| i enjoyed the first diablo. and i don't have a disdain for twitch games--i fire up unreal for a botmatch more frequently than i'd like to admit. but D2, which should have been the fantasty-twitch bomb, just didn't cut it for me. perhaps it was because i've been spoiled by the baldur's gate series in the years since D1's mac release. you can't find peaceful solutions to hostile encounters in D2 (not that you'd always want to, but BG gives you that option often enough). the D2 quests basically consist of killing heaps and mounds of evil, after you've taken off the thin veneer of back-story; fetch-this quests also boil down to simple blood-letting. you kill a spectral wraith, and you get a random item such as leather armor--doesn't make a lot of sense, since it's hard to see why an ethereal creature would carry such a thing. this is, again, in contrast to BG, in which dispatching a baddie nets you the sword he was hacking you with, or the armor he was wearing. i guess i want my fantasy adventures to make a bit of sense, magic and stuff notwithstanding. BG lets you pick pockets, throw long-winded and sometimes intensely funny taunts at opponents before battle, cancel an enemy mage's magic with your own magic, and lead NPCs down dialogue paths to obtain more information; when talking to NPCs, you can choose to be polite or mouthy. i'm less than halfway through the D2, but it's going to be difficult to finish; there's not a lot motivating me to go on. simply put, D2 bores me. sorry to bring this back to baldur's gate again, but i think i would have enjoyed D2 a heck of a measure more in a baldur-less world. but now there's no going back--i'd rather immerse myself in a richer, more tactical game world that might be slower-paced than slice thru another army of personality-less monsters. |