Diablo II: Resurrected | Hacker News Reader

Diablo II: Resurrected

diablo2.blizzard.com

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If anyone is looking to play a modern version of Diablo 2, the spiritual successor is probably more a game called Path of Exile (rather than Diablo 3 or this).

The developers managed to capture the aesthetic while improving the game in the direction of what gave the original game its replay-ability.

Their development cycle of new content every 3 or 4 months with a league reset is unique and keeps things fresh. They're additionally not too monetized. It's a good company with probably more of a future than a Diablo 2 remaster.

If you want something in the vein of Diablo 2 but with a different aesthetic (and not always online) then try Torchlight 2.

While Torchlight and Torchlight 2 have a lot of "quality of life" improvements and are decent games in general, I've found that they lack the replay value which Diablo 2 (with LOD) has. I can't exactly say why but this is how it felt to me.

You might have been older when you played Torchlight 2 than when you played Diablo 2?

I'm afraid, to me, that doesn't seem like sufficient explanation. Now, given a choice, even with outdated graphics, I'd rather play Diablo 2 than play Torchlight 2.

Games seem more magic when we are younger.

Torchlight requires mods to be playable.

The recent rereleases of Torchlight 2 for console (even with some QoL additions) that did not support mods were...not good.

what? that's ridiculous.

I've played torchlight 1 & 2, on both mac and pc. They were both high quality and very well done.

There was no evident shortcomings that required mods to fix

More skill/loot balance than the general presentation.

Btw, I think you can play a diablo 1 remaster inside of diablo 3. I think you can only do this at the beginning of a season reset though.

I didn't know that, cool!

"the darkening of Tristram" is what you want to google for. It's every January. I'm not sure I'd call it a remaster, but it's novel.

Grim Dawn is another alternative, without much of PoE's online functionality

I really enjoy Grim Dawn. I'm sad that the game is finally "finished" and will no longer be getting update patches. The developer gave the game a good 4 years of post release content though!

What do you mean? The game is being updated. Last update was in January this year...

Grim Dawn is absolutely amazing. I tried playing PoE but it felt so fake. Grim Dawn is raw and dark, the dual class system is awesome, and that’s exactly what I was looking for.

I wonder how it’s free? I know two business models for free things, pay to win micro-transactions like EA and selling out user’s data like FB, and I’m not a fan of either of them.

I am with you. Subscription services align customer and developer interests best.

That said, the second best modern model is probably theirs. They sell stash tab space (item storage) and cosmetic items only.

They do not play psychological games that many free to play games do. I imagine that when their revenue starts to slip, they may go down the more dubious road as is the normal pattern. But for now, it has my approval.

I haven’t played hots in years now, but there were loot boxes last I saw. The system also encourages you to spend in game gold to get better loot box contents, but you need that gold to avoid paying real money for new heroes. Those new heroes were usually overpowered on release, or at least, nobody knew how to counter them, so they were great for peoples mmr. I wish it had just been pay to play with optional costumes for sale.

I played hots and it wasn't bad at all. New heroes would be first ban pick in ranked when overpowered anyway, and they usually stayed like that a couple of weeks until they were balanced.

I'm completely fine with that monetization since you still can't beat better players with money and you can still do everything without spending a penny. You at most get a tiny MMR inflation for a week or two if you buy every new hero on release (which wasnt even that often) and that was nowhere near enough to jump a higher league. Hell, given that it still didn't make them enough money maybe it was too little monetization..

Interesting. I’ll give it a shot once I reach lvl60 in wow classic.

PoE is free because of selling cosmetic items. There is no selling user data. I'm not even sure what kind of data a game would have to sell about it's users anyway.

Game interaction creates lots and lots of data. I don't know how you'd monetize that data (selling doesn't magically monetize, the buyer still has to figure out how to profit)---but that might just be a limit of my imagination.

The game could just read the files on your computer or report your internet browsing. Games have all sorts of access to peoples machines. Game privacy policies often contain some invasive permissions, check them out sometime

You can see why their model is working. Almost everyone in the game sports some kind of cosmetic effect.

Of course, I’d be remiss to point out that you really need to shell out to get enough stash space to prevent frustration. One of the $60 supporter packs will get you just enough points and also give an alternate look if you need it. But for the same amount of money as a retail game you get a lot of content.

You would be amazed by the amount of data "anti-cheat" spyware called BattleEye amasses about customers of their clients.

Path of Exile locks some player QoL behind microtransactions (not pay to win but you're going to have a less fun time without it).

Namely, stash tabs, as inventory takes up a lot of space. It's not too expensive though.

Yes you can get a good assortment of tabs for less than the price of a new release game. I never buy mtx in games but didn't feel bad about this.

Though, some players are a little sore over how they seem to be adding very specialised tabs in new leagues. There is of course a perverse incentive at play to design content to require tabs that can be sold to us.

There are quite a few games that are neither pay 2 win nor selling data. They are the middle ground of cosmetics only. All of Valve free games fall under this category.

I don't know, but can't you buy loot crates in valve games that have non cosmetic abilities?

All of their free games do have "loot crates" system, but in Dota 2 and CS:GO, it's only cosmetics. TF2, you can also get weapons and in theory all weapons are "balanced", though in practice perfect balance doesn't exist, and also having more options available + being able to switch loadout during a match can be more OP. That being said, the weapons themselves aren't very rare, and you can get most of them fairly quickly, or craft the ones you need. Hats are more rare but those are again just cosmetic.

Honestly f2p to me means don't bother.

