Diablo II with Lord of Destruction Expansion Set Review

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            Diablo II with Lord of Destruction Expansion Set Single Player Mode

Review by The SirenJuly 2002

I have always lived a solitary, reclusive existence as a Sorceress.  Content to move amongst the shadows, I call the wilderness and darkened wood my home. At first glance, I, The Siren, might appear frail; fragile … Lest you pass me by, know this: I not only brave elemental nature, but harness it with my own body and use it! Wielding the fearsome powers of lightning, fire, and ice as weapons in my hands, I both further the causes of good on this earth and attain my own ends.

As I wander my vast homeland, I am perplexed and repulsed by the evil spirits beginning to spawn upon it. Where have they come from, and what do they want with my world? The beauty of the richly detailed countryside becomes quickly marred by the bodies of dead Rogues—my compatriots—who attempt to battle these evil spirits as they appear. I hear rumors of other existing warriors against evil, each with their own strengths and attributes, Barbarian, Paladin, Necromancer, Amazon, Assassin, and Druid. Yet, I encounter none of them and travel this vividly colorful landscape alone.

Approaching a Rogue encampment (at this moment a darkened, rain-soaked haven), I seek solace for the night at a blazing campfire. Here, I find friends who not only impart wisdom but trade goods. They also detail for me the sordid history of Diablo, the larger devil behind this spiritual blight against mankind that we now face.  As daylight approaches, my spell-casting skills as a Sorceress are met with both skepticism and rekindled hope by these entrenched Rogues, who cannot overtake this evil uprising on their own. I am challenged by them to take on varied and ever-changing quests with my magic, to support the causes of right.

I strike out on my own to prove my worth and might! Songs of both victory and terror perpetually hang in the air. Each enemy has unique war cries and utterances, and each locale its own distinct audible nuances to aid me in my battles.

As I spar with ever-increasing numbers of zombies and all manner of demons and wraiths, my experiences only serve to strengthen both my character and reserve. Mysterious shrines of renewal and magical power dot the landscape, recharging my elemental weapons in time of need. I traverse lush green and golden hills, muted, stony valleys, and bloodied, rotting caves. Light passes into darkness; sun into storm. Cold, fire and poison threaten me, spewed from vile enemies, but I fear not. I meld lightning bolts right in my hands, first throwing them as static to weaken aggressors, then sending out chained lightning to finish them off …  I annihilate rushing herds of mad demons by forming fire bolts into rows of vicious fire hydras that fight for me. I sculpt moving blazes and set them down to protect me and follow in my wake, burning down all evil spirits that might follow … My survival is assured by fashioning ice bolts into frost novas that, spiraling outwardly in rings all around me, slow and shatter the undead servants of Diablo … All the while, raiding passed-on souls both righteous and foul, I gather gold, gems, magic items, weapons and armor to strengthen and aid me in my quests or to trade away.  I recoup lost items for the Rogues as well, in return for even more rewards!

These Rogue compatriots of mine at the encampment finally help to prepare me for their worst local foe: Demon Queen Andariel.  It is a long and arduous journey filled with hordes of murderous, otherworldly fiends who attempt to strike me down. Alas, I have hired a mercenary-archer named Gaile from the encampment, and she follows and guards me willingly and fiercely. Going into battle with Gaile by my side, her experience, defense and power growing even as mine do, we fight this poisonous Queen and her onslaught of new terrors together, emerging victorious once again!

This outland cleared, a caravan leader from the encampment offers to take us to Lut Gholein, a nearby town also overrun with Diablo’s treachery. We go, by now craving the very things that may be our end! The owner of a public house seeks vengeance for the deaths of both her son and husband, and so the first of our new quests begins … Locked treasure chests and abandoned barrels and jugs pepper the landscape, providing new jewel-encrusted magical weapons, health potions, gold, and magic portals for our emergency transference back to the safety of the town center. Their presence is mixed with the tortured corpses of past Rogues, unrelenting swarms of unique monsters and their masters, and dens and underground dungeons of evil that must be cleared for new treasures, experiences and defenses to be gained.

Our journeys, not for the faint of heart or mind, span in all five expansive locales. Gaile and I gather carnage from murdered heroes, forging new and incredibly powerful weapons from them.  We ultimately open the sinister gates of hell to confront the most heinous beings behind this demonic plague of our world; both Diablo in his infamy and the unforeseen Baal, the Lord of Destruction.  Many traps and deceptions of the eye await us, but for the bravest of brave, true light shall reign once again as we vanquish these horrendous foes and restore peace to our once-wondrous land …

Story

A demonically medieval tale woven through perpetual quests involving innumerable battles that carry through straight to the end. Diablo II itself consists of four acts that culminate in a final confrontation with Diablo; the Lord of Destruction expansion set adds a fifth act of gameplay and introduces yet another major boss to defeat in the form of Baal, the Lord of Destruction.

Game Mechanics

A point-and-click interface allows for strategic targeting of the unrelenting droves of enemies, along with easy manipulation of icon-driven weapons, inventory, and character skill tree systems.

