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S1 Ep32: Diablo II
73 Plays7 years ago
Join Dave and Jake, causing Diablo's minions to grow stronger! Wait - that wasn't supposed to happen...
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Setup
00:00:43
Speaker
How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I am joined by my co-host... Where's Dave?
00:00:57
Speaker
Oh hey, how's it going Dave? Hey Jake, what's up? You want to record the podcast? I kind of already started. Oh, yeah. Dave has joined your party to fight the forces of evil. So it sounds like we're talking about Diablo 2 tonight? Hopefully, yes. I came prepared. I know you came prepared because you made the note, so...
00:01:19
Speaker
So yeah, download 2
Nostalgic Memories of Diablo 2
00:01:20
Speaker
of this. Yeah, download 2. Holy shit. This has been a game I've grown up with and had appreciation for over many years. Yeah. It's become very dated now, as we kind of found going back into some of it. Yes, yeah. But man, when that first came out, all the RPG aspects, the multiplayer, the
00:01:42
Speaker
Amazing for the time graphics, right? Yeah 2000 we were a little less we had different expectations I would say I had no expectations at that time now. I'm a jaded adult a journey of no expectations
00:01:58
Speaker
I don't know, a saga of no expectations, that's what it would have been called. I screwed up my reference, that's alright. So 2000, I didn't even play this game when it came out, and I doubt I had a computer that could play it, because this was back in the days when like, if you had integrated graphics, it was like, Windows desktop, that's basically
00:02:19
Speaker
That's as far as you get. Yeah, I remember we had like an e-machines kind of like tucked away in the basement And then we had some fat ass CRT monitor Oh my gosh, and that was your life and also the monitor was like put on a little box that held CD CD ROMs Okay, which would be like oh, this is a game or this is some really piece of shit software that has
00:02:41
Speaker
Icons on it. Oh my gosh. These are basically the Dark days of gaming. I came into it a little bit late, but I remember having like six floppy disks for games I had to park on literally six floppy disks and you're just like yeah, how much is a floppy disk? Well, I don't know like 42 45 kilobytes or some nonsense some crazy amount of data, but Diablo first time I saw this My friend Tony was playing it back in Washington. I was like this looks incredibly violent
00:03:11
Speaker
also kind of compelling. And it wasn't until a time after that that I was able to acquire through legitimate means the game and play it. I don't think my family would have appreciated this. So this is the one thing I couldn't like, you know, be like, hey, you know, can you buy me Diablo?
Diablo 2: Acquisition and Manuals
00:03:30
Speaker
They'd be like, would you like an exorcism?
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, we both come from separate parental backgrounds for sure. Mine were a little bit less strict in that regard, thankfully. I also like how you put in the disclaimer of Blizzard, I got this through legitimate means. I had the, what was it, 16 or 20 digit CD key that you had to get to legitimize your game purchase on installation.
00:03:57
Speaker
I didn't use Battle.net, but I mean, there was no reason for that. Later I did come back and purchase it and play it more legitimately. And that it was legitimately, which is more. And yeah, having your characters on Battle.net is a more standardized experience. You actually get to play with friends and their characters. You don't have to connect to each other directly. It was nice. It's a nice hosting system.
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, I was a fan. Really, I didn't have anybody else who played all that much when I first started. Right. Remember, I got like the battle chest and you have like the giant fucking paperback manual. Oh, yeah, yeah. That probably had like a couple hundred pages, but I had like
00:04:44
Speaker
Here's information about like the lore. Here's information about like the characters and their skills. Yeah. Here's information about the monsters. I'm like, who's ever going to read me so many times. It was, it was weird how obsessed I was with that game. Yeah. That was the thing back then. Yeah. Like you come home after school, you're like, um, we play in Diablo though,
Gothic Themes and Atmosphere
00:05:03
Speaker
right? Yeah. And you hop on and you play with your friends and diversify your class and just take around.
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of one of those one of those early games that I think got the core feel for what they were aiming for just completely correct. Like Diablo 1, Diablo 2, they have a very distinct gothic horror, like a very mature themes feel to them. And yeah, well, so we got to revisit it and see how that holds up.
00:05:36
Speaker
We've played a lot of games since then, so we've got some kind of modern comparison. Yeah. Like I said, looking back, it's very much a nostalgic lens. There's still lots of things in it I like, like the fucking music design. Oh my gosh, yeah. Which, I mean, obviously we had like that clip in the beginning. Yeah. But all the music by Matt Yeoman, I'm definitely going to mispronounce that. I can't correct you. All right, good. That I'm correct.
00:06:02
Speaker
But all the music really helped add to the atmosphere of the game where you're kind of just, even if you're in a party, you're kind of like lone wanderers, like a wandering party trying to fight the force of
Community and Gameplay Strategies
00:06:13
Speaker
evil. Like the whole environment's typically pretty dark. Yeah. And you're kind of alone. Just like oppressive desolation kind of to the world. This is a sanctuary, is a very oppressive place inherently, and pretty much everyone's barely holding on by the time you get there.
00:06:31
Speaker
You just like show up on the door. It's like you open your door in the morning and it's just like Armageddon outside. You're like, I guess I'll go get milk and that's how Diablo 2 starts. Yeah, pretty much. End up at the rogue encampment to get your milk and it just spirals out of control. You don't have milk in stock? You say it's in the den of evil isle? I guess. I guess we'll check it out.
00:06:56
Speaker
So who the fuck even still plays this game? I was surprised that Battle.net was like, oh yeah, hop on, play some Diablo 2. Yeah, Blizzard's actually, I mean, clearly they've made some other choices with the franchise recently. We might not be huge fans of it. But they do support their old games really well. When I loaded this up, I saw that there was, the most recent patch was like, added Windows 10 support and all these other things. And you're looking like,
00:07:24
Speaker
It's been 18 years. You know, it's a long time. So be patching your games. I let my Neopets die after a week. So all the same. Blizzard let your character die after 90 days. But it's still really active. There's people who, I mean, obviously literally any game will have the speedrunner community. But beyond that, there's still people just making builds, playing the game, running farming each season on ladder.
00:07:53
Speaker
I don't know what the numbers are. So when we started up here, we were playing two different characters, right? Well, obviously. Because there were two people. No, we figured we'd play the exact same class. Take turns. The exact build. Yeah. But no, I was playing as a necromancer initially, right?
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah, that got real far because I'm pretty much always played as an acromancer, but I wanted to swap off to a sorcerer to try out some like AOE farming strats. So where I'm going with this is I looked up a build because I have to be efficient or it hurts me physically and emotionally. And someone had made a build like in June of this year or something like that.
00:08:37
Speaker
It was just like completely optimized, all the information, all the calculations, everything figured out. And it had a lot of active responses, just on this Diablo 2 build subreddit. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, this is one of those OG games that people are going to play until Battle.net goes down.
00:08:58
Speaker
You know what's active when their posts are more recent than like Stack Overflow posts? You're like, oh, holy shit. There was one of those first-person shooters. What was it? Lawbreakers. I saw a video for it. That game is actually fully down at this point after a year and a half. And Diablo 2 has been around for 18 years and is still supported on official servers.