I've really come to enjoy Good old Games https://www.gog.com

They have Diablo 1 (+ Hellfire) available for 9.99 (but goes on sale)

(That said there's a huge "Do not sell my personal information" link on the diablo page)

I have enjoyed torchlight 1 and 2 quite a bit. It's been a while since I played diablo 1/2 so I can't compare in my head. I recall there was more clicking in diablo.

in diablo 1 you had to click for every single attack of your character. In diablo2 you didn't have to do it, however most of your attacks would be special attacks, meaning you would have to click all the time anyway (except maybe if you had a skill that you could use all the time while holding). I usually played the assassin and had to click nearly as much as in diablo 1. However, it was enjoyable either way to me. More relevant for the enjoyment in "feeling" would be the sound of your hits and if it really felt like you hit them visually. In my opinion e.g. Titanquest couldn't get that feeling right. However, Diablo 3 and Path of Exile could (Torchlight is okay in that regard, but not quite as good). Still, my favorites remain Diablo1+2.

They run on the idea that players like to customize their characters beyond what's available in game and need the additional QoL account upgrades beside what comes by default on the account. Guild Wars 2 runs on similar idea but unlike PoE it's B2P but at the same time it comes with very generous F2P version; there are of course still F2P limitations - set to keep away shady people and to convince players to purchase the game.

I'm playing both and in comparison to majority of MMOs around both offers something I'd describe as fair microtransactions.

They have the most genius game mechanic/ economic model.

So... You play the game to get loot. The more you play the more loot you get. So of course you wanna save the loot. So you put it in your stash( all players start with 3 stashes) , for safe keeping. The better it gets more loot you get. The moment you start getting the feel of the game (it is one deep game) you discover trading with other players. To trade with other players you discover premium stash tabs.... One tab is around 5 usd. But u need to buy game coins so u always have almost enough for one more stash.

So a premium tab is like a store front where u can display items for sale to other players. So naturally one starts buying more tabs. And more tabs. And then there are the specialty tabs that organize all the loot. Coz why do it manually when u can pay for a stash that auto sorts loot while you gather even more loot...

And suddenly you realize. You have 27 stashes for a total value of 300 usd... Most you have bought one the weekly stash sale.

And that is how PoE is financed. No walls no hidden stuff. Just loot.

yeh also cosmetics in case you wanna look good gathering all the loot.

The downside to that development cycle is that there is an overwhelming number of league mechanics, particularly for new players.

I've heard Path of Exile suggested plenty of times, and personally I just couldn't get into it.

Notably back when Diablo III was still fresh, lots of people suggested PoE. To me, D3 felt more of an arcade-like game that I can quickly jump into and have fun, whereas PoE is more of an efficiency and numbers game. Like it's fun, but I just don't have that sense of being "powerful". I gradually progressed up until Act 5 in PoE (before they added Acts beyond that) and never really felt like I was all that powerful. There were some challenges here and there, but most things just died in some boring manner.

However with Diablo II as I recall, that's pretty much the same ordeal up until a certain point.

I may re-visit PoE at some point this year before D2:R to see if or how things have changed.

PoE is good, but there are three things that annoy me about it.

First, the non-traditional currency system. There's no gold; instead you have different types of "orbs" of varying rarity. Vendors have different exchange rates for some of them, but the system is generally difficult to grok, especially for a newcomer. To make matters even more confusing, orbs themselves are useful, e.g. they can enhance item stats, upgrade items to higher quality, etc. and you need to be careful to not accidentally continue using orbs yourself when you'd be much better off trading them.

Which brings me to trade. There's no centralized auction house - instead you need to rely on a third-party website where items are listed by other players. The process of listing them is done via an in-game API I think - but then once you find an item you want, you need to whisper that player, then go meet them at their hideout and manually do a trade. Just an absolutely atrocious system overall.

The third one is the zoom level. The game feels like it plays at 800p, or maybe 1024p, and there's no way to zoom out further. Unacceptable for a game that is two decades more recent than Diablo 2, imo.

They also didn't have colorblind-friendly options for the longest time.

I used to joke GGG was so hardcore even their accessibility feature had a difficulty level.

Some people like to call it Path of Excel.

I am the type of player who starts a new RPG, gets to character creation, and spends 2 hours on the wiki looking at all the classes and races and other options to make the "right" choice. So, obviously PoE appealed to me a lot.

If you want to give it another go my suggestion is always to just slavishly follow a fun looking build guide (from the current league! things change fast) you found online. It'll cut a lot of the complexity right out so you can learn to deal with the huge amount that's still left, then slowly add it back in as you customise later.

Now now. We _used_ to call it Path of Excel.

Now we've got Path of Building (https://pathofbuilding.community/) for all your deeps needs.

I have spent many hours in that thing, it's ridiculously comprehensive. It's great the community was able to fork it when the original author went to work for them.

Path of Exile is the best ARPG ever made, i don't game that much anymore, but when i feel the need to play a game, it's PoE, every 3 months they release an new "league" where they reset the economy and add bunch of new content! It's just a great game, ton of theorycrafting and items to collect, give it a try!(

This would be a fun game if it wasn’t Free to Play. I wish they would just charge $50 and not optimize for whales and engagement. Diablo 1 and 2 did this and made tons of money.

Having been hooked on Diablo 2 in high school, I made the terrible decision of playing Path of Exile (POE) last year during thanks giving break (cuz we had 5 days off, I thought hey maybe I can play POE for a few days).

Since then, I have been playing POE non stop. I'd wake up at 3am and play until 8pm. I'd drink alot of water before going to bed so I can wake up early to play.

I stopped caring about work, I just played the game. To complete my work tasks, I hacked together my tasks in 30 mins before the end of the sprint with some of the shittiest code I've ever written.

Somewhere along this journey I decided that the only way I can stop my addiction is to completely finish it. I spent around 12k buying stuff for the game. The way it works is... you play to find and collect "currency" in the game. But instead of spending the time, I buy in game "currency" from other players. Its frowned upon and getting caught will get you banned, but part of me secretly wished my account would get banned so I could quit. I never got banned, so I got bolder and eventually I was spending $800 / day.

