The most shocking thing I've noticed when first time playing D2 is the fact that it has poorer visuals compared to D1. D1 looks more colorful and vibrant while D2 looks desaturated and less detailed despite the fact that D1 was released 4 years before D2. The game looks more like some unfinished beta version despite being a bigger project. Also D1 has much nicer looking surroundings (especially Tristram, shrine rooms, libraries), more versatile bestiary and better lighning effects which adds to the atmosphere. How did they fuck this up?
>>11988402Wtf, why did the pic compress? Here's a better quality.
When you are rendering polygons with those texture at that fps and taking into scope the quadrilateral field of vision (from henceforth referred to as FOV), you have to understand that there a number of factors going into the transposed image and what the actual requirements are here and how they are going to be optimized, is there multiplayer? et cetera. Now, before I begin breaking it down, we are going to have to look at the landscape of the time and what exactly we are working with when dealing with Diablo 2 when compare to Diablo 1. So, you have your image posted in the OP, and the first thing we are going to look at is (cont.)
>>11988431It's not just about the games themselves, it's about the experience, the visual harmony, the pixel integrity. Let's dive into the aesthetic synergy of Diablo 1 and explore why it absolutely obliterates the look of Diablo 2 and, more importantly, why the subtle alchemy of its graphical engine, when properly tuned, shines through in ways that most gamers have yet to comprehend. When you start Diablo 1, the first thing you encounter is its masterful use of fixed resolution rendering matrices. The game's 640x480 resolution may seem a bit pixelated by today’s standards, but that’s exactly where the charm lies. Every single pixel in Diablo 1 feels like it has been painstakingly hand-crafted and dynamically rasterized using an adaptive subpixel generation algorithm. The way the game uses color dithering to merge its limited palette creates this ultra-smooth visual aesthetic, especially when transitioning from the gothic cathedal corridors to the hellish underworld depths. It’s like watching a pixel ballet.
>>11988438Diablo 1’s lighting system is a marvel of its era. The game’s lighting is powered by a dynamic shading algorithm that uses a low-poly pseudo-global illumination technique ( the devs referred to it in passing, "the squishy shadow effect"). Unlike Diablo 2, where light sources feel more pre-baked and procedural, Diablo 1 gives every light source a sense of weight and presence. A flickering torch doesn’t just illuminate a patch of wall it breathes, creating organic light pools that feel alive. The radial ambient occlusionnot to be confused with the much more sterile screen-space ambient occlusion in Diablo 1 ensures that shadows wrap around characters and objects with a texture that could only be achieved with old-school, high-caliber low-res volumetric textures.Now, let’s take a moment to talk about the environments, because Diablo 1’s dungeon design is second to none. While Diablo 2 might boast a more expansive world, it’s the modular tile-based architecture of Diablo 1 that really grabs you. Each room feels like it has a distinct personality, due in no small part to its manually-encoded spatial meta-mapping a technique that forced the development team to rely on naturalistic geometry to achieve a sense of chaotic but controlled disorder. In Diablo 2, on the other hand, the maps are procedurally generated with texture blending algorithms that, while technically superior, have a way of flattening the personality of the game world into a sterile landscape of sameness. Diablo 1 is full of delightful randomness in the RNG (random number generation) that gives every playthrough a genuinely unique flavor. That random fireplace placement? Classic.
>>11988443You can practically hear the crisp, low-pitched audio samples of Diablo 1’s character movements, where every footstep reverberates with the kind of clarity that Diablo 2 can only dream of. It’s all about frame interpolation, and Diablo 1 really does push its 2D sprites to the limit with trilinear texture refinement that makes everything feel silky smooth despite the constraints of its 1996 tech. And those character sprites, with their high-polygon count faces (for the era, at least)? Absolutely sublime. Each swing of a sword, each flicker of a fireball, feels more visceral in the way it cuts through the air. Diablo 2, in contrast, relies on more rigid, less flexible sprite sheet manipulation that, while technically impressive in its layering, simply lacks that organic, handmade quality. On the sound front, Diablo 1 doesn't just have atmospheric background music. It uses lossless dynamic range audio rendering, integrating low-fidelity ambient sounds with highly-compressed but intentionally fuzzy audio. This creates an aural tapestry that Diablo 2 simply cannot match due to its more "open-air" soundscape approach. The digitized audio compression in Diablo 1, combined with its linear audio synthesis engine, amplifies that sense of claustrophobic tension, whereas Diablo 2’s more expansive audio environment lacks that same immersive fidelity, something that’s crucial when you’re fighting in the bowels of hell. It’s like Diablo 1 is wrapping you in its audio embrace, while Diablo 2 just plays a soundtrack and expects you to figure it out.