00:09:22
Speaker
Some games have more longevity than others is the takeaway. So what type of player were you back in the day? Did you like to do ladder? Do you like to do standard or maybe even like a hardcore player? I think I had like, so mostly standard. I mostly did direct connection because originally when I played this I couldn't use battle.net so I just connected people. I played with like a friend and that was pretty fun. I didn't really do hardcore.
00:09:52
Speaker
Because that terrified me. I still haven't but I've considered it on a couple occasions I think I did it once and then I died and Those people who don't know if you die in hardcore You you can't get your shit back. You're you're fucked. The game is over for you. You don't the game you die in real life exactly and my Young 13 year old brain just could not handle that at the time. Yeah, and I was like never again. Mm-hmm
00:10:19
Speaker
It is aptly named, right? Like only someone who is hardcore would play on hardcore. Yeah. Willing to lose all of your effort. I just wanted to be edgy at the time. And I have since learned that I cannot be edgy. Same week. Hardcore character name, edgelord420.
00:10:37
Speaker
But yeah, other than that, mostly playing standard, kind of like co-op experience people around the same level. Just making progress, kind of getting through the story. And playing a lot of necromancer.
Class Overview and Synergies
00:10:52
Speaker
Necromancer is pretty classic. I almost preferred myself more of a barbarian. Yeah.
00:10:59
Speaker
My first character in any game is like, go the strength route, just hit them with multiple sticks until they die. Like the murder hobo, right? Yeah. Barbarian's pretty classic. I didn't play Barbarian until Diablo 3, but back in Diablo 2...
00:11:15
Speaker
I might have had one run through with a lower level character. I don't think I ever beat it. But I remember they had a lot of abilities for resource generation. You're just like, oh yeah, you killed a thing? Well, now you're going to force potions to fall out of its corpse and things like that. That's really nice when you're at that stage of the game where potions really matter.
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like throughout the entirety of Diablo 2, I'm like drinking potions. Sorry, clothing potions. Oh yeah, yeah. Because you just take damage, you're like, well, my health's fucking gone. And I don't think regen was that common of a mechanic. Yeah, it was a much bigger thing in later games.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah. Also, potions in Diablo 2 have a quaff time, basically. It takes a while for your health to actually fill up. Yeah, it's not instant. It's an overtime effect. Yeah. So sometimes you would just be mashing, drinking all of these different potions, like, please go up, please go up, please go up. You've just got three arms coming out of your body and chugging potions at the same time while you're fighting. Well, still two handing an axe. That's odd.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, you couldn't wait until you were low on health or it wouldn't take effect quick enough. You'd have to use something like AM, the rejuvenation potion for the instant health and mana. Oh, the perfect juvies? Yeah. Just full health and mana? Yeah, those are so freaking good. But yeah, Barbarian gave you a lot more of those resources. So I feel like if you'd never played Diablo, that would probably be an excellent starting class.
00:12:43
Speaker
I like how you jump to the oh at level 18 you can like dig dig through bodies for possibly getting a potion Is it level 18? It's like 12 or 18. It's not like something you start with all right
00:12:56
Speaker
Yeah, but they're pretty beefy. Like Barbarian is more than a lot of the other classes. They can just walk up and start smashing things. Yeah, they usually excel at either two-handing one big weapon or going akimbo with like axes or maces or something. Right.
00:13:14
Speaker
They're kind of like the all-in and they kind of specialize in combat. I think they can also put points like masteries for certain weapon types, which kind of narrows down your build, and then various war cries to buff your party.
00:13:30
Speaker
So like defensive, maybe increases health or something. Yeah. This is probably one of those, uh, one of those early games that, uh, supported, uh, class synergies. Um, like you, you, you say the barbarian has war cry. Yeah. Um, helps you out. Helps you're like companion out your NPC companion. Um, but also your team. And for me, like if I'm running a necromancer, I'm going to have a bunch of skeletons summoned because
00:14:00
Speaker
I always go summon build and I'll have like debuffing enemies that my ally can also benefit from, you know, like weaken them up a bunch. And yeah, a lot of the classes here in Diablo help each other out in very considerable ways, which I think improved this kind of team play aspect, this co-op aspect of the game. You're not just all running around just beating on one dude.
00:14:29
Speaker
Necromancer isn't really helpful for the party as much. No, it's like you're saying you can put debuffs on the enemies. Yeah, which like Some of those curses are disgusting. Yeah, like single point amplify damage They take like a hundred percent more damage. Like that seems good Yeah, you hit nice. Yeah Sorry hits background sound blue doing I'm not sure what that was
00:14:55
Speaker
Did you ever try any of the other necromancer skill trees? I played around with the bone a bit, so he's got projectiles, bone spears, and things like that. Bone wall, which was really good for walling off areas. Oh my god. That's probably one of the most trolly abilities, where you just wall in people. They're kind of like, what the fuck are you doing? But a good counter for that. Barbarian has something called jump, or leap.
00:15:22
Speaker
and it's like really janky and slow but it's fun to do you can just like leap to a position that costs like nominal amount of mana it's like a poor man's teleport right but you put a point in it if you have a necromancer on your team who's like hey fuck you because they can just keep casting walls and it becomes like this impassable terrain yeah
00:15:39
Speaker
This is basically for for other more modern members of the audience who played more recent games This is maze ice wall on just this no cool down basically. So pretty trolly There's
Gear and Itemization
00:15:53
Speaker
some other classes in there I eventually switched over to a sorceress who is much more singular focused and what she does rather than having these options between the curses minions and
00:16:05
Speaker
Like bone wall things like that. She's just like a pick an element. You want like fire ice lightning?
00:16:18
Speaker
And there are some synergies between them, like there's a warmth skill under fire, which gives you more mana regen, which is very useful. Just a token point in that is really nice, because everything else you're going to be doing is casting spells.
00:16:36
Speaker
And so this build, I maxed out a lot of cold. So I had like a shiver armor, which was like every time I get hit, it slows the enemies and they take damage. And my main really only spell that I used offensively is Frost Nova.
00:16:53
Speaker
Which is a nice big aoe kind of like pulse of like blue light out from your body. Yeah, and If you just get crazy amount of points in that does a lot of damage early on drained so much mana So like half of my inventory was mana potions at any given time You need a lot of warmth to balance out how cold you are. Yeah, I hate myself for saying that Also, what's really cool about the Diablo 2 skill trees is
00:17:20
Speaker
Is some of the later level skills you can put points into actually receive benefits from earlier skills? Right. So something like Frost Nova and Light also feed into like Frostbolt. Yeah. Or is it Blizzard? Yeah, Blizzard's always a spell in Blizzard's games. It's usually really strong too. Yeah.
00:17:39
Speaker
But yeah, there will all the times will be a mastery skill. So like Necromancer had like Gollum mastery. Sorceress has like Ice Mastery, some other thing, Frost Mastery. Yeah. And that's just like this individually, it's not a skill you can use, but it gives you passive improvements to all of your skills in that tree.
