Comment by egfx

Did you ever end up playing the expansion set? Strangely I don’t see it talked a lot about in the context of Diablo 2 at all but it added new levels and 2 more playable characters (barbarian, assassin) to the game and really expanded the playability. I have some inside into the thinking behind the franchise because I started my career at Blizzard working on D2 expansion set. Anecdotally we had an X-men vs Street fighter game that I found appreciated play style at a very top level. Whatever character you chose that’s how you played. It was street fighter after all and I’m convinced that some of the specializing in character attention in d2 and wow was inspired by the way the coin-op played and QA as well as the game designers played nonstop. Now this sort of attentive character specializing outside of role playing games is all over the place and it’s not novel anymore but back then this was very innovative and immersive in an action game. The Lost Vikings and Rock and Roll racing another blizzard classic had the same mechanic.