I don't have many hours on steam, however, this gem of a game is something I already spent hundreds of hours playing on BNet for resurrected and original game for thousands of hours since the 2000s. Bought it again on steam for seamless Steamdeck integration.
Steamdeck
I'm not one of the guys who will call 30fps in pixel format on steamdeck to be perfect. I will be honest, it works quite well, but no perfect. The experience can easily be described as "works right out of the box", not requiring any work to do. In terms of performance, it's not perfect - couldn't get a good mix of quality, native resolution to hit the stable 60fps, on the good side, average should be in high 50s (personal impression, not measured). The image is a bit blurry, but that's expected I guess. For anyone who is veteran of D2 or the looter ARPG genre, you probably played with Mouse + Keyboard and this would be first switch to gamepad scheme. I thought it would be painful given some of the stiffness of oldschool D2 gameplay, but actually it works quite well! There is still awkwardness around certain skills, but generally speaking you can still blast.
D2 Remaster
In terms of the remaster of the genre classic Diablo 2 - this is an outstanding work by devs. Game is actually the old client with a graphical layer on top to enable modern HD graphics. This helps preserves a lot of the weirdness of the old game for the oldschool gamers, you can even turn between modern and oldschool graphics with a press of a button! On top of that, we mainly got bunch of quality of life improvements (shared stash, bigger stash, quick cast hotkeys, hotkeys bar, probably more I forget). The game also received a little bit of content post release, which was mostly hit rather than miss. I won't get too much into details of it, but I would rate that content as classic approved (largely maintained the original D2 feel).
Warlock DLC
So the DLC contains few new things: 1) New Warlock class, 2) More quality of life, 3) New endgame improvements and development, 4) New pinnacle boss with, 5) New loot.
I will start with the most important for me piece - quality of life! It added specialised stash tabs which allow stacking and quick organisation of your "currency" i.e. Runes, Gems, Uber components. They all stack to 99 now in a single dedicated cell, which let me delete several stash character from my account! It's perfect for a general player / solo find player, but if you are online power game at some point you might run out of this space as well if you hoard too much currency. Well and then we have a Warlock class, the poster child of this DLC. I have played Warlock almost exclusively and I could say that while on release it was over tuned, the design is a mixbag of "classic" and "modern" design philosophy. What I mean by that, is Warlock has a lot of toys and all of them feel "right" without deadweights which is often part of the classic D2 skill trees feel. or we get telekinesis from the start at level 1, which is not something other characters get. It's not a complaint about Warlock, because class still feels relatively classic in the feel of designed skills, but it opens up a question - if more content will be created for D2R (which I believe it will), will it create a power creep from modern design blending with classic one? I think it's a tight balance, which the devs have to monitor and listen to the community.
Overall - excellent game and great DLC
