The Beautiful Diablo 2 Resurrected Machine | Hacker News Reader

The Beautiful Diablo 2 Resurrected Machine

fabiensanglard.net

138 pointsphenylene49 comments

I just replayed diablo 2 a month ago, but since I don't have a windows computer, I went for the Path of Diablo[1] mod. This is an excellent mod that stays pretty close to the original experience, but makes the game a bit faster and more comfortable for the 2022 gamer.

[1] https://pathofdiablo.com/

Why is this guy torturing himself like this? He picks about the hardest way to do everything he does. He breaks his back trying to build his setup around Thunderbolt and fails, like it has failed him on his previous peripheral-sharing post. He uses a silly $150 workbench intended for component reviewers instead of a $50 mini-itx case. Instead of getting a slightly larger case he spends probably over a grand on a different GPU.

At this point, I don't know what to do with desktop machines. USB is a mess and Thunderbolt motherboards either don't support video or have stability issues.

You use the video output on your GPU like a sane person.

Streacom design at its finest.

The best Streacom can do is a Power Mac G5 with achondroplasia?

Fun read as I also played that game in the past.

In the article he mentions "the game has changed" with new quests and a synergy system but these weren't added to resurrected.

The extra act came with the D2:LoD expansion in 2001 and skill synergies became a thing in the 1.10 patch in 2003.

Yeah, the only real changes in the initial Resurrection release were the obvious graphical improvements, and some fairly minor quality-of-life improvements to the stash system.

That said, they have started to make actual gameplay changes since then. Last month gave us the first gameplay patch to Diablo 2 since 2010: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo2/23788293/diablo-ii-r...

Weapon swap glitch was also 'fixed'

The game changes in dimensions beyond synergies and quests. For instance, there are new runewords. D2 is the pinnacle ARPG with a die-hard community, so even minor changes to area levels, runewords, or skill attributes can open up all sorts of new possibilities.

I’d personally prefer if the gaming community wasn’t so monoculturally driven to a prescribed set of game attributes (e.g. end game content, DLC, battle royale, loot boxes, skins, sandbox, open world). D2 isn’t for everyone nor should it be :)

yea, and you can play a pre-LoD mode as 'classic' when making a new char since then ...

You are killing me since I was thinking of synergy system as "that recent thing"

> "Maybe Diablo 2 difficulty and savageness belong to another era."

The popularity of the dark souls series would indicate otherwise. I feel the invisible hand of upper management here, using words like "casual" and "accessible" to justify the decision to make games "easier".

Dark Souls lacks permadeath. People are fine with hard but ultimately fair, die and learn the patterns then eventually win.

Diablo 2 could erase weeks of work by one monster spawning an unfair combination. Practically nobody is truly looking to bring that back. Though, people are fine with that work improving further runs with rogue-likes.

Have you even played Path of Exile? People LOVE that shit. Endgame bosses hit you for integer multiple of your HP, the only way you survive is through theorycrafting how to mitigate it (or be one of those losers who has to follow a guide)

Hell regular bosses LOVE massive damage spikes. I'm with you that it pisses me off and I since left for greener pastures (Grim Dawn)

Path of Exile doesn't have perma-death. There is a hardcore league, but dying simply drops your character to the softcore league (rather than deleting it).

This is incorrect. Dying drops your character to Standard league, which is a league that almost no one plays. It's mostly used for testing mechanics/interactions/bugs, etc. Hardcore PoE _is_ permadeath.

Standard isn't so much a 'league' as it is a dumping ground for all the stuff you did in past leagues

Which is effectively the same for anyone playing hardcore, because otherwise what’s the point

It’s not even just endgame bosses that can wreck your day in PoE, a few unlucky rolls and even the first boss you encounter is going to be a tough one to beat.

> Diablo 2 could erase weeks of work by one monster spawning an unfair combination.

Only if you play Hardcore mode, which is entirely optional.

Hardcore mode adds huge amounts of fun to the experience. You feel so invested into what's going on, calculating how much risk you can safely manage, etc. Leaderboards are more interesting. Finding secondary gear for when your main eventually dies.

Dying because I was being stupid is just part of the fun. Re-role. Use some saved resources to skip the early grind.

Dying because server crashed, internet lagged for 6 seconds, etc. Those hurt. They are the vast majority of deaths.

Taught me not to open Evil Urns in the Crystalline Passage without proper preparation. >:(

There is also an experience penalty on softcore in hell. 10% experience at lvl 98 is a few weeks of work for me.

Getting to level 99 or playing hardcore mode isn’t the objective for 99+% of players.

Diablo 2 is a fairly forgiving and moderately casual game imo. Most builds require only one skill for damage, and respeccing and how easy it is to get a character rushed means it’s easy to experiment or fix builds.

