I'm currently slashing my way through the PC port of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2, which came out the other day. I was a big fan of the original games on the PS2, and even though militant fans of the classic Baldur's Gates may scoff at this hack-and-slashy spinoff of the much deeper, more complex PC counterparts, there's a simple pleasure to be found here.

18 years on from its original release, the game is much how I remember it: fast-paced, and far less story-driven than any other game you'd associate with Baldur's Gate. In fact, it's much more akin to Diablo, and is one of the first 'Diablo-likes' to have moved that formula into a 3D engine. What differentiates it from today's ARPGs - like Grim Dawn, Diablo 3, and Path of Exile - is how challenging and self-contained it is. It made me realise that, as the genre has become more and more centred around endgame and drip-feed engagement, it's lost something that Dark Alliance 2 had.

Now, I like all those above-mentioned ARPGs, seeing them as rather mindless power-trips where you can quickly get yourself into a position where your health regenerates way faster than enemies can possibly deplete it and you see how many enemies you can tear through. The problem is that I wouldn't play them long enough to feel challenged, and when I'd question why these games offered so little resistance Normal or Hard difficulty (even in Veteran mode), the common retort would be 'Just wait until you get to Torment XV in Diablo' or 'Once you get to the final boss on Ultimate difficulty in Grim Dawn, it'll be so hard that you'll wish you were never BORN.'

Golly.

The thing is, to get to the challenging tiers of Grim Dawn and Diablo 3, you need to play through the whole game to unlock them, and in the case of Diablo 3 you need to complete the campaign and get your character to Level 60 or even 70. That's dozens of hours of grinding and cutting through demons like rancid butter just to attain the dopamine hit I got after spending just an hour with Dark Alliance 2.

When i started playing Dark Alliance 2, I carried my complacent modern ARPG mindset over it. Within the first hour, I got unceremoniously cut down by the undead in a haunted manor. I'd barely got out of the prologue, and I was dead (for perspective, it was about 12 hours before I'd experienced my first death in Diablo 3, and that was because I got really cocky jumping into the Nephalem Rifts).

My first death in Dark Alliance 2 was a wake-up call - it felt good. I had to change my approach, think a bit more strategically, and actually be present in how I approached campaign encounters rather just tearing through it to get to the next level, the next difficulty, the next numerical increase to enemy attack and defence. Encounters feel a bit more designed than those of modern ARPGs too, with extra considerations like traps, pits, and puzzles forcing you to be a bit more mindful.

Dark Alliance 2 feels like a classic fantasy adventure rather than dash for the endgame.

The Dark Alliance 2 story is pretty standard fantasy fare, but by packing its value into a single campaign it actually does a decent job of offering side-quests and character-based quests that give you a little more motivation to do them other than XP rewards. The game has actual characterisation too, with NPC's personalities and stories improved by the fact that you zoom into a first-person view when talking to them. From this perspective, you can appreciate character models that are more animated than those of far more recent games like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, with moving mouths and a body swagger that usually reflects what they're saying (a testament to the amazing power of the Snowblind Engine). Again, by being designed around a single campaign rather than endless repetition, the game fleshes out its world more - even if that world is small by modern standards.

The campaign focus doesn't mean that Dark Alliance 2 lacks replayability, it's just based around story rather than grind. Each character has their own personal quest alongside the main quest, there's an 'Extreme' difficulty setting, as well as two unlockable characters; that's another thing that's been lost to time - the thrill of unlocking new characters upon completing the game rather than paying for them as extra content.

Dark Alliance 2 is an old-school ARPG that respects your time, and doesn't force you to sink dozens of hours before getting to the 'real' game - which is usually the endgame these days. Of course, the sheer popularity of Diablo and the like shows that I'm clearly in a minority that doesn't get much joy out of endless grind and obsessing over the min-maxing and finicky calculations of meta-play. Today's RPGs games put players on a kind of dopamine drip-feed, first requiring you to put in a ton of time to get your kicks, then staggering that enjoyment out over endless difficulty tiers and 'Seasons' to keep you playing and playing.

Will Diablo 4 offer more substance for those who don't play for the endgame?

Of course, Dark Alliance 2's qualities come with the caveat that it's an old game, and its scope is limited by the fact that it's at heart a PS2 game. Obviously the more recent games - the Diablos, the Path of Exiles, the Grim Dawns - are more fluid and more action-packed - but they're all too eager in their pursuit of infinite endgame (don't even get us started on Diablo Immortal). It's a shame, because mechanically all these games hit the right notes for me with their vast enemy swarms to cleave through and spectacular depth of levelling and abilities, but without offering much challenge or friction to those of us who can only spend 20 and not 200 hours in them, they remain elusive. 

Perhaps if Diablo 4 takes cues from Dark Alliance and offers a compelling self-contained campaign before riding off into its decade-long endgame grind, then an old-timer like me in search of some substance and baseline challenge might be a bit more inclined towards it…