00:17:59
Speaker
which is super useful. Oh yeah, absolutely. This time though, I wanted to diverge from Barbarian and go do somebody else who I really like, which is the Paladin, who is the token black guy of the game. But he's really good as far as combative auras, defensive auras, usually runs around with like a big ass shield and like a flail or some type of mace. Typically a one hander. And then also it has like combat skills.
00:18:29
Speaker
So for me, this time I was going zeal, which is just... More damage. You beat the shit out of one target or multiple targets. Yeah. So if you get a faster weapon, you just go and you're like, wow.
00:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, we obliterated the second main boss in the game at the end of Act 1 faster than I've literally ever seen it go down in a standard playthrough because of Paladins' ridiculous buffs. Yeah, hit us up, Guinness. It was that good.
00:18:59
Speaker
I was like, all right, boss, and it was dead. So I don't know. Also, the loot didn't show up for me. Later I found out it's because you picked up all the loot instill. I've developed a skill over time, Jake, called being a greedy fuck. But yeah, there's some other classes here. I mean, theoretically. I haven't played them, obviously. But you got Druid, who was like, OG, before the expansion. Was after the expansion, actually.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah, Druid and Assassin got added as part of Lord of Destruction. If I use the word before, I mean after. You gotta just be on the same wavelength here. Now, I never played him, so I kind of just assumed he was around, and almost all my time was in Lord of Destruction. I didn't pick up the game until after the expansion dropped, so...
00:19:46
Speaker
He's fun though, because you could like shapeshift into a werewolf or a werebear Which I didn't see as much playing online But I know werebear had like shock paws. So you could like essentially wap and like stun an enemy today And it looked pretty cool. You could also do like some minor summons for I want to say like support creatures. Yeah birds
00:20:08
Speaker
You can have like a bird, like a vine, a little spirit. Oh, the vine. You just mentioned vine. I know I've played them once now. Really? Because I remember there being the corpse vine. Yeah. That's what the thing was. Because as one of the mechanics in the game, a lot of the classes will mess around with corpses. Well, I mean, it would eat the corpse and give you a percentage of health back. Right. So it was a utility point, pretty much.
00:20:34
Speaker
And it would kind of just move around under the ground like near you. It would follow you around. You kill something and then it just consumes the corpse. You're like, oh my gosh, that's awesome. Yeah, the animations they had and like this little isometric game, I was like.
00:20:48
Speaker
What the fuck? Yeah. So cool. The vine always like reminded me of zerk. It was like, it was, it was a zerk unit just added into the album. Cause it's like this little tendril, but it also have like an animation for like what it unearths. Yeah. I'm doing air quotes for cause there's an animation on top of the static background resource. Yeah. That's the boring shit. Um, yeah. Druid was awesome though.
00:21:11
Speaker
They also had like elemental stuff because typically each class kind of had two main things as far as meta are pretty common. So you're either like doing shape shift druid or you're doing elemental druid where you put like a cyclone around you.
00:21:26
Speaker
Well, you have like cyclone armor you have a whirlwind or just this giant Circle around you have just wind damage which is I think just kind of his magic Yeah, and then you're also shooting out little mini tornadoes and shit This is interesting. So this is this is must explain why druid wasn't in Diablo 3 because this sounds a lot of a lot like monk. Oh
00:21:46
Speaker
So they took a lot of those ideas, I guess, and moved them over. Yeah, Druid always looked like the utility kind of like, does everything guy to me. It's like, you want to be melee? Be like a melee form. You want to be ranged? Here's all your spells. Wind your fire, shit. Who is diverse? Yeah, got a lot of options.
00:22:03
Speaker
But I didn't play him a whole lot. There's some characters I never played as, but they kind of looked interesting. Assassin was one of them. Yeah, for sure. We talked about this a little bit previous, but any time that you're playing a melee character
Trivia Game: Sound Effects
00:22:21
Speaker
that's just straight up DPS with no survivability, and you're in a primarily solo game, or you're in a game where you're gonna get lit if you're on the front lines,
00:22:30
Speaker
Um, it seems like a risky proposition to me. I know it has to be viable and there's got to be a build, but I never gave it a shot. Yeah. Um, they were kind of specialized in DPS. If they're going like more martial arts type things, they had a couple of weird abilities like under shadow disciplines. Okay. Like.
00:22:52
Speaker
hitting things with your mind. Oh, okay. But like the damage scaling on that was absolutely terrible. I think the most common is always like the traps in as the abbreviation was where you just specialize in traps and you think you have like a max of like five or six. You kind of like just put on the traps and they will automatically shoot out maybe like bolts of lightning depending on the trap was like temp summons kind of.
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah, and they, I think, went
Act 1 Overview
00:23:19
Speaker
away over time. I'm not sure if you could attack them directly, probably. But you just kind of backseated, delegated the whole thing. Right. It's like a more static necromancer, in a way. You just like dodge inside to side, letting the traps kind of light up. There were times like I would play Assassin, I would be like inside like a small ruined building and like throw traps outside and just like, wait. I'm like, die please, please die. Just watch the experience bar slowly.
00:23:45
Speaker
Riveting gameplay Yeah, I didn't do that kind of Related to that. I think Amazon was the arranged one, right? You know, like I'm gonna use a bow shoot it guys you had consumable arrows Yeah, I think that was the only Because I was an offhand item, right? You actually equipped the quiver. Yeah, you actually need to have arrows, which is a
00:24:11
Speaker
pain. As you got higher level, you'd increase your attack speed and other things. You'd just be like blowing out these arrows at like insane rates. And I think like a max tag was like 360. So you'd actually have to like run around with things in your inventory like hold up and doing PvP. I got to drag these arrows into the slot. Yeah.
00:24:31
Speaker
But they had some really dumb things, like homing arrows. They had split shot, which is just kind of like it fans one arrow into like 30. Yeah, seems pretty good. Just some really dumb things. Projectiles usually don't home in unless they're like certain spells do it. So I could see how, especially in this game where the targeting's a little imprecise, it's easy to click the wrong thing. Yeah. With the isometric view. Homing arrows have got to be pretty nice.
00:24:58
Speaker
They also have javelins, right? Like is there like melee or no, that's those are still thrown I mean it javelins were either or So you can kind of like go up and like stab on a fool, right? Or you could actually throw them but if you threw them you had like a limited account, right? I'm not sure if you got those back from repairing the item hmm. I didn't play as much as the Amazon but I
00:25:22
Speaker
It's still an interesting class, and I know that it's basically a time-tried tradition to glitch bosses out and then kill them with both. Since Diablo I, I guess, and the Butcher. Get him stuck in a stairwell to shoot him with arrows through a wall until he dies. Again, riveting gameplay.
00:25:44
Speaker
But yeah, those are those are really the classes here. So by the time Lord of Destruction came out, they had pretty big diversity for what what the classes could do. Yeah, I like how many bases they actually covered. And that point in my inceptive years was kind of.
