I played the shit out of Diablo 1 when it came out (I was an impressionable tween at the time), but by the time D2 dropped I had lost interest in the formula, so I never made it past the first half of Act I until recently. I must say, with only a shred of nostalgia to fall back on, I enjoyed my belated full playthrough as a skelemancer yet hardly more so than RoS, which is in fact a solid entry in the genre when patched (that said, PoE and especially GD both top it). Indeed, with D1 as my tried-and-true yardstick for what a numbered Diablo game ought to be, it's hard not to view the whinging about D3 being a betrayal of D2 as anything more than overstatement in retrospect.
The stern single-mindedness of a single player's slow-burning descent into the Abyss, the sense of imminent ruin that stems from an all-pervasive, visible darkness, the clattering soundscapes that occasionally dispense with tonality altogether – by contrast, LoD's Neo-Wagnerian score, with its heavy-handed quotations of 'Mars, the Bringer of War', Tristan und Isolde and Pelléas et Mélisande, among others, is a compendium of filmic clichés – are all but lost in the 'progression' from D1 to D2. What was gained in terms of gameplay arguably compensates for this newly stunted atmosphere, which is already more colourful than it needs to be, but let's not kid ourselves: none of it even so much as approximates the gruelling katabasis that takes you from Tristram (civilisation) to the Cathedral (its metaphysical underpinnings), the Catacombs (the death thereof), the Caves (intimations of wilderness) and, ultimately, Hell (the savagely searing Outside where there is no room for Man, where his triumph is a trap), which had an unimpeachable, minimalist logic to it. By contrast, D2's pragmatic maximalism stops short of impelling the least bit of claustrophobia throughout – instead, it treats the player like a mere tourist on a sightseeing quest.
Nor have I ever cared for multiplayer in this genre and even less so for trading (which is why I favour GD, incidentally), so neither of those arguments points towards D2's purported superiority as far as I'm concerned. I even prefer D3's endgame with its bounties and rifts to the eternal return of Baal runs. Anyhow, I had a good time with D2 and am glad to have made up for a twenty-year old missed connection, but I doubt I'll be revisiting it again any time soon.
(unless you starve all day and night drinking some redbull's piss).