>>11988446There's a certain rawness to the whole package, a sense that the developers were scratching a digital itch that had never been scratched before, using cutting-edge tech to push the boundaries of what was possible, even if it wasn’t quite as polished as it could be. Diablo 2, in contrast, came after the technological maturity phase, so everything feels more refined but also more sterile. The "edge" was dulled in favor of fluid animation transitions and texture filtering. In the grand scheme, Diablo 1 outshines Diablo 2 because its visual and auditory feedback systems were crafted with love and chaos in mind, pushing the pixel density modulation just to its breaking point, creating an atmosphere that’s simply electric in its raw, unrefined beauty. Meanwhile, Diablo 2, though technically superior and undeniably smoother, lacks that same grittiness and organic pixel-perfect analog approximation that made Diablo 1 such a masterpiece of 1990s technology. It’s like comparing a handcrafted analog synthesizer to a polished but soulless digital plugin. One has that authentic, visceral, "feel it in your bones" quality that Diablo 1 nails.
>>11988415Right is better.
>>11988462So, when you load up Diablo 1, take a moment to appreciate the beauty in its low-level, hardware-accelerated rendering quirks and bitmap-driven immersion, because in the end, it’s not just about what’s better on paper, it’s about what evokes that nostalgic pixel euphoria, something that Diablo 2 never quite managed to replicate.
>>11988469Are you serious? Diablo 1 better than Diablo 2? Do you even know what you’re talking about? Let’s just throw out every single point you made because it’s completely backwards, nonsensical, and frankly, ridiculous. If you want to live in the past and cling to that dated mess of a game, fine, but there’s no way Diablo 1 is better. Period. Let me break it down for you:>Resolution and Pixel QualitySo you’re saying Diablo 1’s "fixed resolution rendering matrices" were somehow an achievement? Are you out of your mind? The game looks blurry as hell on anything above a 14-inch CRT! 640x480 resolutionand you’re calling that a visual masterpiece? It’s like trying to look at a painting through a fogged-up window. Diablo 2 bumped that up to 800x600 a literal leap and had better textures, smoother visuals, and higher clarity. Diablo 1 looks like garbge in comparison, and you’re sitting here calling it "charming" because you can’t see anything clearly.>Lighting SystemDynamic shading algorithm my ass. The lighting in Diablo 1 was atrocious. It was like a lazy flicker at best, a chaotic mess at worst. Every torch, every light source, it’s like they just threw a single light source and hoped for the best. The shadows were a joke! Diablo 2 had a much better lighting system, with properly calibrated light sources that made things look natural, immersive, and, dare I say, realistic. You actually get to see stuff instead of squinting at a dark blur with pixelated smudges.
>Environments"Modular tile-based architecture" in Diablo 1? Oh, that’s a fancy way of saying the maps are boring and repetitive. Every dungeon felt the same, every corridor a carbon copy of the last one. Diablo 2’s hand-crafted zones were built with actual detail. Each environmentfrom the deserts of Act II to the jungles of Act IIIhad its own distinctive identity, and you actually felt like you were progressing through unique areas. Diablo 1? Just random rooms filled with more random rooms. Don’t even talk to me about "spatial meta-mapping"the game’s dungeon design was lazy and cheap, with zero variety.>AnimationsYou’re comparing Diablo 1’s clunky, jerky sprite animations to Diablo 2’s smooth, fluid movement? Are you really about to argue that those stiff, robotic character movements were somehow superior? I get it, you like the nostalgic fuzziness of low-resolution sprites, but come on. Diablo 2 was a step forward, with much more natural character animations and smoother combat. There’s no comparison. Diablo 1 looks like it’s running on a broken Voodoo 3 card.>AudioYou’re gonna sit here and tell me that the “lossless dynamic range” and “digitized audio compression” in Diablo 1 somehow creates this “atmospheric tapestry” of sound? Really? What a load of nonsense. The music in Diablo 1 is fine, I’ll give you that, but it’s like listening to an ancient MIDI file loop over and over. Diablo 2 had actual orchestral music that didn’t sound like a broken CD skipping. The sounds were sharper, more immersive, and the ambient effects didn’t sound like a drunken foghorn blaring through a tin can. You want "claustrophobic tension"? Just turn up the volume in Diablo 2’s Tristram hat’s how you build atmosphere, not by drowning everything in outdated sound samples.