Where is Jamella Editor Resurrected? D2 was a great into to memory and hex editing as a kid :)

Edit: wouldja look at that https://github.com/dschu012/d2s

Also fun: https://d2esr.fandom.com/wiki/Eastern_Sun_Rises_Wiki

I played D2 pretty obsessively for a few years during my teens and never bothered going higher than 92, rolling new builds was always more fun than endless baal runs for me.

> Though, people are fine with that work improving further runs with rogue-likes.

Sad to see people contrasting Diablo II, an actual roguelike, with "rogue-likes".

Diablo II is not a roguelike. Diablo 1 it's based on a Roguelike, Moria, but with real time features and no permadeath.

> but with real time features and no permadeath

No permadeath? Compare the parent comment:

>>> Dark Souls lacks permadeath.

>>> Diablo 2 could erase weeks of work by one monster spawning an unfair combination.

But more than that, even Rogue itself didn't have permadeath if you didn't want it. My dad taught me to shut off the computer just as you died. Turn it back on and your save is preserved. Other roguelikes will just let you turn on a cheat option.

That's cheating. On Nethack and derivates, there's the wizard mode but just for exploring.

It's a one-player game. What does "cheating" mean?

Diablo II is a real-time game so it is, with all due respect, a rogue-like.

Diablo 1 is probably the only notable game you could legitimately describe as a real-time roguelike.

Diablo 2 drifts pretty far from the formula, to the extent that it largely defines the "action RPG" genre as we still know it.

Diablo 2 has hardcode mode which actually pushes it closer to roguelike than Diablo 1. I'm not sure what other differences do you have in mind.

I'll take your word for it; I'm not familiar with the differences between I and II.

Rogue-likes were turn/tick-based engines, played in a terminal, using the curses lib (or equiv). Diablo is no Rogue-like, good sir

my credentials: I'm the creator of what I think was the world's first commercial-only, traditional Rogue-like game (AFAIK)

Roguelikes, in the traditional sense, are definitely turn-based games.

bingo

Rogue and then its Rogue-like descendents: Hack, NetHack, Angband, Dwarf Fortress, DCSS etc

Slightly related, it's been posted before; OpenDiablo2 is an effort to re-write Diablo 2, in Go:

https://github.com/OpenDiablo2/OpenDiablo2

> One thing we never got to do was slay Diablo clone. Installing software to track IP address of the server was too unappealing.

This was actually changed in 2.4 (the patch with the ladder season added). Diablo clone now is tracked by the region.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo2/23788293/diablo-ii-r...

Yep. And here's the tracker updated by volunteers https://diablo2.io/dclonetracker.php

Kind of off topic. What an impressive post! It's refreshing to see that the open web is not dead yet.

I'm wondering why they even bothered with an external GPU, when an APU would have way more power than the best GPUs of the time even dreamed of.

The game mentioned is Diablo II: Resurrected. See system requirements[0].

Minimum: Nvidia GTX 660, AMD Radeon HD 7850

Recommended: Nvidia GTX 1060, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT

They aren't terribly steep, but they are not on the same level as the original game[1]!

> DirectX compatible video card, 8MB Glide or Direct 3D compatible video card for optional 3D acceleration

[0] https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/284798

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-2-resurrected-pc-system-requi...

That's close to Skyrim remastered requirements and that works ok on an integrated Intel.

A lot of games list nvidia something or AMD something as "minimum" requirements, but I haven't had a dedicated video card in about 8 years and many games I want to play actually work just fine (I don't play many 3D shooters and the like obviously), and my laptop is five years old.

The new game "Diablo 2:Resurrected" has more modern requirements ( i believe an NVidia GTX 1060 card for example).

> It also made me reflect about Diablo III and how I felt about it. While it was a fun game, I found it too safe to be enjoyable. Players have separate loot, loots always matching their character class, items bound to the account, and no trading. People were siloed, making it a game played side by side, not together.

Very much agree with this. It is true for basically all games today. I remember Ultima Online in the early days where you could basically do anything. It just made every discovery and achievement more valuable and exciting. I miss the risk in today's games. Maybe I am old but games these days rarely can excite me at all while I still like to play old games from time to time.

Amazing setup for amazing game ! Thanks for this post, i love to read you :-)

Interesting read. I have never played Diablo 2, but might have to try resurrected now.

I found Diablo 3 boring, but hearing about some of the differences maybe Diablo 2 will be more interesting to me.

Grim Dawn(kinda gritty) and Torchlight II(kinda cartoony) were also a good time for myself and friends. I only bother to play with friends though, I'm not really into singleplayer.

I love this guy's books!

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