In more than one way, Diablo II was a precursor to Blizzard's wildly successful World of Warcraft. At the time of Diablo II's release, PC RPGs where mostly among the CRPG genre (Clicker RPG), based around the AD&D style of character sheets, dice rolls, and adventurous storytelling. Diablo II took an ARPG look at the darkest of the D&D and Christian cannon, and made a game that submerged itself in an adult take on the fantasy genre. This style gave it and its predecessor a unique place in the RPG market, but what made the game infinitely replayable was it's thinning of plot focused adventure in favor of what made RPGs a game: stat management, class building, and loot. That isn't to say that Diablo II doesn't feature some pretty sick lore, so much as it is to say that even without that lore, Diablo II would still feel distinct in its own right, and its legacy owes nearly all of its clout to the gameplay.
MMOs were certainly around at Diablo II's release, but none had quite taken the world by storm the way Blizzard would in a little less than a decade proceeding this release. Blizzard's take on game design has always been on gameplay over all else, with worlds easy to get lost in but only for those willing to read supplementary materials or those with the patience to overwrite the addictive pull of their games' designs. While it is possible to stop and smell the flowers in both Diablo and WoW, it requires intense restraint to slow down the propulsion of these games' core loop: leveling up and looting. In particular, it is the loot that really shines in both of these games. The synergy of spells and ablilities your chosen class would learn as you went encouraged particular builds and play, but loot gave you the opportunity to truly excel and push these class boundaries into becoming a singular powerhouse. Diablo II in a lot of ways was like the proto-MMO, even if MMOs had preceded its release. It encouraged multiplayer play, with the more in a given game lobby, the more experience you were able to accrue. Likewise, trading rare loot or working together to collect the correct runes to create that endgame gear became the whole reason to play once the final boss was finished for the first time. A single playthrough of Diablo and quitting is a bit like beating a dungeon in an MMO and quitting: you've seen what was there, but you haven't really played through it all.
Diablo II's max level is an intimidating level 99, one which takes copious amount of hours to actually reach. Leveling, however, is only ever the real pull for the first half or so of the gameplay. While leveling is great for unlocking skills and abilities and enhancing specific stats like vitality or strength, the game slowly transitions away from this being the main pull in favor of gear by the time you reach about half of max level. Gear comes in many different shades, from basic gear to magic gear (enchanted with various buffs such as health leech or regenerating mana or double damage to demons) or sets (where buffs become unlocked the more pieces of the set you have equipped). Some of the irony in this design is that while some of these magic loot drops are absolutely core to many of the best builds in the game, they are always designed around simple gear with something called slots. Slots allow you to place gems in them to essentially customize the buffs your gear can get. Greater than gems for your slots, however, are the runes. Runes are rare (oftentimes extremely rare) drops that come from particular bosses that can be combined in different orders to create rune words, which give you incredibly powerful endgame buffs that outmatch just about everything in the game. Most end game builds are essentially built around particular rune words. Replaying large chunks of the game an absurd amount of times is paramount to being able to gather the runes required for your particular build, something very akin to grinding raid drops in an MMO. The addictive nature of playing a game to try at what is essentially a slot machine in order to win the particular drop you need to complete your build is the basic draw of the game. It plays into that hopeful "maybe this time..." mentality that is the basis of a gambling addiction, the intense desire to try one more time for that big win. This loop has been perfected by Blizzard in the years since with their integration of basically the same system on a larger scale with WoW or loot boxes in Overwatch. It has become such a permeate part of the gaming landscape that people wonder if this may have detrimental effects on children who are being conditioned to gamble at a young age. It's fun, but not without its ethical issues. Regardless of the good-or-bad debate around this type of game loop, Diablo II very much popularized it and, in a lot of ways, perfected its implementation (and I would argue far more morally sound than subsequent attempts, such as loot boxes, by not allowing real world money to be spent in game).
What is most notable looking back at the legacy of Diablo II is in how much basis it created in the gaming landscape for the next several decades. Loot-based gameplay is now in everything, from RPGs to shooters, and can even be found in survival games, a genre that could be considered the loot-based-RPG's opposite in that its sense of empowerment is built around allocating resources and self preservation for lengthy periods of time and against great odds. Diablo II feels very much in all things these days, and easily put RPGs in a more accessible state. Games such as Fable, Dark Souls, and Borderlands owe a great debt to this mammoth of gaming, the game that is still played online today despite sequals, despite imitators, twenty years later.
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