This week, I finally feel like I have finished the game. It finally got boring after building my character to the point where I could breeze through everything in the game. I was finally able to work this week and correct the bugs I introduced and get back to focusing on work.

I have yet to digest what happened in the last 3-4 months.

Its crazy how addictive these games can be.

This reminds me of an anecdote I once read or heard about a person curing their World of Warcraft addiction. The person used an unofficial server with cheats to instantly get the best gear, then proceeded to one-shot the toughest boss. After that, playing normally felt pointless to them.

"The person used an unofficial server with cheats to instantly get the best gear"

> Smart, unfortunately I didn't think of this. I feel like if I did, maybe I wouldn't have spent so much time on this game. My addiction to the game really took a toll an people around me who cares / loves me. I feel bad, but really there was nothing I could do except finish.

I'm wondering if there is a certain personality / mindset that is susceptible to gaming addiction.

I really appreciate you talking so openly about it. It really can be one hell of a drug. I don't really think the personality traits are quite different to people who go to casinos or lose all their money on the stock markets. It's this idea to get better, better, better at all costs. Just one more thing and I'll stop, however after this thing there's another thing waiting and so on and so on. It never ends (well, except as how you did it :) Hope you leave it all to rest now before the next addon comes. Actually, I think the developers are quite user oriented so if you would ask them to ban you, they probably would.)

You could press Shift IIRC, particularly if the skill you were using was bound to LMB. That way hold LMB down to move around and hit shift when you need to attack.

I've done pretty much the same thing with idle games. They make me really obsessive. I edit a save file or inject some javascript in the console once I've decided to quit. Once I have infinite resources, I can see how shallow the endgame is and I lose any will to play.

It is unfortunate we do not strive to make "work" as enjoyable and as addictive as some games, while also allowing employees to share significantly in the wealth they help generate. It feels like many video games show us how much potential is hidden away inside people.

Think you learned your lesson? I am the same, and I won't touch addictive games anymore - it takes far too much effort to get unaddicted. Not to mention all that time lost where I would have had more _real_ enjoyment, and enriched my life - reading books, going outside, watching good TV shows and movies, single player games, etc.

Yup... I think finishing the game (in the sense that I've done everything fun about the game) put a closure on my desire to play MMORPG games in the forseeable future.

PoE is effectively a gambling addicting simulator.

I quit shortly after I bought my first tabs on sale. I'd stalled on mid-tier mapping playing solo self-found and decided I needed to grind currency to continue if I wanted any hope of better rolls. I've never paid into any gachas, so it really caught me off guard when I realized what I had done and how impulsive and out of character it was.

The base game is very comfortable and alluring. I rolled several toons and got to where I could sprint to 80 in a week, then get to high 80s mapping until I hit the natural limits of playing SSF.

I haven't picked it up since, and thinking about how deeply I got into it before has been an excellent deterrent from relapse.

So am I right in saying that this money went to other players/farmers, rather than the devs? Did you manage to sell your account in the end?

Do you intend to seek professional help about your addiction? From my perspective, it definitely seems this did not happen as a result of some addictive quality of the game, rather your own personality/current situation.

So am I right in saying that this money went to other players/farmers, rather than the devs? -> Yes

Did you manage to sell your account in the end? -> Nope, still have the account as a sort of trophy / reminder.

Do you intend to seek professional help about your addiction? -> Yes, scheduled something last month. But as I mentioned, the game slowly lost its appeal.

> it definitely seems this did not happen as a result of some addictive quality of the game, rather your own personality/current situation.

Putting blame the victim is always the easiest way to go. Good job.

I feel this.

I was borderline addicted to D2 during my high school and beyond years. I'd literally do nothing but play D2 for a solid 4-5 year period.

Then I discovered POE, this was back in the alpha days, I created the wiki (which eventually got sold to Curse which is another story) and played PoE pretty muich daily for a few years.

I'm entirely burnt out now, but just hearing the D2 music has got me in the mood to play it again.

story time!!!

Agree 100%, but even PoE doesn't really capture what was for me the best part of d2 (hardcore + the chance to go hostile at any point), they did announce some cut-throat leagues in the beginning but I don't think anything has happened with that ...

Path of Exile does not have any decent PvP (while PvP in D2 was popular endgame option). Path of Exile is also a very anti social game where most players play alone.

I was pretty addicted to Diablo 2 for a couple years as a teenager. Never got into WoW or anything, but I wasted at least one entire summer doing nothing but playing Diablo 2.

Never was a big fan of 3. It felt more like playing some kind of diablo themed version of gauntlet or something with a bit more depth. It didn't feel like Diablo 2. I tried another recent one that was supposed keep the spirit of diablo 2. I think it was path of exile. I never got into it the same way. It was better than Diablo 3 but still didn't quite capture what made diablo 2 so addictively awesome.

As far as atmosphere and everything goes, diablo 1 was always best at that. Diablo 2 brought the series in a different way, but diablo 2 was something else.

The open battlenet games were utterly ridiculous. Hacked items to the point of nonsense. Like you couldn't even see what was happening on.the screen, but it was fun playing with those sketchy editors that were more often than not likely malware.

Mostly though, my memories are from the closed battlenet games. Lots of time spent gaming with random people I never seen again, but we'd spend hours getting through an act or two together, race for treasure and just have good times. Helping low levels run through the game so they can mule for their high level characters and farm, cheap shots from high level characters that went hostile immediately, good PvP duels, item runs, and just generally lots of fun.

I still remember the day I stepped into a game playing my level 84 hardcore(permadeath) character...somebody went hostile immediately, I was somewhere pretty obscure so I thought it'd be alright, stepped through the waypoint...was dead before the screen loaded, of all the places I picked...that's where they were, that game had like 60 way points or something...that was pretty heartbreaking...