00:26:04
Speaker
It inspired the rest of how I thought of RPGs. Right. As far as like you have your fire, your ice, your electricity, your resistances, your gear, your armor.
00:26:15
Speaker
range versus melee combat. A lot of that, I think, at least I draw inspiration from when I think of RPGs and how I want them to be was from this game. Yeah. They cover like so many of those core archetypes. And like you contrast this to Diablo one for improvement. That one literally had three classes. It was like mage, rogue, and warrior.
00:26:34
Speaker
Which is the classic RPG of melee, sexy-dexy, and magic way the fuck back. Yeah, exactly. So Diablo II fleshed out quite a bit, and it feels very different to play these different classes. One of those things that I think can increase that diversity, especially as it applies to your build, is what gear you're choosing to field, right? We talked a little bit about Bow versus Javelin, but other classes had choices as well.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, and a lot of the classes would actually have like set or sorry class specific items. Oh, yeah So like if you had a shrunken head, you knew that was for necromancers only right? Yeah touch paladin equip No, I Can't carry that. Yeah, I refuse to touch that. I will not put that in my inventory I
00:27:29
Speaker
Certain shields were limited to paladin. Barbarians had some specific helms. I believe certain scepters or wands, or not wands, small globlets.
Act 2 Overview
00:27:43
Speaker
Smaller scepters were for sorceress. Wands were for necromancer.
00:27:50
Speaker
And then the other ones I didn't talk about. Yeah. Like the Talons were for Assassin. Right. You got like your Wolverine claws or whatever basically, but Berserker claws. Yeah. I think everybody had some specific options. There was also like a general use options. Sword, for instance, most people could equip a sword, but no, obviously not everyone.
00:28:14
Speaker
I mean, you wouldn't want to on a sorceress so much because you're not putting any points into damage or anything. Yeah. Battlemage was not a sorceresses thing. That was more of a druid. Do you remember these sets at all?
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah, I actually, I got one while I was playing in this, the preparation round for the podcast. It was like Arctic, Arctic something chest had like obscenely high AC for, or just armor, I guess, where I was at in the game. I don't think I ever really completed sets. The guide said I should go for tall rashes for the sorceress.
00:28:54
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's always been like a classic one. Yeah. Because it just, I think each class has their own specific high level class set, which is class locked and you like five or six pieces. And even through like later parts of the game, it still holds up pretty well. Right. Because they usually give you like specific bonuses, right? That would be the core feature of the set is like, you're wearing three pieces of gear.
00:29:19
Speaker
Here's something cool that you can do with that. Yeah, it's usually like a stat thing But it was even better when you got things like hey this boost here if you're going sorceress like sorceress spells Yeah, I like even just plus one to all your sorceress skills. You're like, that's fucking awesome. That's pretty good And I know like a barbarian had a mortal king set Where you have like this full plate male and helm and then when you had all the pieces equipped you had like this Bright shiny aura around you. Okay, which is oh, oh so good. Oh
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, those pretty much always use the sets to attach unique effects to classes. Sometimes the stats that it gave you weren't super awesome, but it would have a really cool effect that you could take advantage of.
00:30:06
Speaker
I mean, I would never take advantage. I would ask the set's permission
Act 3 Exploration
00:30:09
Speaker
first. Right. It's more polite to do it that way. And then they had, other than the green rarity, you know, the sets that dropped, they had, they had your standard magic items, which are like a yellow-ish. Typical magic, which is kind of like blue. Oh yeah. And it had like some other property outside of like a base item, which is white. I was thinking of rares, I guess.
00:30:30
Speaker
Rares would be yellow. Unusually had at least more value, but typically also more effects added onto the item. I think your bronze or gold was like a unique item, whereas like an actual named item had some effect. But then probably the best are the fucking socketed items.
00:30:51
Speaker
because you could put gems, jewels, or runes in, and each gem, jewel, or rune will have its own effects, which you can add on. But the best part is when you combine those runes in a certain order to make a rune word effect.
00:31:10
Speaker
which are predetermined, hey, this will do this. So a pretty common one for sorcerers was you have a robe with three sockets, you put in the jaw rune, the ith rune, and the burr rune, and that makes enigma, which gives you a free ability called blink.
00:31:31
Speaker
Okay, which is typically or teleport. It's only in sorceresses skill tree normally. Yeah, but allows other classes so like If you're going paladin, you can do a hammered in Where you kind of like summon these hammers which spin out from your body and they deal magical damage, right? So you kind of like blink around and like throw out these hammers
00:31:51
Speaker
and it was like really common for pvp but oh my god yeah i never learned all of the rune words that was something that kind of got dropped off i mean obviously it was in the manual jake yeah i mean that big man that's what i missed out on um it's hard to pirate the manual
00:32:07
Speaker
Actually probably wasn't. There was a PDF somewhere. But yeah, I never really... I didn't play as much as you, so I didn't get too far into the late game farming for specific words and things like that. These runes seem nice. It's nice. I'm just gonna leave them on my stash here and find a use for them eventually.
00:32:25
Speaker
But yeah, a lot of legit depth came from trying to complete
Act 4 and Final Battle
00:32:32
Speaker
your build, round out those items that you wanted, those gems that you wanted to socket and the rune words.
00:32:43
Speaker
But that sound means it's time for trivia time. That's not the sound, we just added the sound. Sorry, I was improvising. I'll just cut that and put it back there at the front. So the idea behind this whole trivia thing that we're gonna do, like I said, I've been, I don't wanna say die hard, I'm not that, I'm pretty lazy about most things. It is almost Christmas though. I've been a Diablo 2 fan for a long time. It's, like I said, something I grew up with.
00:33:13
Speaker
And I was so ingrained in it that I kind of knew all the terminology. I knew like the correct builds I knew like so much information about the game even to the point of Knowing like the sound of like items when they drop. I want to test this. Yeah
00:33:28
Speaker
So we want to see how I hold up after all this time. So Jake's going to play some different sound effects, and I'm going to guess and see if I'm right. I think we have like 10 we're going to go through. And feel free to play along at home. I also randomized the number. So maybe it's not 10. Maybe it's one. One would be a really bad trick with.
00:33:50
Speaker
Well, let's see if our listeners at home can beat my score. And hopefully my score is good. Otherwise I will try and reevaluate my life. Yeah. Because Diablo, Diablo is the core. You've built everything up. This is all it's about. All right. So start this off here. I'm going to play a sound and we'll see what Dave thinks it is. Okay. It definitely sounds magical in nature.
00:34:20
Speaker
I want to say that is a rare item drop. That is the rare item drop. That is correct. It sounded kind of this generic sort of like pixie sound to it. It's interesting. This one might be a little more difficult. Can I get that one more time, please? Yeah.
00:34:42
Speaker
All right, so I'm between either skull or some type of necromancer shrunken head. Okay. What do you think that one is? I feel like a shrunken head would be more juicy in its sound effect. I'm going to go with some type of skull drop. Yep. It is the skull. That is correct. Oh, nice. It's going to be really hard for our listeners to be if you get them all right. So dial it back a bit.