>Graphics and Visual Fidelity"Handcrafted sprites" and "low-res volumetric textures"? This is 2025, not 1996. Diablo 1 is, at its core, a primitive mess of ugly graphics and terrible texture work. You want raw and unrefined? You got it! And you’re gonna sit here and try to argue that it’s "better"? Get real. Diablo 2 didn’t just innovate, it revolutionized what a hack-and-slash action RPG could look like. The monsters were larger, more detailed, the environments were more dynamic you could actually see stuff, unlike Diablo 1, where everything’s a blurry mess. The “pixel density modulation” you’re raving about just makes things look like a bad early-90s flash game. Here’s the kicker: Diablo 1 may have nostalgia on its side, but nostalgia doesn’t make a game "better". You’re clinging to a broken relic, pretending it has some kind of deeper quality because you’re emotionally attached to it. Diablo 2 is the true evolution of the franchise. It took everything Diablo 1 started and made it work. It was better, faster, cleanerDiablo 1 was like trying to use an old school typewriter while Diablo 2 was a fully functioning laptop.Look, I get it. You probably have this weird attachment to Diablo 1 because it was your first, but don’t sit here and pretend it’s the superior game. Diablo 2 is a masterpiece of its time, a technical achievement in every sense. It expanded on everything Diablo 1 did right and fixed everything that was broken. Diablo 1 was a rough draftDiablo 2 was the final product. That’s the truth, and no amount of nonsense about "pixel art" or "dynamic lighting" is going to change that. Just admit it and move on.
>>11988431Thanks for the explanation.There's something unimitable about Diablo 1 color scheme, it looks tastefully colorful (for instance the red light coming from a dark blue stone doorway which is kinda reminiscent of Dario Argento and Ken Russell movies, it also reminds me of some gory gothic horror fantasy movie such as Pit And The Pendulum).And Diablo 1 screenshots look like some medieval oil paintings. It's dissapointing how lifeless Diablo 2 looks in comparison despite having more locations, gameplay variety, bigger story etc. The moment I saw this generic green grassfield where you can run circles around enemies like a footballer I couldn't immerse myself into such unserious setting (while Diablo 1 has tight labyriths where you can easily get swarmed by enemies no matter how strong you are. It has that distinct religious horror element and it feels like you're descending into hell itself).Also Tristram (and its inhabitants) feels more lively (especially Grisword, Adria, Farnham) compared to generic and forgettable npcs in Diablo 2 towns who don't seem to care and don't have any interesting stories to tell.
Is this what we've come to? Flooding a thread with the most obnoxiously long ai generated response possible?
I too thought D2's graphics looked oddly flat, then I got a Glide wrapper and then things looked like how I remembered them.
>>11988927Whats a glide wrapper?
>>11988913I thought he's just reposting a discussion from the usenet or some ancient forum. would chatgpt start an answer with "Are you serious? Diablo 1 better than Diablo 2?"
>>11988402Diablo 2 uses a lot of palette tricks and has a far higher number of frames per character/enemy, which means sacrificing the ability to do touch-ups and optimize sprites, even though both come from 3D renders. Quality sacrificed for quantity.
