Interface

Not-so Improved Mouse Life Expectancy

One of the most common concerns raised about Diablo was the extra costs that you incurred playing the game. First and foremost among them was mouse replacement. Diablo was a constant barrage of clicks. You clicked to move, to change direction, to attack, to pick up a potion, to manage your inventory, to talk... and so on. With all the moving and attacking in the game, mice rarely held up well under the pressure of the constant clicking.

Mmmm... bad juju

This is... interesting

Diablo II tries to remedy this problem by letting you hold your mouse button over a target and you'll keep on it. Your character will keep attacking, and will follow the target as long as it's alive. However, this isn't the best solution to the problem, since a lot of creatures will die in one or two hits regardless. Unless you're chasing one of those stupid creatures that does nothing but run from you, or fighting a boss character, it's not that useful. Whenever fighting those typical mobs that surround you, we found ourselves just clicking like crazy regardless. It's a nice effort by Blizzard, but a failure for the most part.

A Red Portal?

Eeek! Griswold, dear friend!

Success!

Where Blizzard manages to succeed is in more directly gameplay-related issues. For the longest time, Diablo players wanted to be able to stack potions in their belts, since it got irritating having to replace it so often. Well, you got your wish... sort of. Without a belt, you can hold only 4 potions, but belts can double, triple or even quadruple that. So in effect, with a good belt, you can have 16 potions - twice what Diablo allowed you. However, in the situation you most need potions - namely, corpse recovery - you have quick access to only 4.

There's the drunken bum

Die foul demon!

The interface has improvements in several other areas as well. Your skills, which replace spells from the original, can be accessed by hotkeys. If I'm a barbarian and I want to enter Frenzy then Leap over a necromancer's skeletons to get to him, I can just press F1, click, then F2 and click where I want to jump. All I have to do is bind those keys to the appropriate skills (open your list with "s" then right-click.) As a matter of fact you can go into the options and bind your special skills to any key you want. FPS fans might find themselves binding their 4 favorite abilities to WASD.

The Diablo interface was pretty slick in the first place. The game wasn't overly complicated so playing it smoothly wasn't an issue. Diablo II has added a few features, but the interface has more than compensated.