I dunno, I've yet to find an online game with the same kind of community. There was hackers, griefers, people really into the game, item farmers, pvpers, it was a varied mix of gamers under a barely moderated environment, yet somehow it worked and it was pretty amazing. At least when blizzard was active with d2. Near the end it started to decline and the hackers took over, still in its golden age, d2's closed battlenet was pretty great and I haven't really gotten into an online game in the same way since.

Every time my kids die in a game, I ask them what happens. The answer is never: "I lost everything!"

I still haven't found anything quite like the feeling you get when you die in Diablo II hardcore.

“Escape from Tarkov” raises the hand

Diablo 3 has hardcore too!

Wait until you hear about Minecraft hardcore.

A hardcore mode isn't super rare in gaming. Tell your kids to try Minecraft's hardcore mode; that'll change their answer.

Kids these days have it easy. They've never had to leave a nes turned on overnight just because a game lacks a save feature or continues and is unreasonably long...then their mom turns it off while their sleeping...:(

Oh Blaster Master...someday i'll complete you...

Nethack: https://www.nethack.org/

Diablo II is easy compared to Nethack. I love them both, but at least in D2 you know what a potion does when you pick it up and none of the equipment is cursed.

There's no feeling quite like being surrounded by too many monsters and looking at all the unidentified potions, spell scrolls, and wands in your inventory, choosing one, and hoping that it will magically teleport you out of trouble. (Only to discover that it was a cursed scroll of fire and now EVERYTHING is on fire.)

I've played many rouguelikes over the years. My current favorite is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. But the adrenaline rush just does not compare, probably because it lacks the real time interface.

Hardcore mode is what made Diablo 3 fun for me.

Except most of my deaths ended up being from internet outages - your characters are generally nearly invincible when attacking enemies, but if they just stand there dumbly they die in seconds.

So I stopped playing after that.

Try dying in Rust on one of the main servers

> Never was a big fan of 3.

D3 was almost a cross between a cookie clicker game and D2. It's a good game if you ignore its name.

Cookie Clicker is such a good game though.

It’s so meta and interesting. It almost single-handedly cured a friend of mine of his video gaming addiction.

It’s also a great meditation on exponential economic growth models.

Like I said it reminded me most of Gauntlet. An arcadey, hack and slash game focused more on slaughtering enemies with a character that progresses relatively linearly.

It's not a terrible game, I just found it very shallow. It removed most of the element of choice from character builds and streamlined things in a way I just didn't really like very much.

Path of exile had the opposite problem, it tried too hard to be like diablo 2, while focusing too much on random loot and excessive choice.

Diablo 2 managed to walk that fine line between pointless loot clicker and mindless progression clicker and kept it fun by giving players agency, but not drowning them in choices.

The whole concept of having "open" and "closed" Battle.net was genius. If you want to hack, be our guest! (But you can only play with other hackers.)

That experience of trying to mod my character was – I'm fairly certain – what eventually got me into programming! (Unfortunately I was on a Mac, so I couldn't use 90% of the so-called "trainers", much to my disappointment at the time.)

I recall meeting one specific player on Open Battle.net (their username was "iceblizz", I think) whose hacked sorceress was unbelievably OP. They also had a super-cool personal website -- and both of those things really kindled my curiosity ( ... "How on Earth did they build that website?" ... "How are they so strong with negative 2 billion HP??")

Haha yeah that type of stuff was pretty amazing to me. I remember stone of Jordan rings and armour and stuff hacked with some unique bow quality that made your armour and stuff glowing white were 'the things to have' at least for a while.

Though no two were alike and some people somehow had even more hacked shit than the pitiful programs I found could create.

It did definitely introduce me to the world of being able to modify programs and playing with the data files of games.

I feel like these days with the high stakes surrounding online gaming and.cheating and everything and just the money involved in the game industry sometimes fun gets left by the wayside.

Did you ever end up playing the expansion set? Strangely I don’t see it talked a lot about in the context of Diablo 2 at all but it added new levels and 2 more playable characters (barbarian, assassin) to the game and really expanded the playability. I have some inside into the thinking behind the franchise because I started my career at Blizzard working on D2 expansion set. Anecdotally we had an X-men vs Street fighter game that I found appreciated play style at a very top level. Whatever character you chose that’s how you played. It was street fighter after all and I’m convinced that some of the specializing in character attention in d2 and wow was inspired by the way the coin-op played and QA as well as the game designers played nonstop. Now this sort of attentive character specializing outside of role playing games is all over the place and it’s not novel anymore but back then this was very innovative and immersive in an action game. The Lost Vikings and Rock and Roll racing another blizzard classic had the same mechanic.

I think you mean Druid instead of Barbarian :)

Ach you’re right Druid. The barbarian level was new and the Barbarian flipped archetype Druid and Paladin flipped archetype Assassin.

https://diablo-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Druid_(Diablo_II)

I can't remember when we got lord of destruction but yeah at some point. It basically completed the game. Blizzard's early expansion packs were definitely worth it. Tides of darkness, broodwar, lord of destruction were some of the finest examples of what an expansion pack should do.

Blizzard used to make some quality games. Both the blizzard north and blizzard teams.

This is just my, possibly unpopular and also likely cliché opinion. But I blame world of Warcraft and Activision. WoW gave them ridiculous amounts of money and Activision gave them Uhhhh...'corporate refinement' that combination led to them becoming much like most other big name game companies. Money over fun. It's sad...but it is what it is.

Again, that's just my opinion, i'm sure lots of people have enjoyed post Warcraft 3 blizzard games, but for me, that was their last one where gameplay came before profit.

> Strangely I don’t see it talked a lot about in the context of Diablo 2 at all but it added new levels and 2 more playable characters (barbarian, assassin) to the game and really expanded the pla

When people talk about Diablo 2, they are always referring to the version including the expansion.

> It felt more like playing some kind of diablo themed version of gauntlet

Which gauntlet game is your point of reference?

I think they mean Gauntlet Legends, it was more ARPG than usual, saved your game even in the arcade.

