Why I love Diablo 2, Act 1

It's weird to feel affection for dreary bogs with names like Blood Moor, even if they do look like backdrops against which Kate Bush might do an interpretive dance at any moment. But Act 1 of Diablo 2, from the first time I left the Rogue Encampment to the moment I caught a caravan east, is carved into my bones.

Everywhere you go in Act 1 feels like somewhere you could have walked to from the first game. The fields, the graveyard, the haunted monastery, these places all inhabit the same idea space as Tristram. They look like locations from old movies like The Blood on Satan's Claw, or a Hammer horror with vampires in. For the duration of its first act, Diablo 2 was a direct sequel in a way the rest of the game wasn't.

You leave the Rogue Encampment, a conveniently compact hub compared to the more spread-out later towns, and either follow a rough path to various points of interest or immediately go off-piste into the wilds. You might find an optional dungeon, or a mysterious book on a pedestal that leads to a sidequest. Where the first Diablo was claustrophobic, a single dungeon beneath a village, Diablo 2 promised wide open spaces. Here is where that promise pays off.

The deserts of Act 2, bounded by rocks that can make the stairs to the next zone difficult to spot, and especially the jungle of Act 3, a tight maze full of dead ends, will make you miss this "wide corridor" linearity. Act 1 does open-world without time-wasting or boredom.

Corrupted rogues charge at you out of the rain, and when they die their howling spirits leave their bodies like they just opened the Ark of the Covenant. Goatmen bray and impish Fallen chant "Rakanishu!" while the soundtrack's ominous drums kick in. Shamans resurrect dead Fallen if you don't take them out fast, and nests spawn blood hawks if you don't deal with them quickly too. These tricks would be copy-pasted onto later enemies, but here they felt fresh, encouraging tactical play. And there were no bloody lightning beetles.

When you return to Tristram, via a portal unlocked at a circle of sinister standing stones, the village is in ruins. It burns down around you and Griswold the blacksmith, your old ally, is an undead monstrosity who begs for death. Even Wirt's just a leg (and a pile of gold). Destroying Tristram feels like the best way to pay homage to it. Diablo was always heavy metal horror where a happy ending would be out of place. Burning to the ground is the most Tristram thing that could happen to that perennially cursed place.

Act 1 ends with the Catacombs, a dungeon that feels more like the first game than later dungeons like the narrow Maggot Lair or the showy Arcane Sanctuary, with its teleporters and backtracking. The Catacombs, buried beneath a cathedral, full of rat men and gargoyles, are atmospheric and expansive, mysterious and spooky. (And altogether ooky.) There should be lightning because I performed a ritual at a circle of ancient stones—not because I hit a beetle.