What went right?

Nothing.
>Endlessly right click in the hopes of getting your perfect runewrod
lmao

>have to grind one billion hours for a one in a billion chance to find a high level rune (which you might miss if you're not alert 24/7 by the way since it just appears as a random junk drop) of which you need several to make one runeword of which you need several to make fun characters
terrible game design that can only be defended if you suggest Blizzard invited duping and cheating

This is total bullshit. My brother in law is 24 and never had a gaming PC growing up. I hooked him up with one for cheap and he's been obsessed with all PC games for the last 4 years straight. When I told him to get Diablo 2, he was legit hooked for months. Couldn't put it down. Grinded the fuck out of online and absolutely loved it. This is a kid who grew up with shit like Halo and Oblivion.

Also StarCraft. I legit don't know anyone else among my age group who loves StarCraft as much as this kid does. And his only taste of RTS before this was Halo Wars on Xbox. Take your bullshit about these games only being good to nostalgia fags the fuck out of here.

The UI was really good back then and it works even for today.
Sorceress are not even the best endgame class, get real dude.

Most addictive boomer game of all time. Everything feels right.

>All of Act III
Yeah, I don't know what it is about it, but I can't disagree with you here. Act III sucked ass in 2000 and it still does
>Sorceress dominating every aspect of the game
Have you every tried playing a kicksin? Easily the best damage dealer in the game. I hear even some variations of necros are just as OP as the sorceress.
>ancient UI
That, by itself, is a dumb criticism. People think that if a game doesn't have a flat UI like Endless Space, then it's "ancient" and automatically bad. Here's the thing, though. Endless Space made minimalistic UI look good, because they put in the effort. For most modern games, it's soulless garbage, because people can't make UI anymore. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the UI in diablo II. You don't need to press more than 2 buttons to get somewhere (inventory, skills,e tc.), your char info is readily visible throughout the game, there is really nothing that stands out. It's not uniquely fantastic, but it is by no means terrible.

Attached: Endless-Space-2-preview-14.png (1000x563, 294K)

that UI skin is hideous

>top tier visual and sound aesthetic
>top tier location/act and area design
>clearly defined and varied classes and builds
>layers of randomization in layouts and loot for replayability
>$20-30 buy to play model when subscription games were far more prevalent
>perpetually active community in vanilla and modded servers
obviously it's outdated and pretty imbalanced though

>end game items are hard to find

Attached: 24npwle.jpg (640x806, 25K)

>sound aesthetic
>mfw i seriously consider replaying even fucking Torchlight cause of the OST
Uelmen's a god desu.

>Sorceresses dominating every aspect of the game
Did you mean paladin?

youtu.be/uS8hMuHV7Sg
I wish he worked on more games, or even released his own albums. He could even work on films. Uelman is a fucking God tier composer.

atmosphere, art style, music, first act starts off retard-proof, good difficulty scaling, easy to play hard to master

>ancient UI
so you want either a phone game touch screen or a right-click mouse-based menu system?
ok retard

the company was still run by visionaries with a genuine passion for making great games instead of soulless bean counters interested in min/maxing their profit margins only

right about everything, especially atmosphere and pre-cgi horror/fantasy movie aesthetics which is nonexistent in Diablo 3
I replayed it few years ago and it's still the same, it's not really about standards but more about cultural aspects connected with game at a time, including movies, books, art, other games, which modern audience won't get. It's not nostalgia, but playing it I can feel going back in time with distinct connection to all of these things.

This is the natural progression of "reward scheduling" -- hiding gameplay behind cookie clicker unlocks.

Unlocking runes, as you described, is the same as unlocking level 2. You had to do skinner-box, bird-brain button mashing to do it, just more of it (the reward schedule was increased)

Durability.

everything dude...