The Beautiful Diablo 2 Resurrected Machine (opens in new tab)

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.

> "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".

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...

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.

> 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.

I love this guy's books!