But it was cartoony, which was my issue with D3. I was done when the ultimate gear farm was running around clouds and rainbows hunting unicorns.

I played path of exile as well but found it too manipulative, and though QOL the mtx were too expensive, I found within a few seasons of game launch I'd spent too much, and that was with running ladders for items to sell.

I'd rather just own games outright. I remember when DLC started on 360 we joked about how long it would be until reverse gear in a car was DLC. Didn't think it'd be quite so soon.

effingwewt's right, either legends or dark legacy but more specifically this one

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_(2014_video_game)

That came out in 2014. I played both that and D3 around the same time. That version of gauntlet feels heavily inspired by diablo 3 to the point where I was playing them interchangeably when i'd get bored of one or the other and it was only ever really my girlfriend and I and our roommate playing together quick rounds at a time like an arcade game.

I've loved the Diablo and Warcraft series but I will never buy anything from Blizzard again:

> In the Blitzchung controversy, the company withdrew the prize from the winner of an online game tournament after he wore a mask and spoke in support of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests in a post-game interview, stating "Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times". The company is partly owned by Tencent. In August 2020, Activision Blizzard removed imagery of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests from its trailer of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

I really want this but the Warcraft 3 remaster was so so so bad that I'm holding my breath until I can play it first.

Was really looking forward to playing Helm's Deep maps on Bnet with the new WC3 but alas

Between the Hong Kong shenanigans, 2019 layoffs, and abysmal WC3 remaster release and support, it's hard to support anything this company does these days.

For me it was the HGC. Just kinda sucks that they killed it right before the new season was supposed to start because I was really getting into it. Killed my whole interest in the game.

I know it wasn't profitable but that just kind of says it all. When I was a kid and fell in love with Warcraft and Diablo, I really don't know how much of that soul of the company remains today.

Note that unlike W3R, the Diablo II Remake will be made internally (via the recent Vicarious Visions subsidiary)

Oh man - quite possibly my favorite game of all time. I find it funny that the remastered graphics look exactly like how I remember the game (though they're clearly improved).

It's exactly what a videogame remaster should be, IMO; use modern technology to recreate the feelings you had when you first played it!

I was looking at the graphics and wondering if they just had those 3D models all this time, because they had to make them for 2.5D rendering in D2 and just swapped the assets now in a sense (and the engine too of course)

That's an interesting thought, but I'd assume 20 year old 3D models wouldn't be much use today, would they?

I know they were thinking about making D2 a 3D game at first, like Runescape, but then went with 2D, because 3D technology wasn't at a point that allowed them to carry over the gritty and dark theme they wanted for Diablo. And then went on to make D3 look as cartoony as it does... They used photos of clay figurines for Diablo 1, would be fun if they remade that with 3D scanning techniques. Do check out David Brevik's post mortem on D1 from GDC by the way, it's fantastic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

That might not all be attributed to nostalgia. CRT displays actually make things look more hi-res and «depthy» [0]. We’ve barely caught up with 4/8K and OLED. This is why CRTs are so popular for retro gaming. Some effects aren’t even possible to display correctly on a non-CRT (without shaders at least) [1].

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/9xg8w3/t...

[1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/gamesnosh/status/1232731118354550...

I wonder if they are using the same backend servers as old client or if that got a rewrite as well and players will be in separate environments.

I played a couple months of evenings of D2 during the pandemic: the online experience was quite a mess. Got temp bans several times for switching characters soon after login. Rampant botting to the point that people made bot services that would give you waypoints upon request as they spam their d2itemz4sale.biz or whatever URL. Seems like there is no moderation budget so they just have a bunch of blunt automated rules.

Lots of quality of life issues remain in the game, like potion management after death, managing projectile consumables in the inventory, friend system is a bolt on through the chat system. I wonder if they made any changes to address un-fun parts of the game or if this is functionally identical.

Still had quite a bit of fun. Was able to tank Uber Diablo with a Zeal paladin to drop annihilus.

> I wonder if they are using the same backend servers as old client

To me it seems like the entire point of these remakes has been to kill off the classic Battle.net and get everyone on to the new Blizzard Launcher. The WarcraftⅢ remake made this especially apparent due to how much was promised but then cut before release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sURZZkQxru8

The original Diablo 2 could be played offline or with friends without using Battle.net, so those can be worked around.

I'm guessing with the "cross progression" system (whatever that means) that games will have to be on Blizzard's servers at all times to allow syncing and avoid cheating, hacks, and piracy.

I remember towards the end of my time playing d2, bots were everywhere. At some point, I will admit I started to do it too. I actually really enjoyed the scripting behind it (in Lua) and the technical challenges behind it. Funny, it looks like d2jsp is still a thing.

Oh man, this brings me back to writing Redvex plugins long ago... looks like it's gone far, far away.

Temp bans are there to stop bots. But only legit players suffer, bots just wait a few seconds.

As someone who wasted a decade on the game, i'm not interested in minor pixel hacks that are irrelevant to gameplay(99.99% of time isn't spent on staring at objects) which remains a cookie cutter clickfest trash( and a closest RPG game that is cookie-clicker like). There is a reason game bots were pioneered with d2, the game is extremely repetitive and loot-centric pinata simulator. If the mechanics didn't change its just the same game with extra makeup. D2 mods at least implement quality-of-life improvement, which often clash with the vanilla game expecting the player to maintain tasks and repeat routine actions(often requiring a town portal), as well as limited pool of viable builds(mods significantly expand the space of possible builds and item customization). Anyone who played any decent D2 mod will know that QoL improvements and diverse build pool is much more interesting long-term vs the improved graphics that will be 'novel' for a few days at best.

Weird, it shows up as Diablo IV on their game selector page.

I clicked the beta button. I probably don't need another game I won't play (or play for an hour once every 5 years). So the beta is probably just about right. A couple hours of gameplay will satisfy my needs.

