You have no idea what you're even talking about. Both Diablo 1 and 2 used pre-rendered sprites. Yes, technically they're "polygonic", but in the same sense that a Pixar movie is polygon-based: the amount of detail is only limited by the time they were willing to give their render farms. This page has a nice animated comparison's between D1's and D2's sprites for Diablo himself, you'll see how small the difference actually is. http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Diablo If anything, the models they used for D2 were more detailed, better lighted, and encoded with more colors.