I’ve never played any of the Diablos, or met anyone who has. But they are obviously popular for a reason. Are they worth going back to the first one?
Edit: Thanks for the answers, the community is alive! Based on you recommendations it looks like I’m going to give 2 resurrected a try.
I played 1 through 3, including a bit of Resurrected. I definitely favour 2, though, having played it for probably thousands of hours.
I’d recommend any of them, 2 even more so, what’s with the release of Resurrected.
Diablo 1 has an almost old-school D&D feel to it, establishing many staples of the series, such as the itemization, the lore, the character stats and inventory management aspects, among others. It definitely feels a bit dated, but I’d recommend trying out DevilutionX (on GitHub) to mitigate that. It’s a project that adds many quality of life features and allows the game to feel a bit more of a modern experience, with larger resolutions, better and configurable controls, access to content that was cut from the original, and many other things.
Diablo 3 is the one I played the least, but I’d still say to give it a go. It’s more of an arcade experience, with combos, hordes of enemies, giant numbers on wearable loot and, as much as I could gather, a simpler experience all around. It’s probably the most hated entry on the series, but I still had loads of fun with it if only for lore reasons.
Diablo 2 is… well, Diablo 2. Depending on whether you play LoD (“Classic”, you could say), or Resurrected, it can be a very unbalanced game. Builds and classes are clearly better than others. Itemization is on its own level, being the best I’ve encountered in my entire life and the main reason why I keep coming back to it. It’s also why it’s such a grind of a game, which is not for everyone. Anyway, I definitely recommend 2 over the others, which is not to say that they are not good games.
As for plot… well, you can play all games without reading a single line of dialogue, but you can if you want and I like the games for that.