Are we all clinically insane?

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.