That is sort of my Path Of Exile habit too. About once a year I will get a hankering for a good old slaughter fest. Except POE keeps adjusting their skills tree, and destroying my characters. Or so it seems, since I can never remember the exact builds for some of these 5+ year old characters.

If anyone is wondering what the original Diablo II battle.net experience looks like in 2020 (yep, it's apparently still working, hows that for legacy support?), Carbot recently did an episode on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYIyQMVzUnI

Also the Diablol 2 series does cause some flashbacks, especially the soundscape... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ru-UM1nYJQ&list=PL0QrZvg7QI...

Shame that it's not coming to macOS. Does anyone have any experience gaming through Parallels? I have a 16-inch MBP. I have never ran Windows on it though.

In general it works great, but many online games have anti-cheat systems preventing them from running inside VM - for example Overwatch (also from Blizzard).

Ha this always made me laugh since 96.

- It doesn't work on Linux

- It doesn't work on Mac

Linux is extremely fragmented and has less than 1% of market.

Mac has 10% - 20% Market with 100M+ Active user, and judging from the M1 sales it should finally cross the 110M by late 2021.

Asking for Mac support isn't ridiculous question like it was in the 90s.

> Linux is extremely fragmented

Linux support in games usually means support for Ubuntu/Steam runtime. No Linux user is asking for 100% QA coverage for Alpine and Kali.

> and has less than 1% of market.

If you mean Steam stats, it is comparable to macos market share.

> Mac has 10% - 20% Market

Nope, not even in US.

> judging from the M1 sales it should finally cross the 110M by late 2021.

Did you know that in 2020 ChromeOS machines sold better? I was also surprised.

> Asking for Mac support isn't ridiculous question like it was in the 90s.

Actually, it is.

MacOS is the platform that breaks ABI the fastest, even faster than Linux distributions. Apple expects the developers to keep up with maintenance of their software for each annual MacOS release -- which is exactly what game developers won't do. They expect to release their game, and after the wave of their sales ends, the game will end up basically unmaintained.

Hence, all the 32-bit games I have for MacOS won't ever run on M1. Or even any other Intel Mac that was upgraded to Catalina or newer. But their Linux counterparts will run on Linux for years to come.

I think this is a little more notable because 1/2/3 do run on Mac (or era-appropriate macs, at least). This will (absent of future news) be the first in the franchise not to.

The original D2 was released for MacOS, both Classic and OS X.

From what I remember, D2 was released for Classic, and had update for Carbon/OSX.

Which turned out to be a problem, once the Classic environment was no longer shipped with OSX and you wanted to reinstall the game.

Disappointing for sure. Traditionally Mac support was one of those little things that distinguished Blizzard from the other big guys and gave them a less commercial image. Unfortunately not surprising with how much they've come to resemble Activision or EA.

Have you tried checking out Wine? At least on Linux, these days just about all games run pretty well. It's very possible the story might be different on macOS though, I really wouldn't know personally.

Considering Diablo II Re should not be GPU demanding I was surprised as well.

My experience has been you should always do BootCamp for Windows gaming due to performance losses. But for something like DII Re I guess it could be good enough.

We have better wrapper software available nowadays, but I was really surprised at how Starcraft II launched. The Windows version of it only included a D3D9 renderer.

Notably, every major game before this point that had a native macOS version, also supported an OpenGL renderer on the Windows version. Specifically in my case, my experience with Wine back then wasn't ideal, and I believed that if SC2 had just had the OpenGL renderer, I could have gotten along fine with it.

I don't expect D2:R to be using Vulkan on any OS, or else that would have made x86 macOS support relatively easy. With my limited macOS usage in Mojave and Catalina, two MMORPGs (Guild Wars 2 and FFXIV) used Wine wrappers. Can't quite remember what GW2 did, but if I recall FFXIV, it used D3D11 -> Vulkan -> MoltenVK. Surprisingly worked well, but I don't know if that was something any random user could have done with any other game easily (not sure if there were pre-compiled solutions around).

Bootcamp should be fine, at least on x86 Macs. I've heard some initial work being done with M1 Macs, but I doubt anything ideal will exist by the time D2:R releases.

WINE will probably be fine. It’s quite well maintained these days.

I was surprised by this too. Best I can figure is that it is due to Apple's transition to M1 chips but who knows.

I'm playing D2 on a MBP right now, using Bootcamp. Works great even though you need an inofficial patch and some fiddling for the retina display.

Welp, theres a year of my life going down the drain again. I have spent way too many hours breathing second hand smoke in internet cafes playing this game

I'll play this, but all these remasters make me wonder if Blizzard is running out of ideas.

World of Warcraft Classic was resisted as the CEO infamously said "You think you want it, but you don't."

When that turned out to be completely wrong and WoW Classic turned out to be a smash success, chances are Blizzard shifted development priority toward more nostalgia.

People are still playing it, but its certainly no longer a smash success. WoW classic really exposed the weakness of easily min maxed old games like vanilla WoW. I hope they learned their lesson and "update" D2. Otherwise yeah it'll be a trip down memory lane and then after the 5th Baal run I'm out.

A lot of old school blizzard creative staff have left over the years [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/ewdija/a_list_of_...

It’s corporate now. Corporate is actually different from Business even. It means, we know what prints money, and will stick to the script.

Corporate is pretty much the death of innovation and creativity.

I fear that would be a cynical but possibly accurate take on it. However I must note I've seen people begging for this ever since D3 released.

I think Blizzard are well aware that there's plenty of us who have grown up with their core franchises, and are now at the age where nostalgia is an easy sell.

(Also interesting to note they have Future, Mobile and Nostalgia releases of the same franchise all on the near-future map. They're not going backwards, but they're certainly spreading out.)

> Verify your age

Choose a random date with enough years into it, done.