00:35:12
Speaker
That one's gonna be tougher. You want to replay? Oh, please. I'm gonna venture out leather gloves? That one's cap. Shit. Yeah, that one came through his cap. Let's see here. One more time.
00:35:34
Speaker
It definitely sounds like metal hitting the ground. I want to say it's like a, a short metal sword. Yes. Yep. Got it. Let's see this one right here. One more time. I'm actually just doing this for the listeners at home. It sounds, it's wooden. It sounds longer.
00:36:05
Speaker
I'm gonna say pilum. I actually don't know what a pilum is, but it was javelins. Well, pilums are in the same family of javelins. Okay. So, uh, so you give us 75% credit. If you want, you can maybe, you don't have to. It's fractional now. Thanks on that. Ooh, that sounds like gold dropping. Based on Jake's face, I'm probably wrong. Um, that one is charm. Charm. Ah, son of a bitch. Yeah. Right. Right.
00:36:37
Speaker
Is that one gold? That one is gold. That one's gold. All right, so we'll do another one here. Wrap this up. That is a scroll if I ever heard one. That is indeed a scroll. And I lied to you just to try to throw you off and tell you that I was wrapping it up.
Act 5 and Game's Legacy
00:36:57
Speaker
I've got one more. That is not an item dropping. I think that is...
00:37:06
Speaker
Entering a town portal. Yeah. Yeah, I tried to I tried to throw you off because I wasn't sure if you read guest portal creation or portal enter But it is portal enter so son correct. I know I got like three wrong but get on my level It's correct on that count. So What however many we played minus minus three, I guess for the listeners at home. Yeah So thank you guys for joining us on our little Divergence here and back to our regularly regularly scheduled programming
00:37:37
Speaker
The game opens on you in the center of a small camp, stomped grass and dirt surrounded by small makeshift wooden walls. Next to you is a small fire with a few logs around it for seating for other people to sit with. There is a potion center, a blacksmith, and a grimy profiteer nearby. Outside the camp is a vast wilderness with some old well-traveled paths. You were first housed with helping a camp by clearing out a den infested with evil.
00:38:09
Speaker
Yeah, rogue encampment right off the right off the bat they're laying on the theming like the music which obviously guys have heard and are listening to and just this kind of oppressive sense that
00:38:25
Speaker
Uh, this is not gonna be all flowers and candy. You burned Diablo 2. Which you might have thought from the box art of, you know, the giant skull face. Right, yeah. I mean, people dress up for Halloween all the time. You normally get more candy than flowers, but still. I just got a bag of flour. Oh. Hmm. Well.
00:38:47
Speaker
That's odd. Yeah. It's got all the necessities. You can be healed by a Kara there. But the rogues are a whole thing of their own. They're very capable. But they do ask every single person to come through to clear out that den of evil. Yeah, it's kind of like, hey, if we're helping you out, maybe you can pull your own weight. Yeah.
00:39:12
Speaker
The fun thing about the Den of Evil, though, is once you find it's kind of along the main road, is you have to kill every single monster there. Yeah. And pretty much for everyone's case of going through this is you kill all but one monster. Yeah. And then it says monsters left, one. And you go back through the cave three times and you find one guy who was like, it was me. I was hiding.
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, for a modern game, this would have been the point where once you got down to like five left, they'll like add map indicators or something for you. I think Diablo 3 does that. But no, very first class, you're going to have to probably do some backtracking unless you're pretty thorough. But to get you started, you're likely to level up, obviously, clearing this and experience that kind of
00:40:00
Speaker
Take a look at the skill trees and see what your options are. Yeah, and This is usually where the the loop the first kind of iteration of this Diablo loop is coming in It's like you're gonna go out there. You're gonna kill stuff. You're gonna find loot You're gonna automatically equip it even though it's garbage because you're naked. Yeah, you have I think like and the weapon and that's literally it so even as like sorceress you're going through with like a small globe and you're just like whacking people on the head with it because you don't have
00:40:30
Speaker
any points you don't have any skills yet yeah it's actually kind of funny since you are basically basically naked you walk up to one of the characters that responds based off of your class just like this nude guy walks up nothing else special about him he's like ah you're a necromancer i can tell by your gird
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah Act one is very Very thematic as I said, they've got you after you clear out that den of evil. They're like, you know, we got some trust trust in you and we'll give you you know tier two quests and leads up to chasing down the Big bed to the rogues. Yeah, it was a Andariel. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, and Arielle is the big bad at the end for you said big bad. Yeah Yeah, the small bad to the rogues is a bloodraven. Yeah
00:41:23
Speaker
Who's like an undead archer who also raises undead? Yeah, it's an obnoxious fight I actually struggled with my sorceress which is like I don't remember that fight being tough But when your primary damage is projectile and she's like 200 miles per hour. She's got her like Sonic the Hedgehog red power-up boots And then she's like summoning zombies if you're shooting projectiles like hey that was blocked
Impact on ARPG Genre and Conclusion
00:41:49
Speaker
Yeah, that was that was the story of my life for like 10 minutes as I tried to fight this boss I'm like, all right. Well out of potions got a run back by my But but yeah beating her in the end is it feels real good there's like a whole animation of like lightning coming down and like Her body is like held up like it's possessed as like spirits and like lighting or shooting out from everywhere. Yeah
00:42:13
Speaker
And then as a reward, you get to have like a mercenary, which is nice. Cause, um, this is, if you're playing solo, this is, this is the only real assistance you get in the game other than maybe some barbarians ish. Like later, but, uh, those are ambient, those, those ambient NPCs. Yeah.
00:42:31
Speaker
But yeah, it's an impressive fight and kind of removing, you get the sense that you're removing the source of evil in the area. Like you're going through act one purifying basically what you later learned are the left behind waves of the dark wanderer.
00:42:53
Speaker
which is most of this game is you're doing that but uh but yeah the rogues rogues love you for it you know always great and uh you get your your first respec which you might immediately burn because you're like i don't like my first skill yeah this is one of those games where respects weren't a thing um if you put points to something that was permanent yeah if you want to redo it um make a new character and go through it all again
00:43:20
Speaker
They added it a lot later. A car gives you one respect per difficulty. Per run-through. Otherwise you have to fight bosses to collect items you can get to make a respect. And the cube. Yeah, I want to really encourage you to stick by your guns on this. Another big quest in Act 1 was getting Deckard Cain. Oh yeah.
00:43:43
Speaker
Who you don't really know who he is for the most part, but you get like a scroll from a tree you open a portal with some rocks And you go to tristram right from diablo one You tell deckard cane to get out of here deckard cane get to the rogue camp and then
00:44:00
Speaker
Deckard Lee Trisham goes back to the rogue encampment, and he identifies your items. It's a pretty useful feature. It is. Because normally you'd otherwise have to get scrolls of identify, and each scroll takes up a slot unless you have a tome of identify. Nice little book. Which is to hold scrolls. But you have to do that for every single item. But he, as a thank you, will kind of just identify all your items.
