XBOX: Musings of a Madman

Introduction The preface here is that D2R is aptly named as it definitely resurrected interest in one of my favorite games of all time!

That said, I mostly played D2:LOD when it was still new in college so for anyone counting I am in my 40s now. Nowadays I am what you might call a casual gamer and XBOX has been my primary platform for awhile now. This is my breakdown of the differences after playing just about every character class build into Hell on single player offline mode while skipping the weirdo esoteric builds like the melee sorc of course! Only class that has not beat the game is Assassin probably because I never played it much in the past ...

Controls The main difference by far is the gamepad input remapping!

Full 360 degrees analog joystick with scaling velocity should be superior in almost every way to point and click movement in a top down isometric tiling game engine like Diablo. The main drawbacks are usually dead zones and drift but that can be calibrated. If you are moderately tech savvy you can even replace the 2-axis joystick control modules when they wear out if you like tinkering or saving money.

Those of us that had the muscle memory for directional patterns using movement to line up, single out, or cluster enemies for the perfectly timed devastating attacks or already knew exactly when to feather in Shift intuitively basically had to relearn how to play the game. Controller movement does not feel quite as good as it could probably because the game was never designed to be ported to console unlike D3 that had rolls, evasion, and other rotational and circular movement mechanics builtin by design.

Overall the advantages of joysticks are limited by the need to have fixed distances on movement based targeted skills that favor the precision of a mouse cursor!

Targeting Which brings us to autolock taking some getting used to while reducing player options!

For example my favorite build used to be the lightning fast lightning Sorceress but teleport fakes to move enemies into a collision is literally impossible on console. That said, I have a build with pathetic gear around L85 that can run Countess in Hell in about one minute so with godly gear like Infinity I cannot imagine it would really matter much!

It is the same story with targeting for other class skills where using simpler AOE actually becomes way stronger than it would be comparatively while things like telekinesis become tedious enough to not even use at all most of the time. Having to try multiple times to open a chest or activate a waypoint often means it is faster to just run up to things. I am not saying that Kurast runs were ever fun unless you found something but just expect that to be about an order of magnitude slower on console.

Overall this is kind of a game breaker that makes you have to change builds and play style entirely with a few exceptions!

Skills This is the crux of posting the whole comparison as the above differences combined with other changes shook up the skill trees and builds!

If we take all 210 skills of LOD and ask the question "does this benefit from pixel perfect precision?" then we end up with two broad categories. I am going to skip passive skills for brevity as obviously this is already getting pretty long winded. In fact, within the the category of YES being nerfed by console due to fixed distance and auto-targeting and NO this works the same or at least not worse than before then we really only need to list the YES category by impact. Here goes!

Teleport - OUCH! Is what the glass cannon says when their main advantage and the most powerful support skill in the entire game gets turned into an uncontrollable Occulus! If anyone knows how to get keyboard and mouse working on XBOX I am very interested in trying!

Telekinesis - Relegated to gimmick status. I do not even bind it on action bar anymore since it is so rarely useful and combined with a broken tele you might just get yourself killed trying!

Leap (and attack) - 1 point was enough to add some versatility to movement. You may never frog optimize your path again but at least it can still knockback with short bunny hop. No self respecting Barbarian ever worried too much about incoming damage!

Charge - 1 point made this the second best mobility support skill in the game. At least until auto-target makes you turn and face plant into an enemy like a drunk Sonic the Hedgehog! Still useful given that I am never going to play enough for self found Enigma. At least my Hammerdin has a crappy CTA thanks to

Ohm dropping in

Chaos Sanctuary last year but that is about as good as it will get ...

Blizzard - If it were not for the also completely broken and easily accessible sunder charm this would have been almost build breaking and a forcing function into other cold sorc builds! Or there is something wrong with me where I would normally preemptively forecast blizz, tele forward to scout, then back again to cast a second blizz. Letting the Merc do the work of scouting and pulling into blizz is mildly annoying when they wander off to admire the level design for no apparent reason.

Meteor - Slow cast means hoping your Merc can keep the boss busy without dying (since you cannot give them potions on XBOX either) but I actually switched to running fire with

Enchant using explosive

Bolts instead. Fire always needed to be hybrid so now it is just not worth playing at all past Nightmare which is basically fine with me as multiple light and cold builds are better and a few L75+ is probably more than enough.

Corpse Explosion (and poison) - The detonator is a little finicky but if you smash the button like a mad scientist it still works eventually.

Fire Wall (and bone) - Same kiting and positioning control problems BUT luckily these were never very important and mostly situational. Basically just not going to use them at all anymore!

Hydra - Arguably less impact as the forward casting was the norm, you just cannot easily put them on the edge of the screen or in choke points anymore. Basically all the fire sorc skills are kind of lame on console and they were already weaker even before with the exception of PVP maybe? Now with potion offsets and sunder cold sorc is stronger than ever and it was always arguably the strongest anyway even though I always liked light better.

Lightning Sentry (and all traps) - Pretty OK even with the fixed distance limitation since you do not actually need perfect placement for things that shoot automatically anyway!

Amplify Damage (and all curses) - This could have been worse except for how cheap and fast it is to just try again and paint the entire mob and serious bosses tend to get auto-locked just fine.

Find Item (and potion) - Do not expect to be able to cherry pick Uniques or Champions. This is the bottom of the impact list even though it is not as good as PC because you were probably going to flip to dual Alibaba and superstitiously whisper "open sesame" on every corpse anyway!

Note: I personally dislike playing elemental Druid and find it weaker and less fun than Summon, Shift, or Hybrid of those trees.

Tornado is probably as bad it ever was and

Fissure probably has similar problems as

Hydra since is hard to kite on console!

Conclusion Everything else is basically the same on PC or XBOX as far as I can tell so far.

Both platforms get the new slick graphics packs, interface overlays, and some quality of life improvements. The core game feels about the same even with item and skill updates or occasional surprises like the holy paladin no longer negating Magic immunity on undead! Not complaining as it is still the weakest enemy resistance in the game by far so merely drops Hammerdin back down to S-Tier instead of Thor the undisputed God of PVE!

My trapsin is stuck in Hell A4 with dual Spirit and my nixsin is chilling even further back probably until collecting Nat's. Such is the life of single player offline but you definitely do not need anything fancy for this game to still be fun over 25 years later!

P.S. If you are on an old Xbox One like me simply buy a cheap USB external SSD drive. Plug it in any free port and format it for Games so you can move your install there ... it makes load times on Acts, Waypoints, and Portals go back to mere seconds like they should be because the game was almost unplayable on internal HDD @ 5400 RPM!