Where do you stand on separating the art from the artist? Maybe you've mulled this over when considering whether to watch a Roman Polanski film or listen to a Michael Jackson album - and Lord knows, the history of art would be impoverished indeed if we stripped it of all its monsters. There's never an easy answer. In the wake of the appalling recent revelations about the studio's "frat boy" culture, this is now a question we have to ask ourselves about Blizzard games, too.To get more news about Buy Safe Diablo 2 Gold, you can visit lootwowgold official website.
In some respects, this beautifully produced remaster of Diablo 2 is unlucky to be Blizzard's first release since the state of California filed suit against the studio. Much of the work on it was done by Vicarious Visions, a blameless outfit only integrated with Blizzard earlier this year. (Indeed, its former studio head Jen Oneal was recently named co-leader of Blizzard, a new broom presumably intended to lead reform there.) What's more, the original 2000 game was made by Blizzard North, an autonomous studio quite distinct from the SoCal mothership. Diablo 2 is an adopted child of the Blizzard culture at best. But Diablo helped set the Blizzard tone, too, with its none-more-metal aesthetic, kitchen-sink lore, cutting-edge online multiplayer and endgame of abyssal depth and complication.
It feels important to lay all this out, but it's not my place as a critic to tell you how to feel about playing Blizzard games in 2021. That can only be a personal choice. Personally, as someone who loves the studio's games, I am conflicted and still undecided. But I've let it have no bearing on the rest of my review.
That's not to say I don't have complicated feelings about Diablo 2: Resurrected for different reasons. Diablo 2 is a beast of a game that, 21 years on, still casts a long shadow - over the tortured development of its successor (a fate Diablo 4 doesn't seem to have escaped, either), and over the action-RPG genre it defined. As influential as it has been, it's a singular, bloody-minded, almost awkward piece of work, and a defiantly unmodern one.
The important thing to know about Diablo 2: Resurrected is that it has done almost nothing to change this, for better or worse (spoilers: it's both). You get a few minor but significant quality-of-life changes, including a shared stash for your characters to exchange loot in, automatic gold pick-up, and - since the game now has console versions - well-implemented gamepad support. But this is the limit of what the developers have permitted themselves for fear of altering its character too much. You're still playing item Tetris in a tiny inventory grid. You're still running to your corpse, empty-handed and heart in mouth, to retrieve your armour, weapons and cash when you die. You're still browsing a list of public games with garbled titles like ONLYDURIELPLS in the lobby if you want to play online. You're still restricted to a single respec per difficulty level - and if you end up with a character build you don't like after that, tough. This purist attitude is certainly the right call, but it comes at a cost beyond the realm of difficulty and game balance. For example, local co-op play on consoles, such a delight in Diablo 3, has sadly not been implemented here, because it would have stretched the game too far out of shape. In fact, it would have required a fundamentally different approach. To understand why, you need to look under the hood of this unique remake. Fortunately, Blizzard has allowed you to do this with one button press, instantly revealing the game as it looked in 2000 - pixelated, grainy, isometric, low-resolution and very much two-dimensional. This isn't a remaster in the most widely understood current sense: the game's original assets, updated or redrawn to run in higher fidelity on modern hardware. Nor is it exactly a remake: the content of the original game remade from scratch, to a greater or lesser degree of faithfulness, in a brand new engine. It does exist as the latter, but only as a dumb 3D audiovisual overlay that mimics the output of the original game 2D game logic running underneath. This is the game you are actually playing. Your detailed, 3D avatar reaches out to strike the monster next to her, but it's the chunky pixels underneath (or rather, the maths running underneath them) that determine whether or not the blow connects.