00:44:27
Speaker
Because he has all this arcane knowledge from being a badass mofo. He's so smart he can identify randomly generated items. That's how good he is. It sucks giving him like a Christmas gift. He's like, all right, Deckard, hold us your hands. He's like, oh, the ethereal breath of the dying colossus blade. Damn it, Deckard. What was I going to do with this anyway? I talk and die. That's all I got. Yeah. Yeah, he's a...
00:44:53
Speaker
He's kind of the core of Diablo franchise. He is through the series, follows you pretty much everywhere, and is the narrative exposition spout for what's going on in a lot of cases.
00:45:06
Speaker
Yes. Because your various characters will have maybe like response line to things, but they're very generic. Yeah. But Decker's kind of like saying, here's what's going on. I mean, if you actually listen to them, nobody fucking knows. Stay a while and come back.
00:45:24
Speaker
Nobody stays alive. Anyone just stay, I made tea. But yeah, eventually we make our way through and get to that, the big bad, right? And Dario, who's kind of one of the lesser minions of the prime evils. She's like a lieutenant to the prime evils. She kind of looks like Sarah Kerrigan when she's the queen of blades.
00:45:53
Speaker
I had never thought of that, but that's 100% true. Jake and I should have talked about this beforehand, apparently, because we're learning some things. I had never made the jump, but that's exactly what she looked at. If you're not laughing, you're learning. Yeah.
00:46:04
Speaker
And if you're playing this game and you're a young teenager like us, I think this is the first character that has boobs. Yeah. She's like a demon and she's not wearing clothes, obviously she doesn't need to. But she has pretty powerful melee attacks and then shoots out waves of poison and you're like, shit.
00:46:25
Speaker
So if you're under geared, this is might be the first time you have to vary up your gear for a boss. Yeah. Because I mean, when we went through, Dave killed her in three seconds. I like didn't get to see her fully load on the screen before she died. It bodes well for me that speed impresses you. Yeah.
00:46:42
Speaker
But if you're running a more standard build, or God forbid you're like a summoner like I was on the Necromancer, and all of your skeletons go away, you need some way to mitigate that poison. So you can get those antidotes. End up potions, yes. We'll just clear poison from you, which can be really useful. Like a Necromancer has a poison
00:47:04
Speaker
abilities in the poison and bone tree. You could just be like, nah, I'm not feeling the poison today. You could technically just slot that for PvP.
00:47:14
Speaker
And it's an interesting fight though. A lot of summons, a lot of things to fight. And she's gigantic. It's hard not to click her. But wrapping that up, you'll probably get some of your first real good loot drops. Maybe your first set piece. And it kind of kicks off the end of act one. You can travel into act two.
00:47:38
Speaker
talked to war of you uh see the little cutscene you travel to the east to the east and now you're in loot galane where the loot is and also the galane but nobody cares about the galane not so much on the galane i'm a bit hungry you can go for go for some galane but this is kind of your uh thematic desert in that it's a fucking desert yes and everything out there is kind of like
00:48:07
Speaker
I don't mean this in a racist term. Just sand creatures, or like, beetles, or any, like, undead, um, like, mummified things. Yeah, it's like Egypt. Basically, take Egypt, all tropes, especially into Egypt, and you just place it here. So you went from, like, 1600s, just kind of, like, England, like... Gothic horror, kind of. Yeah, very Gothic horror. It's like, in the desert.
00:48:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's pretty accurate and uh, i'm not a huge fan of the map in act two I know we haven't like broken this down too much, but it's very um Uh windy there's a lot of like where's the exit to this area? It's somewhere on an edge and act one has that a little bit but act two you've got
00:48:53
Speaker
You've got lightning beetles, like pounding you down. You accidentally hurt one of them. At this point in the game, you don't like you have quotes, resistances as like a stat. Yeah. But you don't have any points in that. Right. They're all zeros. You see, it doesn't exist. So a lot of these beetles are very frequent when you hit them.
00:49:13
Speaker
They shoot out lightning at like a random pattern and it hits you and that's like a third of your health each time. Yeah. So when I was going in as my zeal paladin, where it emphasizes like a lot of quick, successive strikes, Jake drops these town portals for me to go back and pick up my body. And like you said, the poisons are pretty common here too. Yeah. From all like the, the undead.
00:49:39
Speaker
As you get through the game, the elemental resistances are a lot more important, but this one in particular seems to hate you. But there are some interesting things that happen here. You continue to complete tasks for Deckard Cane. You assemble the... The Horadric Staff. Yeah, the Horadric Staff. When did we pick up the cube?
00:50:03
Speaker
Was that from an that's one of the I think the first or second quest project cube is a It's a major project item. Yeah, but basically it works is like a separate inventory where you can put three of the same type of Item all specified a sec. Yeah, and it will merge them together to upgrade it. Yeah, so Let's say an act one. You're getting a lot of chipped gems. Yeah, which might deal like Some elemental damage if you put it in and a weapon that has sockets
00:50:33
Speaker
You can do three of the same type to upgrade that gem. Chipped to flawed, to normal, to I think flawless to perfect. So you can increase your stuff, make it better, but also it
00:50:49
Speaker
Like you have limited slots throughout the game. Yes, yeah. You have your inventory and you have your stash. So being able to condense those is a godsend and really necessary. Yeah, and the cube has a, it's kind of a tesseract type structure where like a bag of holding or something. It has more space inside of it than it takes in your inventory.
00:51:12
Speaker
So you put things in it and they get smaller. Which is pretty useful in several places, but you complete a staff to open a tomb and fight the big bad for act three.
00:51:29
Speaker
Yes, two. I jumped ahead and I was gonna still mention, I'm still on act two, but Duriel, who's in a small arena and does a lot of melee damage and kills everybody every time forever.
00:51:46
Speaker
He's like half slug, half scorpion, 100% asshole. 99% concentrated tower of will. 5% pleasure, 50% pain. 100% reason to remember the name. Duriel. So like, you just kill him and you move on to the next act. This is act three. Start off in the Koorost Docks. This is more of your jungle thematic.
00:52:16
Speaker
Yeah, if you were going from, like, you're going from, like, Gothic horror, and you're going to, like, Egypt, and now you're going to, like, maybe South American jungle kind of thing with rivers and trees and things like that. And I think this is the first time and the only time, if I remember correctly, that you actually see the dark wanderer that you're following.
00:52:39
Speaker
Briefly, yeah, yeah And he's like his his sprites there for him. I think he kills something or someone and then he's an asshole It wouldn't surprise him like teleports away and you can't really interact with him But it's it's a really cool aside because otherwise he would only exist in cutscenes And
00:52:58
Speaker
For the uninitiated, the Dark Wanderer is the hero of Diablo I, the warrior who canonically defeated Diablo and thrust Diablo's skullstone into his head, which doesn't make any sense to me, but this guy wasn't very sponsored, and struggled internally with Diablo, and continues to do so, but is failing, is giving in, and Diablo's leading him east. For reasons.
