Are we all clinically insane?

Admittedly - Diablo 2 (Original and Resurrected) has eaten more of my lifetime, than any other game.
But if someone asks me, which game (till now) is at the top of my list, it is The Witcher 3 (with both DLC's, especially Blood & Wine).

My friend group and I have been wondering the same thing. I didn’t quit the game, the game quit me: my level 94 main bowazon expired while I was away at college, and it was too crushing a defeat to really come back from. Then Diablo 3 came out, but it just wasn’t the same… it still contributed to me ultimately dropping out of college though, so, I absolutely understand how D1 could have gotten OP in trouble there xD Perhaps we are just a bunch of gambling addicts at the end of the day, but I do think there’s more to it than that.

We’ve all been really surprised how much we’ve been playing since we picked D2 back up to introduce some people who’d never played before, and literally cross Hell completion off an older party member’s bucket list. Most weren’t sure they would even commit all the way through a single playthrough of Hell difficulty and figured we would do the story once and be done, but everyone is still engaged and preparing for Ubers together two months in— rare for our group to actually stick with something so long, so this game is clearly doing something special even for the most habitually flaky members of our party.

I’m sure nostalgia is part of it, but I also think for me a lot of the appeal is the same reason I keep going back to 3.5e D&D: there’s just SO MUCH you can do differently when building your characters for endgame, especially now with the sunder charms, and that’s not really something I feel the sequels (or 5e) offer… at least not in the same way.

But then there’s the new stuff. Out of all the things I expected to see happen to Diablo 2, getting a new expansion was not one of them. The Warlock is surprisingly enjoyable! It’s wild to me that they made a class that feels just like a character I imagined for myself as a kid but was never able to execute satisfactorily in-game (a necromancer with

Revive just didn’t quite cut it for my demon army dreams, and the telekinetic weapons of course were not a thing— I compensated with Bone spears and a Spirit sword and used my imagination). It’s a whole new world out there with the

Terror Zones too, which feel a lot more engaging to me than the Rifts in D3 ever did, and hunting for prized demons like rare pokémon is a neat new challenge. So I can’t even just chalk it up to nostalgia when there ARE new things to do besides run

Baal ten million times to get to 99.

The chronicle hunt, however, is pure crack to me… I no longer have to keep track of my unique finds and log my runeword completion manually in a notebook, which… alright, you got me there, I’ll admit this particular habit and my encyclopaedic knowledge of runes, sets, and uniques *might* be pushing me over the Edge into qualifying for madness.

(edit: whoops this got longer than i thought and i’m not sure how to hide stuff under a cut. will figure that out when i’m back at the computer. sorry!)

Maybe we are insane, maybe we have a great hobby. Also the slot machine in D2 costs only time, not money

richhtx wrote: 5 hours ago

i still enjoy warcraft 2 tides of darkness
just what i grew up on, diablo and warcraft along with all the elite console titles of the 90s

wouldnt have it any other way

Lot of nights listening to peons saying "Tell me what to do!"

FerociousTerrier wrote: 57 minutes ago

richhtx wrote: 5 hours ago

i still enjoy warcraft 2 tides of darkness
just what i grew up on, diablo and warcraft along with all the elite console titles of the 90s

wouldnt have it any other way

Lot of nights listening to peons saying "Tell me what to do!"

zug zug

Are we all clinically insane?

YES!





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krathkor wrote: 4 hours ago

more like colloquially insane...

the staying power of d2 is remarkable.
the only other franchise lasting 10+ years was halo.

Not sure what you mean by "lasting" here, but this kind of longevity is not uncommon among fighting games. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo came out in 1994, Street Fighter III Third Strike came out in 1999, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 came out in 2000, and all of them still have tournaments today.

Even just among Blizzard games, Starcraft 1 still has an active competitive scene in 2026.