Impressions

Ack. FSAA please!

Sadly, the first thing I noticed when I first started playing was how pixellated the game looked on my 19-inch monitor. According to Bob, I could only play at 640x480. Playing at 640x480 is okay for FPS because you have to keep your frame rate high, but when I don't care about getting 100 frames per second I want to see my eye-candy at a high resolution.

The game itself looks a lot like the original. I haven't played Diablo in years, but it doesn't look like the graphics have changed much. If anything, the game appears more pixellated than I remember, but it probably isn't since I played the original on a 15-inch monitor. I blame it on 3dfx myself. I've been extremely sensitive to jaggies and pixellation ever since 3dfx showed us the Voodoo5 full-scene anti-aliasing demos. Once someone actually points out the image imperfections in a game, you can't help but notice them later.

Don't worry about it

Hammer time!

How is it?

I think that everyone in the office who sits in the vicinity of FS has asked me that question. First of all, let me say that I've only played the game about 10 hours, but I like it a lot. As Bob mentioned before, the game doesn't have an immediate "oh my god this is so much better" feel, but you do notice improvements as you play longer. The game has been described as Diablo 1.1, and that's not bad as far as I'm concerned. The original Diablo was a lot of fun and had plenty of replay value. I'm confident that Diablo II will be just as fun if not more fun than the original.

That doesn't look fun

Neither does that

The basic premise of the game is the same: discover quest, complete quest, get reward, find a new quest. As most of us know, completing quests is fun and all, but we're really in it for developing our characters: leveling-up, gaining new abilities, and (most importantly) finding powerful items. Going on a new quest into a new area means that you get to fight more powerful monsters that give you better magical items, not to mention more gold and experience.

Hmmm.. What's under there?

A unique item!

Thankfully, Blizzard has given us even more ways to better our characters in Diablo II. Let's take a look at the skills my Paladin can learn.