>>11988484>>Environments>"Modular tile-based architecture" in Diablo 1? Oh, that’s a fancy way of saying the maps are boring and repetitive. Every dungeon felt the same, every corridor a carbon copy of the last one. Diablo 2’s hand-crafted zones were built with actual detail. Each environmentfrom the deserts of Act II to the jungles of Act IIIhad its own distinctive identity, and you actually felt like you were progressing through unique areas. Diablo 1? Just random rooms filled with more random rooms. Don’t even talk to me about "spatial meta-mapping"the game’s dungeon design was lazy and cheap, with zero variety.kek this is so wrong. Most of Diablo 2's areas are just open fields, medium-width twisty-but-one-dimensional caves, and dungeons with so many doors and rooms that they lose all purpose. Combined with the fact that Diablo 1 has tactical combat and Diablo 2 is just a dps run, the superior level design of Diablo 1 is also a lot more important.
>>11989095>Diablo 1 succ: sexo demon >Diablo 2 succ: random winged bitch Downgrade.
>>11988402You'll observe this a lot with games in series where there is a jump in technology/graphical standards between the two games being released.Everything you're saying about Diablo 1 in comparison to Diablo 2 also applies to TES1: Arena and TES2: Daggerfall.Arena released 4 months after Doom and was in development at the same time. Since no one expected a 3D world in games on a higher-level-of-detail than Wolfenstein 3D before Doom, Arena's gridbased 90-degree angle engine was perfectly acceptable. This gave devs time to implement all kinds of cool stuff that you'd see in games from 93 and 94, like animated sky textures where the sun moves through the sky during the day. Really cool faked per-pixel lighting and shadows. Amazing weather effects. You can visit all of Tamriel and each region has a different theme and texture set. There are like 16 texture-sets for dungeons. Water has depth in towns/wilderness, you can swim, and there are boats.Daggerfall was developed at the same time as Quake and was a weird hail-mary attempt to create the biggest and greatest 3D world of all time in a time where 3D engines barely worked. They did a lot of things right, and gameplay is way more complicated than Arena, but all kinds of graphical effects, gameplay features, and QoL features are completely missing from Arena. Lighting is now shit. Sky textures are a .jpg. Weather effects aren't as good. There are 5000 times as many dungeons, but 1/3 the number of unique texture sets. Towns have exactly 4 texture sets, though at least they have variations for the seasons. Exteriors and Interiors run in entirely different engines. Interiors have full 3D water like Quake. Exteriors? Water is a flat non-moving texture that just changes your character's height and speed to 1/16th and wobbles the camera.>>11988960The way it breaks down into sections makes it seem like AI. He probably told it to respond like a sassy little bitch. You can do that with AI now.
>>11988415The ui takes up more of the screen on the left so theres less to render
>>11988431>>11988438>>11988443>>11988446>>11988462As much as I agree that the aesthetics of D1 are better than D2, you are without a doubt one of the cringiest faggots i've ever seen on this entire website.
You know those plastic Medieval weapons they sold at Halloween stores? That’s the aesthetic Diablo 1 had.
>>11989295OP is the first person I have ever seen bring this up so heaven forbid a little effort is put into a detailed response.>>11989169Good post, another example is the jump in tech resulting in a huge gain in detail on some areas, and a huge loss in detail in other areas. FF7 to FFX, character models are night and day, but the 3d environments pale in comparison.
how many of these posts were written by AI?
>>11989508All the ones that waste your time
>>11988402Have you tried playing D1 recently? It looks blurry as shit
I've always liked the monsters and animations in D1. I think it has to do with how dangerous enemies become in the caves. Every attack feels like it can stunlock you, even with high block. D2 lets you just facetank so attack animations feel less important.
>>11988402>Why does Diablo 2 look worse than Diablo 1?I think I can only agree when it comes to some of the player character sprites clipping, and that's forgivable with how much more they were working with.
>>11989353>jump in tech resulting in resulting in D2 being shit. They pretended to be Id Software inventing new cool graphics, but the end result was they half assed simple 2d graphics and half assed new 3d graphics, game looks bad either way. I had voodoo card and have even now btw. Even UI looks bad like fucked color palette, total failure.
I don't think I've ever directly compared them like that because both games are ugly and probably the worst thing to ever happen to RPGs.
Real question is why would anyone play with the weird perspective mode on? It looks awful, playing D2 isometric is much better looking
2 was a cash grab
