It's the Artwork, silly.

OK so we're cheaters

After cheating up a couple of characters to get all the abilities (a Necromancer and a Sorceress) and skipping around a few levels, Wayne and I both discovered a big reason why this game took so long - the art. We were dumbstruck by the varied and detailed artwork in each of the areas. Where the original Diablo featured only a few different styles or settings, Diablo 2 has dozens.

Nova at a wider spread - also check out that tiki mask statue

I'm out of RAID - chain lightning will have to do

It's purrrty

Particularly impressive was the spider cave we came across. Look closely and you'll see portions of the area covered in spider silk and woven up in a characteristic spider fashion. Foliage in the desert varied wildly from the lush plants we saw in the jungle scenes, which is exactly as you'd expect. Even the torches, wells, and doodads are all very unique from one area to the next. There's nothing generic or tiled looking about the environments.

Meteor's on its way down

Kaboom!

Going back to the screenshots, we were primarily interested in capturing the higher level spells and of course the more interesting looking spells. Give the screenshots a little time to load - they average around 100K in size because we didn't want to compromise too much on the image quality. We'll have more juicy details on Warcraft III and our visit to Blizzard later this week.

This ice ball...

...explodes on contact