Upon entering the world of gaming, you quickly come to realize that there are seemingly as many genres as there are stars in the sky. In typical fashion, a game will come along that defines one of these genre, and Diablo 2 is just one such game.
Released by Blizzard Entertainment in 2000, Diablo 2 set the mark for the ARPG, or action role playing game, genre. With revolutionary 8 axis movement, fast paced combat, and multiple difficulty settings to provide an ever increasing difficulty for the players, the bar was set very high.
The Diablo universe is set in an apocalyptic world where Angels and Demons are at war, and the battle ground for that fight is on Earth, the greatest enemy of all being the Lord of Terror, Diablo. As a wandering warrior, you are faced with conquering everything from unspeakable abominations to hordes of the undead in your question to defeat Diablo and capture him inside “The Dark Soulstone.” It is your eventual failure to do so that leads to the story of Diablo 3.
The play style of the Diablo series, at it’s core, has remained mostly untouched. Choose your hero, battle through massive numbers of enemies, collect ever more powerful items to equip your hero with, rinse and repeat. It is in how that goal is accomplished where the differences really shine.
In Diablo 2, players focused on beating each subsequent difficulty to move onto the next harder, which increased the levels of enemies, the experience they grant, and the quality of items that they drop. Once the final difficulty is reached, the only way to progress is by doing “boss runs”, or starting a game, and killing your way to the final boss, and then resetting the game to do it all over again.
However, Blizzard learned from players that this is not a good model of game progression. And with Diablo 3, a new system was implemented, Rifts and Greater Rifts. The process is simple, fight your way through the campaign mode once to unlock adventure mode. Adventure mode has 13 distinct difficulty levels, called Torment levels. Enter the game world on a Torment level you can handle, open the Rift Monolith, and enter a Rift. There, you will be faced with a unique army of enemies and after defeating enough, a boss will appear. Kill the boss and receive a Keystone. This keystone allows for entrance to a Greater Rift, where you can earn better items, and are faced with significantly more difficult enemies, as well as a time limit.
Where Diablo 2 shocked the gaming industry with it’s 8 axis movement, Diablo 3 cast aside the constraints of axis movement in favor of fully fluid 3-D motion, giving the player an infinite choice of direction and control, while maintaining the same isometric viewing angle.
Additionally, where the second installment in the series fell short, such as with character customization and game balance, Reaper of Souls brought the transmogrification system, allowing players to fully control the look of your hero, as well as the Torment system, to give the players much better control over the difficulty of the game experience.
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