Diablo 4 Season 9 VS Diablo 2 In Gameplay: What Are The Differences Between Them?
Posted: Jul 25, 2025 Views: 79
Diablo 2 has always been regarded as the pinnacle of the series, and although Diablo 4 has made great improvements in graphics and fluency, these improvements have not made Diablo 4 more fun.
Why is there such a big gap in the reputations of players of the same series? So what are the differences between Diablo 4 and Diablo 2? Let’s compare the two below.
Emotions
Compared with Diablo 2, the emotions of Diablo 4 are the same, both pursuing the excitement brought by the sudden drop of powerful items in the process of killing monsters, but the frequency and intensity of Diablo 4 items are much lower, which is also the feeling of many old Diablo 2 players.
Lack of emotions can be said to be the main reason for the rapid loss of Diablo 4 players. If a game cannot bring satisfaction and excitement to players, it will naturally not be able to meet their needs. The root cause of Diablo 4 should be the expectations of the developers. In order to make the experience of new players better, the feelings of loyal players were ignored.
Experience
The experience of Diablo 4 is mainly about growing stronger, but the gameplay and drop mechanism of becoming stronger are very different from Diablo 2.
Even in Diablo 4 Season 9, the first feeling of players about upgrading is not getting stronger, but getting weaker. Because the first upgrade, the strength of the monsters will also increase. If you can’t change to better equipment in time, you will feel that you have become weaker. In Diablo 2, every upgrade can bring intuitive improvements.
Item Affixes
Diablo 2 has special affixes such as CB (crushing blow), DS (deadly blow), Life steal, Mana steal, Prevent Monster Heal (PMH), Slain Monsters Rest in Peace, etc. These affixes allow players to deal with certain situations in a targeted manner, which makes it very happy to brush equipment with these affixes.
Diablo 4 is a bunch of affixes that increase enemy damage or reduce damage to a certain attribute. There is no specialness except for unique items. Otherwise, there are common affixes such as resistance, armor, and critical strike, which lead to the similar equipment selection of most classes.
Corpse Retrieval
Since Diablo 3, Diablo series has cancelled the design of Corpse Retrieval. In fact, most similar games no longer have this design. Maybe it is because this design does not play a practical role.
The role of Corpse Retrieval is to allow players to improve their survivability, but in fact, as long as there is a death penalty, players are willing to improve their survivability. Once Corpse Retrieval fails, it will bring strong negative emotions, so Diablo 3 and 4 simply cancelled it. Diablo 4 canceled the design that is invalid and has negative emotional value, which is an optimization.
Game Goal
The goal stage of Diablo 4 is relatively vague. The first stage is to pass the main line, and the second stage is to cultivate nightmare dungeons and upgrade. The driving force of the mid-to-late stage goals is very insufficient.
Diablo 2 has monsters that need to be cultivated in each stage, and players can feel that they are improving along the rhythm. Diablo 2 still controls the rhythm of the entire game through the map level. As the level increases, the things that can be dropped are better, and things that have not appeared before will appear.
Diablo 4 players feel that they are just normal dungeons with little more difficult, and there is nothing new. The whole experience is very boring, and there are no expectations. Even if better equipment appears, it is basically just a higher value.
Dungeon Levels And World
Unlike Diablo 2, where each map is a level, Diablo 4 is not like Diablo 2. Instead, the main levels are placed in the dungeon. A player who has explored all the maps and Lilith Altars can feel the existence of the world except for running world events, and the rewards of world events are not very good, so the big world can be avoided.
Therefore, the world is only meaningful when the main quest is completed at the beginning, and it has little value except for PVP. This is even more true after the dungeon can be directly teleported. It was originally quite novel, although it has a lot of room for development, but it seems to have no effect in the end.
Skill Design
Diablo 4 is better than Diablo 2 in terms of skill design and operation, and you don’t have to switch between a bunch of skills. Another advantage is that each skill has some changes, because you can choose branch effects. The disadvantage is that after learning the early skills, the way of fighting will basically not change, because this skill is the core of the build and has been used all the time, and there is not much change, unless you change the build again or get unique equipment that can bring qualitative changes to the skills.
Diablo 2 is the time when skills change qualitatively at levels 24 and 30. Learning a skill that greatly improves efficiency can bring a lot of satisfaction when using it.
In general, in terms of playability and durability, Diablo 2 is the peak of Diablo series, and then experienced the trough of Diablo 3. It got a little better in the fourth generation, but it is still a flaw. If you don’t look at the art and some old designs of the operation method and warehouse function, and only consider whether it is fun, Diablo 2 is still the best of 4 generations of works.
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