Other than that, good to see it, I have most of the original editions in special release boxes. Spent endless hours playing them when they were new.

2 was always better than 3

Was there ever any doubt?

While many folks here reminiscence about the game play, I remember being absolutely amazed by the cinematics. I couldn't think of another game at the time having such detail, and I recall just being really excited to watch each Act's cutscenes as I progressed through the game. I wonder if they are going to update and re-render those as well..

Wow, they really did it. Curious how much of the latter-day mechanics they'll include like runewords, cube crafting etc.

It will have a key to switch between old and new graphics. They mentioned they don't want to touch the gameplay, not even bugfixes. It's primarily a graphics remaster, the gameplay will stay the same.

Some bugs in D2 and pretty silly. Like how Strafe displays (animation) a 2-frame attack while doing a 3-frame attack. Or how Fend will miss every hit if you trigger a Dodge. Or how the Blaze synergy on Fire Wall just doesn't work.

I guess cashing in is supposed to be cheap, and D2 was good enough that I might still play it.

IIRC the Fend/Strafe bug is only a visual bug, and you can spam click to restart the actual attack. This may not be true for the vanilla game; it's what I remember from Eastern Sun.

Don't forget the paladin's charge! Hit it just right and you barely move.

Well, seems like most people want the original experience, bugs and all. On one hand they are worried that Blizzard will try to improve the experience too much and diverge from the original, on other hand they got used to most bugs/features and consider it part of the original game's soul.

Personally, I wouldn't mind having things like unlimited stash and unlimited respecs, which most things add (in singleplayer) by mods anyway.

They even decided to keep the game logic at 25 frames per second but allow rendering at unlimited frames.

This is important to keep all the old game mechanics the same (e.g., for builds aimed at hitting a specific number of frames per attack/cast/recovery). But I wonder how jarring it would be if you're running on a 144hz monitor.

Well, I'm excited!

The screenshots and small snippets of gameplay presented look familiar and fun. There's going to be controller support on PC as well (was one of my favorite things about D3). And cross-platform progression sounds interesting.

I'm not entirely happy about what happened with WC3:R, but I'm assuming some kind of lessons were learned with that, and with D2:R being made with a different team with closer interactions, I believe it will end up in a better state at launch.

(of course I'll also back-up my old copies of D2 and its installers as well just in-case)

This is amazing but wow, full price (60 EUR in Europe). I wonder whether the Switch version will get the "Switch tax" (70-80EUR per full game in my region).

It's 40€ including the old version. The 60€ Prime Evil version also contains Diablo 3 Eternal Collection and some D3 cosmetics.

Rarely experienced audio stuttering for a long time. This site did it, all cores maxed out for a second. Guess it didn't like to be restricted by uBlock-origin.

It looks pretty good, but seems to me that each of the elements look a little too distinct from each other in this hi res version. There needs to be a little bit of fog or something to make it more cohesive.

To be more precise, I am saying the spells and character effects could be more integrated a little more into the entire scene, like in D2. Otherwise it looks amazing.

The magic of D2 was battlenet with all its glitches that made the game develop in its own weird way (the soj-based economy that developed because a hack was possible for a time, being the prime example).

I played D2 regularly all through my teenage years. I think it might be one of the most exploited games ever which was half of what made it fun:

* There were a variety of ways to duplicate items online. One really popular and well known one involved spamming bone wall on a necromancer + meteor on a sorceress which would cause the server to lag to the point that your ping would exceed 1000. At that point, you could join a game with the same character, stop spamming the skill so your original character didn’t lag out, thus creating two ephemeral copies of your items. This eventually got patched

* One commonly duplicated item was called a stone ring of Jordan (SOJ). They were so commonly duplicated that blizzard added an event that if you sold ~100 to an in game merchant, everyone connected to a given server would spawn an Uber version of Diablo that dropped a unique small charm.

* Another way blizzard got rid of duplicated items was something called “rust storm” where they’d take the servers offline and go through every item in existence, deleting duplicates.

* Botting was extremely common. There are a bunch of weird quirks added to the game to try to prevent botting, though none of them worked. For example, if you spin the mouse wheel while hovering over a skill, it’ll cycle through your skills. That would immediately get you kicked from the game because the person who programmed the server thought only bots could switch skills that quickly.

* There was a feature in the game that if one person in your party got a quest, the whole party got the quest. Players regularly abuse this to “rush” level 1 characters into act 5 in the hardest difficulty so that they can expedite leveling up.

* There are ethereal items that get a 50% bonus to their core attribute (eg. Armor). If you used the cube recipe to socket the item, that 50% bonus would then get applied again. There were an entire class of items called “ebugged” that were overpowered.

* There was an event added much later for a unique large charm. Someone figured out that you could trap Mephisto in a building such that he would never path out of it, continuously trigger him to summon minions, and kill those minions to grant you massive experience with low risk of death. Thus uber leveling was born. You’d do this in a party with a fully equipped character handling the minions and could go 1-80 in like 5 minutes. This later got patched.

* There are still a small group of people who maintain items from previous patches that no longer spawn. A good google search term for this if you wanted to go down a rabbit hole is “1.08 valkyrie wing”. These are commonly duplicated and at risk of disappearing in a rust storm, so these players maintain a genealogy on forums of their items to prove they’re “legit” and not going to poof on you.

* Servers would drop you after like 30 minutes of inactivity. However, there were pathing bugs that could be exploited to make your character bounce back and forth between squares on the grid effectively preventing you from disconnecting. No mouse clicking scripts needed.

There’s probably more but this is getting long

As much as I like the idea, I wish they'd tweak the gameplay just enough to make all the classes viable. Especially summoner druids.

So Blizzard now only remakes games?

So far ther remade: StarCraft, warcraft 3, World of Warcraft (classic mode) and now Diablo 2.

Whay happened to the best gaming company?

I wished they added couch co-op, like in Diablo 3. This was D3's best feature. Too few games nowadays have that.

