Introduction

Developed by: Blizzard
Diablo 2 official page: http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2/

Finally

There's a reason why I like Blizzard so much - they always manage to hook me up with their cool products during important occasions. During the holiday season of 1997, they wished me a Merry Christmas in the form of a Starcraft beta account. Four months later, they shipped the finished game in time for my birthday in April. Now here we are, in April of 2000, and they've done it again by sending out the Diablo 2 beta CDs. Their timing is simply impeccable. After waiting anxiously all weekend while other sites and beta testers received their Diablo 2 copies, yesterday FS received two of the four precious beta discs that we were expecting from Blizzard (the other two should be in shortly we trust, unless FedEx delivery folks decided to help themselves). Dutifully, James and I dropped what we were doing today to play a couple of hours on Battle.net so we could write up what we thought. <sarcasm> Such lengths we'll go through to satisfy our readers…</sarcasm>

A gargantuan beast

A dead beast - look at that hand

Installation

Installation on James' machine went through with out a hitch (Dual Celerons, Win2000, TNT2, 3.68 detonator drivers). He was able to run Direct3D enhanced mode without a problem. My machine (P3 450, Win98, GeForce DDR 64MB) however, refused to run in Direct3D - I tried both the 5.13 and the 3.68 drivers without any luck. The game would go through menus and load screens like a slug before finally freezing every time I tried to load a game over Battle.net. Software mode worked fine on my machine, except for one unfortunate lockup, so at least I was able to give the game a go that way.

Crossing the bridge to danger

Den of Evil - doesn't sound cozy

Picking Characters

As I decided almost two years ago when I first heard about the character classes, I picked a Necromancer for my first Diablo 2 player. James chose a Paladin, and we were off and running. For those of you who have been in a cave the last couple of years, Diablo 2 features 5 different character classes (D1 had 3 - the Warrior, the Rogue, and the Sorcerer) - Barbarian, Amazon, Sorceress, Necromancer, and Paladin. Unlike the first one, which differentiated its classes almost entirely by fighting and magic ability, Diablo 2's character classes feature special abilities that don't necessarily pertain to magic. For example, the Paladin has a "might" ability that gives him and others near him added power. These special abilities make Diablo 2's character classes more unique and arguably, more fun to play with.