

What's more, those specific issues seem like the last thing a beleaguered game publisher like Activision Blizzard wants to dump onto an otherwise impressive and faithful translation of a classic Blizzard game. Diablo II remains a fantastic game, and from what I've played thus far, D2R generally makes it a better one. The folks at ActiBlizz could use some good news right about now, but if they want to trash D2R's potential with online login silliness, that's their call. My call, meanwhile, is to look elsewhere for an action RPG option that respects players' purchases until ActiBlizz reverses course to some extent. (And that's not even considering the other course-reversals that the company should be looking into as of late.)

Verdict: A mostly fantastic project that upholds Vicarious Visions' incredible reputation for faithful, beautifully honed remasters, but it's held back by poor online connectivity decisions. If you have designs on buying this, wait to see if Activision Blizzard overhauls the game's online issues.

Listing image by Blizzard