This is awesome, I've been playing Path of Exile since it released and now I have hope to return to childhood.

No mention of the secret cow level!?

So many great memories, and such high level of addiction. Temping...

I loved D2 back in the days, but I don't know how good that gameplay aged...

I don't know about you but to me what makes D2 so charming is its loot and character progression.

Even after all these years, I recall the clicking... my fingers would get tired from all the clicking.

First time I played D2 might have been in 2010 with people who played D1&D2 on release. It was genuinely one of the worst games I had ever played.

Note there's even the cursed chat gem on the bottom of the page.

"You are not allowed to view this page at this time." ?

Go "inconito". I think something I had filled the date to make me too young. It's ridiculous that entering drop down fields proves your age.

It doesn't prove your age. It proves that you declared yourself to be of age.

It proves that something or someone, not necessarily you, declared yourself to be of age.

Lets ruin another classic im looking at you wc3 remastered..

looks good. the pixels are gone and the ui where similar and recognizable got a overhaul. i would assume it supports resolutions of our era as well.

Diablo means "devil" in Spanish, and being raised in a catholic family always gave me odd feels when I talked about these game with people.

Still nice game, amazing soundtrack, same as D1.

I personally enjoy the classic graphics more.

I'm excited for runewords :)

I signed up to it. I’m curious how it goes. Diablo 3 was such a letdown, about as bad as GOT season 8.

LOL I thought Diablo was an old daisy-wheel printer. Gives away that I'm not a gamer.

No, it's a nuclear reactor.

YES

Wow...looks pretty damn good.

Wonder how intense the rewrite was; David Brevik said that much of the game relied on the precise resolution and framerate for everything to work. It wasn't a matter of just upping the resolution and everything worked fine.

I swear though, if this is anything like Warcraft Reforged, I'm truly done with this company.

It probably is though. Is any remaster any successful?

Windwaker HD and Link’s Awakening’s 2 remakes were pretty well received

Yes, a few of the Metal Gears. FF7. Legend of Zelda Master Quest for Gamecube. Counter-Strike: Source. Demon's Souls.

Have to disagree with you on Half Life: Source. It’s way too glitchy to enjoy from start to finish. I’d recommend playing Black Mesa instead.

You and I must have played different copies of the game, then

https://www.thedragonstrap.com/ was absolutely beautiful, and done with real care and attention by dedicated fans.

The Starcraft remaster was largely well-received.

Does Demon's Souls count as a remaster?

From what I gathered so far the engine hasn’t been touched. The actual d2 is running underneath and an overlay is running on top with the new graphics. Can’t find any sources for this but it has been mentioned by MrLlamasc and a couple of others d2 streamers commenting on blizzcon streams.

https://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3634147/diablo-2-resurre...

> Announced during BlizzConline, Diablo II: Resurrected is basically a dream scenario for the seminal action-RPG release -- it retains the core experience of the game yet still manages an impressive remake-level visual overhaul. A spectacular looking 3D overlay that sits on-top of a 2D core.

Worth noting MrLlamasc hosted the d2 dev "round table" at blizzcon this evening. Not to disagree with you in the slightest, just that it may lend him a little more credence than commenting on streams.

realMyst is amazing, easily recommended!

the age of empires 2 remaster has done well

You've got a lot of good replies already, but I think the best example has got to be Black Mesa, the Half Life remake. It even has a better Metacritic user score than the original Half Life.

Lots of remakes aren't very impactful, but that doesn't mean they're unsuccessful. All they intend to do is reawaken some love for a franchise, and provide a more accessible option for people who missed the original game. I can only think of one (recent) example where it went really badly.

The recent Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 was pretty good. Blizzard has absorbed the studio that made it too

The screen shake looked pretty legit.

If you've got the budget, you can keep the existing simulation under the covers identical, and build a 3d mapping over the top of it.

That's how most RTS games are built. Company of Heroes for instance has a low fps deterministic simulation which provides the multiplayer game logic, and high end end 3D mapping with physics and particles etc layered on top to make it pretty.

Any links to more details about this?

This is the classic article about AoE networking, which describes the deterministic simulation at the heart of AoE and later AoE 2:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_o...

The vast majority of details like animations are not implemented in the deterministic simulation. If we play our copies side by side, our villagers probably aren't animating exactly the same, the particle fx can be based on different random seeds (or just not present depending on culling or graphics details), etc. But anything that impacts gameplay is absolutely deterministic. It's OK if our villager is graphically facing left on my screen and right on yours, but the unit of wood they just chopped happened on exactly the same simulation frame.

Modern RTS games take this pretty far. In Company of Heroes when a tank blows up, people are thrown out and bits of it fly away and hit other units etc. The 3D FX is free to do whatever it wants to, with the one restriction that it cannot in any way impact gameplay. A tank can land on a soldier, but maybe it did on my screen and didn't on yours, so we can't make the soldier die! And in the simulation running on the game company servers, there aren't even any 3D graphics or physics running.

So the same technique can be used to upgrade old games. You run an invisible copy, and build a 3D version that looks at the location of the sprites and game state and makes it look pretty. Inputs in to the 3D version (you're probably rendering a 3D camera with perspective any maybe even rotation) are translated back to inputs to the 2D version.

This is absolutely fool proof in terms of maintaining consistency. It is guaranteed. But it's not a trivial task, you have to build a completely new rendering system in a way that's more complicated than you'd implement in a fresh game (say Diablo 3).

A lot of logic in some games is triggered by animation events. Eg, activate a hurtbox on this frame of an attack. I wonder if you use a ton of timers to avoid depending on animations in that way

Yeah, it's messy. The attack would be triggered by the hidden 2D version of the game, and you need to map the 3D version to visually strike when the 2D version hits.

If there's a bug in the 3D version, the strike happens at the correct time gameplay wise, it just looks wrong.

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