00:53:29
Speaker
Main reason being Diablo is trying to unleash his brethren Open more portals to hell and kind of just do Diablo ask things. Yeah, so bad things tend to trail the dark wander. He just walks past and
00:53:45
Speaker
Tragedy befalls everything behind him. Yeah, so you're following him and the big thing I remember here in in act three is you're going towards the temple where Mephisto is held. Yes, and I don't remember all of the tasks that are required there. It's a lot of
00:54:06
Speaker
Kind of similar to Act Two, you're assembling random pieces for a key item to open a thing, to go down some stairs and explore and then kill the boss. Yeah. And a recurring theme here is that the Prime Evils never just sit and wait to be rescued. Mephisto was already corrupting the priesthood that was set there to... Make sure he stayed in prison. To guard him.
00:54:37
Speaker
That's pretty much always the case. You never want to be on guard duty for one of the prime evils because you'll always just end up like a thrall of some sort. Unless you're an angel. I think that's the only exception you get.
00:54:49
Speaker
I will keep that in mind in case I am ever an angel. Yes. And you have to defend a primeval. That's true. These conditions both must be met. But yeah, Mephisto is a heck of a guy. He's the oldest, the eldest primeval, the Lord of Hate. Yeah. So I actually really like Mephisto. His design is really cool, kind of like a spindly type spirit.
00:55:15
Speaker
Yeah, he's like very, just a deformed skeleton kind of. It's like, it's nowhere near human, but he's got this skeletal structure that is also gigantic. All of the prime evils are real big, but his room had a lot of like just ambient people screaming and like all this stuff going on. Oh, and the floor is all just like dead bodies. Yeah. It's 100% dead bodies. Yeah. So he's a bad guy.
00:55:44
Speaker
If, yeah, if we didn't make that clear, um, Visto is bad. Dialogue breaks down almost immediately. Visto needed another, another interesting fight. I think he was more straight up damage, right? Like he was just, if I recall correctly, he was doing, um, various magic old hacks. Oh, okay. Yeah.
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't remember his fight too well. I usually get carried through this one by somebody. That's the thing. You remember a lot of Act 1 and Act 2? Because they're kind of like the hubs. But then you kind of get rushed or someone will power level you and go through and kill things. Yeah. And you'll get the experience. And you'll get access to things. They'll get you from normal mode to hard. Yeah. And just a lot of that stuff gets kind of swept under the rug. Yeah.
00:56:40
Speaker
Yeah, this is probably the act I remember kind of the least. But the next act, which numerically I think would be act four, is you're essentially in hell. Mephisto has opened the portal and Diablo has kind of gone through and you're in the Pandemonium Fortress, which is kind of like
00:57:02
Speaker
the last vestige of Can I say quotes humanity here? It's like the outer gate. Yeah to hell kind of you with uh Tyrell the archangel who's been trying to keep Tyrell Tyrell material material. Yeah, I've always said Tyrell really I'm not gonna call him Tyrell Okay, the reason the reason I thought he said Tyrell is like he's established. He's black in later games. This is true
00:57:31
Speaker
Anyways, yeah. The angel. Yes, yes. But the fortress is kind of like this very nice pristine marble and gold. It's very... I'm not gonna use the word pristine. Yeah, yeah. Compared to like the rest of hell, which is like stone and fire. Would you use the word hellish? I would, Jake. I would say it's very hellish. But like this little vestige here, the pandemonium fortress is kind of like
00:58:01
Speaker
When you first go into the nether in Minecraft and you make like a little makeshift base and you're like, here's where we won't be shot by anything. It'll be our little safe haven. Yeah. Cause it's very small.
00:58:15
Speaker
I don't remember a lot of this one. I remember that there was an angel who was turned who you actually fight. Yeah, the gay angel is war. It's only because I know little snippets of lore from Diablo because they come up later.
00:58:36
Speaker
He essentially betrayed Tyrael and was helping out Diablo. So he's like one of the first quests. But for how small Act 4 is, it's like one of three quests. Yeah. Another one is like, go to the Hellforge, destroy Soulstone. And then you actually go to the Chaos Sanctuary to actually fight Big D. Big D. That's what people call him. His friends, his enemies.
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah. Diablo is a heck of a punk. And the only thing I remember about this fight is that my necromancer summoner build did not work well on it. No. He's pretty good at clearing mobs, even as we're friendly. But you have to go into this big sanctuary. There's like three branching paths. And you have to activate these seals to essentially draw Diablo into the Chaos Sanctuary so you can fight them. Right.
00:59:31
Speaker
But he can, like, put you in, like, a bone prison. He can just fucking hit you in the face. Yeah. He can shoot out a lightning, like a lightning beam. He's got, like, a Diablo. I was going to say Diablo. He's got abilities like Diablo. Oh, interesting. Yeah, no, I was going to say Godzilla lightning breath. Yeah, it's like I think that's apt. You would think fire, but no, no. He breathes lightning for some reason. Yeah, he's an asshole.
01:00:00
Speaker
But that whole chaos sanctuary is very... It's like an actual sanctuary. Like you still have like lava and fire everywhere, but you kind of see like ruins of what you might see in like a really nice church. Right. And you have people who are putting Iron Maiden on you. Oh yeah. Which is...
01:00:21
Speaker
The fucking worst. You could recount for the the audience. What was the effect on Iron Maiden? Thanks for asking, Jake. So I'd go around like as a barbarian and just like hit stuff as you do. The effect of Iron Maiden, it's a curse that gets put on you so that when you deal damage to something, you also take that much damage. Reverse thorns, basically. Yeah.
01:00:44
Speaker
So it sucked because you could put on you while you're like mid attack animation and you just fucking die. You just blow yourself up. Constantly. Well, I guess. Hate when you blow yourself up. Yeah, no, it's it's it's pretty rough. You think you think there's any correlation to this place being called chaos sanctuary and the fact that the world above is just called sanctuary?
01:01:10
Speaker
maybe lower i don't know probably not possibly but uh yeah you've uh at this point shattered mephisto's lord of hatred soul stone killed diablo because you know you're you're you're big you're bad and then the game ends i guess unless you've got the um lord of destruction expansion yes so you've killed the lord of hate and the lord of terror um there's got to be another lord for you
01:01:38
Speaker
We'll get there. The Lord our God. Next is Jesus. So basically, you interact with Tyrrell again, and he's like, glad you killed Diablo. Oh, by the way. Yeah. You have like another cutscene for this new act, the expansion of Act Five. Yeah. And you are transported to Harrogath, which is... I like that sound. That's an interesting name. This is essentially like the home of the barbarians. It's like a...
01:02:08
Speaker
Tundra. Oh, yeah Tundra act the snow biome. This is you went north, right? Yes We've been going east we now go north. So we finally asked for directions. Your father never listens to me But this is where bail is at yeah, he's a punk
01:02:28
Speaker
He is a punk. Bail is a punk. That's all I've got on bail. Thank you for your input, Jake. Yeah, I remember the the barbarian stronghold here is kind of your base for this act. And you can go out and there's barbarians just fighting demons and the planes, basically. Essentially, that city is being besieged by demons. And the barbarians are out there trying to hold their own and doing a heck of a great job. Yeah, barbarian is a good class.
