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Comment by Vysero | Hacker News Reader

I played Diablo2 for almost 19 years. Then the Blitzchung controversy happened. Now Diablo2, and all Blizzard products are dead to me, and imo they should be dead to you all as well.

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For those who are wondering what the parent is referring to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy They banned a player who voiced support for the Hong Kong protests.

This is serious concern for me regarding the rise of China. Access to their market is already so valuable that they are able to impose their censorship program internationally via implicit threat against corporate proxies abroad. See the similar NBA Hong Kong controversy[0] and the YouTube 'communist bandit' ordeal[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Associatio... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/youtube-china-communisty-par...

I'm pretty happy to draw a distinction between playing a blizzard north game that I bought in 2002, and continuing to support activision blizzard today.

Sure, I get that, if the copy of D2 that you're using was purchased from Blizzard North.

BTW did you ever see the Diablo they came up with? There's gameplay, neat to think what might've been. https://blizzardwatch.com/2020/05/18/diablo-3-blizzard-north...

Wow... I haven't read an article that made me more upset than that one in weeks. The "Diablo 3" we got had no business calling itself Diablo anything imo. We didn't dodge a bullet, we were robbed.

I wholeheartedly agree! Oh no, I also wish I wasn't the bearer of bad news, lol. The creatives behind these projects are gone, I feel Blizzard is a shell of what it once was. I wasted countless hours with Diablo - another Blizzard project I'd like to have seen is Titan.

You are boycotting an open source project that reimplements a 19 year old game from scratch because you hate the current owner of the original game?

it's not reimplementing it from scratch. it's developing a runtime engine that can read the original diablo 2 files. It says right in the README with big letters. You can't use this unless you have a legal copy of diablo2 and an expansion.

This thing is more like an emulator than a game.

If it gets big enough, people will make free asset packs to replace the official ones, much like there are for Doom

OpenRCT2 is pretty mature, but I doubt asset packs for that will be wholesale remade either.

Assets aren't like software in this regard.

OpenTTD went the same route, but has a free asset pack these days.

This is a game engine reimplementation, not an emulator.

You obviously don't know what an emulator is.

And OFC is reimplementing from scratch. Everything else is not code, but data. Get your facts right.

>You can't use this unless you have a legal copy of diablo2 and an expansion.

Or an iso acquired from a random torrent site. I've owned a few copies of D2 in my life and given blizzard years of my time, who knows where the booklets with the CD keys are. At least my copies of lod have it printed on the cover. I feel no qualms whatsoever about not giving blizzard more money for another 'legit' copy.

Do you boycott any other companies based in, or products made in China?

You are boycotting people playing a 20 year old game that was made by Blizzard North, who closed their doors in 2005, over someone being banned in 2019? Why don't we just cancel every business who has ever done something we disagree with?

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