Possibly overwhelming for a novice are the intricacies of the specific character classes and their detailed skill trees, where various types of experience points are earned for victorious battles that can be applied to numerous character traits, such as strength, vitality and energy, and used to broaden and reinforce character specialties such as spell-casting. Once specific experience points are applied, for better or worse, they can never be removed or reused; that said, the neverending battles do allow for constant earning of additional experience points. Each numbered level of character experience requires more and more game play in between to reach, though, and most locations must be played through multiple times (with enemies spawning again and again), or else a character’s experience level will not build up adequately enough to win boss fights with.

The game manual does little to direct the player towards the better experience point choices or to detail many specifics, so too much experimentation yielding poorly placed points often lends itself to beginning the game again on a better footing. The game automatically saves all progress over itself in the same save slot.

Once a quest area is started, if the game is exited before completion of that area, reentering the game will start at the closest safe town and the desired area will have to be accessed via Waypoint portals for transport and then conquered from scratch again. If a playable character dies, that same character spawns again back at the nearest safe town bereft of most inventory previously carried (except that which has been stored remotely in personal chests) and also sans acquired armor and jewelry previously worn.

One must only save and exit the game, then reenter it at said town and raid one’s old corpse, however, to recover everything intact, except for items carried in personal sashes and any gold the character had on his or her person. If a particularly difficult fight has been won or a large amount of experience points just earned, it is a good idea to exit the game and back up the sole save onto a disk, where it can be reinstalled back into the game over the current save if there is a major mistake made. A saved character from a previous Diablo II game may be converted to an expansion character for use with the LOD, but once converted that character cannot be changed back. Maps randomly change with each new character and game started, and a nice red overlay map showing all entrances, exits, shrines, caves and the like can be toggled on and off.

Inventory System

The ability to upgrade “socketed” weapons and armor by inserting acquired gems and jewels into those sockets, thereby adding magical attributes, certainly personalizes and enhances the gaming experience. However, there are so many magic items added with the LOD expansion set in addition to the already overwhelming amount of existing magic items, armor and weapons available in Diablo II itself that even the doubling of the storage area in LOD and the inclusion of large, wearable sashes for extra goods can’t keep inventory from spiraling out of control. The perpetual required trading and manipulation of inventory can be cumbersome and overly time-consuming.

The Horadric Cube, an acquired inventory device used for combining inventory items and morphing them into better items, has vague connotations and can be difficult to use to its maximum potential.

Rewards of battle are immediate, and health and mana (fuel for spell casting) refills are abundant. Keyboard shortcuts can be programmed for quick fortifying of characters, as well as for fast access to inventory and character attributes, etc. Constant upgrades for armor and weapons are in almost infinite supply; however, when selling items to vendors, their worth is cut in half compared to what a game character will pay to purchase them, making poor purchasing choices or lack of inventory storage space more costly.

Learning Curve

To the uninitiated, the amount of character stats, class-specific weaponry, beneficial shrines, and magic items may seem inhibiting at first. With patience it becomes easier to comprehend, and the thrilling battles will quickly draw the player in and render the less-clear points as secondary to some degree. The game can still be completed even if its finer details are not understood and the Horadric Cube’s use is not maximized.

Graphics

Diablo gets a boost with the Lord of Destruction expansion set, bringing its world into the long-overdue 800×600 resolution, with optional (and more enjoyable) 3D. Scenes are bright and richly detailed, if not still somewhat pixelated. The rare in-game movie sequences look stunning, however, and offer decent backstory information. 

Sound

The voice acting of the NPCs is superb, as is the constantly evolving medieval musical score. Sound effects for everything from changing weather to enemies’ actions and vocalizations are top-notch as well.

Replay Value

The wide range of character classes to choose from, the forming and perpetual refining of each character, and the sheer breadth of customizing traits available all serve to solidify the replay value of this immense epic. The fact that maps differ when beginning a new game also adds to replay value.

Stability

Diablo II with the LOD installed and ran flawlessly under Windows 98 SE on my Athlon XP 1900+ PC with 512 megs of PC2100 DDR RAM and an Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 Ultra video card. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Blizzard Publisher: Blizzard Release Date: 2000 (Diablo II); 2001 (Lord of Destruction expansion)

Available for: Windows Macintosh

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback

Screenshots

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System Requirements

PC—Single Player: Lord of Destruction expansion pack requires the full version of Diablo II to play Windows 2000, XP, ME, 98, 95, and NT 4.0 SP 5 or greater Pentium 233 64 MB RAM 800 MB available hard drive space (in addition to the original 900 MB Diablo II multiplayer install) 4X CD-ROM drive Direct X compatible video card

Additional requirements for Lord of Destruction multiplayer: Up to 8 players over TCP/IP network or Battle.net (Battle.net requires a low-latency 28.8 Kbps minimum internet connection) Multiplayer games played over a LAN require a TCP/IP network Enhanced graphics support: 8 MB 3D acceleration card that supports either OpenGL (v1.1.2 or higher), Rave, or 3dfx

Mac—Single Player:G3 processor or equivalent Mac OS 8.1 or later 64 MB RAM plus virtual memory 650 MB free hard disk space 4X CD-ROM drive Video support for 256-color display at 800×600 resolution Mouse and keyboard Glide, OpenGL (1.1.2 or later), RAVE, or 3dfx compatible 3-D accelerators (optional)

Multiplayer:64 MB RAM plus virtual memory 950 MB free hard disk space 28.8 Kbps or faster modem Up to 8 players over TCP/IP network or Battle.net requires low-latency Internet connection with support for 32-bit applications

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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