01:02:58
Speaker
I don't know if we said that enough, but But yeah, there's always there's there's tasks in between but what are the main goals here and Basically the same way you were following the dark wanderer and Diablo on this one You're kind of trying to get to bail right who is gone into this underground sacred magical stronghold For another magical item of sorts. Yeah, I'm being vague because I don't recall
01:03:26
Speaker
There's something about the world stone. The veil is corrupting the world stone. You did read the Wikipedia. I remember some cinematics, too. Yeah. But you have to go through Mount Ariat, which is protected by these ancients who are like these three barbarian Nephilim.
01:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, which is that's the terms reused later Comes up a lot more in the diablo 3. Mm-hmm But after you fight them you can go into mount ariat and down towards the world stone Where bail is kind of camped out? Yeah, but when you finally get to there Yeah, as you're going down to bail He'll just like attack you randomly yeah from like
01:04:12
Speaker
out of the blue. Yeah. Like a tendril come out or hit you or you'd be hit by some magic damage. How would you like tentacle? Nobody will know. And like the whole time he's always laughing at you.
01:04:32
Speaker
So yeah, you can tell by that sound he's pretty evil. I mean, that's not the laugh of a good man. At least not a sane man. He's not even a man, to be honest. Yeah, he's kind of a tentacle beast. And he's a punk. He has you fight through all of his armies to get to him.
01:04:53
Speaker
And when you finally do I know that actually speed runners run through this and they'll like avoid all of the All the enemies usually you don't want to fight things unnecessarily, but the room before him you have to kill everything in it I think there's like a lock basically on the door. Yeah, there's no
01:05:09
Speaker
there's like waves you have to go through meanwhile he's just like sitting on a throne and kind of like watching yeah yeah he's a bit of that's a lot as i said but he um once you actually get into the main fight the thing i remember about him is not only does he summon tentacles all over the place but he makes clones of himself yeah a little like illusions type things yeah
01:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's not fun. But he is the ultimate fight to round this out. So once you've defeated Bail, that's the last prime evil. They've got to go regenerate back in the nine hells, or however many hells there are. I think it's nine.
01:05:54
Speaker
but as it turns out too late he's corrupted the world stone so our bro Tyrell has to destroy it and he destroys the world stone which a lot of people think is a bad thing
01:06:12
Speaker
I can't remember the exact like fallout from that, but I think it was... Fallout 76. Oh, that's what it was. It was Fallout 76. If he left it corrupted, then something terrible would happen. And if he destroyed it, something bad, but not as bad would happen. So good that I read up on this.
01:06:33
Speaker
Better the Diablo you know than the Diablo you don't. Leave it there and outside Diablos will come in. But yeah, that is the base game story-wise.
01:06:48
Speaker
but a lot of it extends beyond that. Cause like we said with multiplayer, there is a metric fuck ton of PVP that goes on. Oh yeah. But a lot of that is what she said was like grinding out your gear and rounding out your build. But you need to have a lot of like runs of going back and killing things to do that. And there's some other content in there being able to fight special bosses and things.
01:07:16
Speaker
Or a fun thing you can always do is put Wurt's leg and a town portal in the Roger cube and open a portal to the cow level. Yeah, there is no cow level. That's a different game. Yeah, but they've used these recurring levels since Diablo 2, kind of like a hidden secret level.
01:07:40
Speaker
do some tasks to get into. Diablo 3 gave you the pony level. But back in the cow level, you're basically dealing with these... They stand upright, they're on their hind legs and they've got like pole axes, right? Or like... Helbovine. Yeah, helbovine. And then there's like a king, isn't there?
01:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, the cow king, but if you killed him, you could not open another portal to the cow level. Like next difficulty, maybe? Yeah, it might be per difficulty. But the thing that's awesome about it is, as soon as you go in, there's all these like cows. And by all these cows, I mean like,
01:08:18
Speaker
It's a higher mob density than the rest of the entire game. Yes. It's often hard to like see the ground for how many cows there are. And all of their voice lines were done by like developers, not cows. Yes. All right, cow. Uh, your script for this one is the same move. No, we're not getting anything. Developers pick it up. Mo, mo, mo, mo. Mo, mo, mo, mo.
01:08:41
Speaker
But, as indicated by the fact that Diablo 2 is still playable, and we played it immediately prior to this recording this week, it has had some impact on the industry. It's been lasting. I mean, obviously it was good enough to justify Diablo 3.
01:08:59
Speaker
But it's also just created the action RPG genre, right? Other games like Grim Dawn, which we've played. That's another game. Path of Exile as well. Path of Exile, right? Diablo 3.
01:09:15
Speaker
Yes, Diablo 3. It was probably the least related to Diablo 2. They all have their own twists on it, but they inherit heavily from the systems in place in Diablo 2. And this core, go out, kill things, get loot, sell loot, upgrade your character kind of, loop. Have that nice progression. Yeah, Torso is the other one I was trying to think of.
01:09:40
Speaker
But yeah, it just completely launched this genre. And looking back on it, I think Diablo 2, it's a little more repetitive than I remember, but that's probably because I revisited it a couple of times. And it's a little harder for me to play all day.
01:09:57
Speaker
But I think that's entirely just because of everywhere I've been since then. Yeah, a lot of things like Diablo 3 obviously smoothed out a lot of things for like picking up gold. In Diablo 2 you have to manually pick up every single item that drops. Yeah.
01:10:14
Speaker
which can be tedious because they don't show by default. You have to hold in the alt key or some other interactions where, like you said, clicking was kind of slightly fuzzy or some other thing. It's just a little bit clunkier because of when it came out. But for the time.
01:10:31
Speaker
As a sorceress with the potion belt, I had to fill it up with all these mana potions, drag them down from my inventory. Once I used those potions, if I didn't pick up more, I'd have to drag more in from my inventory. They just removed that entire thing by just making it like, here's your potion buttons, you press the button and you get it. And then they don't even use mana as directly for the most part in later games.
01:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, they try to make it a lot more convenient. And sometimes it's hard to go back to that. Things that take you kind of out of the game are, I think, harder to justify now, or mechanics that interrupt the gameplay, I would say. But back then, I mean, this was 2000. Like, what an amazing jump forward this was. You consider the previous games like single player, three classes, had none of this, or took place in one town. Very simple.
01:11:24
Speaker
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game that jumped as much from the first entry in the series to what Diablo II ended up being. To quote Chris Crocker on this, leave Diablo II alone with me.
01:11:41
Speaker
But I believe that that's what we've got planned here and what we've got time for, so I would like to thank everyone for listening to another episode of Soapstone. As always, you can reach out to us on Facebook at Facebook.com slash Soapstone Podcast. We love to hear from you guys. You can also send comments into our Gmail at Soapstone Podcast at Gmail.com. We love to get those as well. But until then, we'll see you in the next one.
01:12:09
Speaker
We will see you in the next one.
01:13:38
Speaker
you