The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Blizzard to restore Classics: Diablo 2 Resurrected September 23rd!
Roe
Always to the EastRegistered User regular
Always to the EastRegistered User regular
Blizzard's Job listings. wrote:Compelling stories. Intense multiplayer. Endless replayability. Qualities that made StarCraft, Warcraft III, and Diablo II the titans of their day. Evolving operating systems, hardware, and online services have made them more difficult to be experienced by their loyal followers or reaching a new generation.
We’re restoring them to glory, and we need your engineering talents, your passion, and your ability to get tough jobs done.
So if you like wearing many hats, know small teams are the most effective, and look forward to challenges that will create millions of new adventures for our players: we would love to hear from you.
Responsibilities
Make gameplay first again on modern operating systems.
Create conditions for experiences that look as good as they play.
Own implementation and curation of features new and old.
Combat hacking to improve multiplayer.
Diagnose and fix all the things: crashes, deadlocks, overflows, heap corruptions, etc.
Diablo 2: Resurrected's street date was announced at e3. It is launching on the 23rd of September of this year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DttPBtsZ5fcDiablo 2 Resurrected is a remake of Diablo 2 with upscaled graphics, item art, music and is going to be integrated into the Battle.net launcher for safe, cheat free experience.
Roe on
+8
Posts
gonna be a job listing for hr soon too.
Where did you hear this?
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
Brother Laz could remake Diablo 2 for modern OSes by himself in 8 months. The biggest issue there is he knows better than to try to get a job at ActiBlizz, so it'll probably get done slower and worse by people that are only interested in phoning it in for a paycheck. Probably.
I hope I'm wrong, though.
to be fair if they focus on making the new versions for Windows 10 then there wont be any difference. factor in cross-buy/cross-play and cloud saves and you could be able to play at home on your PC and while travelling on your tablet.
They will 100% do a Mac release simultaneously. It's their thing.
I would share this cynicism if Blizzard games didn't still get released with incredible quality.
It's an "oh that's nice" and nothing earth-shattering.
oh i'd be surprised if there wasn't. despite Apple's lack luster support of gaming on their platform i think most PC devs have been in the habit of dual PC/Mac releases for some years now. hell back before Steam it was just one disc that served both platforms.
but with the tablet comment the issue is whether they are focused on iOS which could be a different situation altogether. ultimately its a matter of whether they're shooting for a standard PC/Mac release* or chasing after the tablet/mobile crowd**. the 3rd option of course would be to chase both markets and right now Windows development seems the easiest path to do so***.
of course, all just hypothetical speculation since we have little to go on. and in all honestly i expect Blizzard will want the games to be played as many people as possible on almost any device they choose. at this point i'd only rule out console releases.
*and why wouldn't they?
**think Civ Revolution 2 and of course Hearthstone.
***if perhaps not the guaranteed money maker just yet.
Well, I believe they are going to be doing enough to make a future purchase. Blizzard is known to not do half-baked work, or they will put more work in due to popular demand.
IMO, any work on the gameplay will be great, the game has a list of issues that need work and a blind man could write a list to make the game worth playing again.
Also, any attention to the game that equals a new patch (1.10 I'm looking at you) and some anti-cheat measurements, and lots of people will be day one buyers.
probably, but i'm sure they'd rather the news come out on a stage as a nice interstitial moment and not through a HR request on their job board.
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
I have a feeling that if it were true, they would unveil it at the opening. I'm still hoping for a surprise announcement on Saturday though.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-looking-to-revive-these-classic-games-upd/1100-6431991/
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
native support to stuff like 1920x1080 would be lovely
Would be nice to play it again in a proper modern resolution though.
I wish they'd tack the original Diablo in there, if only to get better support for a modern OS. I lost a decent chunk of time during my teen years playing Diablo at LAN parties with my friends.
I wish they'd redo Rock 'n Roll Racing too. Spent a lot of time racing in sci-fi super cars back in the day.
Ideally they'd keep the isometric third person view, but I think it'd be fun even in a first person view like most other modern racing games.
although it is still missing a lot of stuff (night elves and undead, bloodmage, apparently you can't cancel a building once it starts (?) a bunch of other stuff) and some things are different (mana regen seems better), but it is a playable demo and looks pretty awesome. the new models look really good. i am looking forward to this actually getting released (alpha...or beta...or some other preview version was supposed to hit 12/31/2015 but that didn't happen).
as to the official stuff there are rumors that blizz is talking to some WC3 pro's for balance modifications but i don't think there has been anything officially stated.
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
i mean they are making overwatch so it isn't as though they are not making new stuff. however personally i would be fine if they just perpetually updated WC3 forever. i still play frozen throne relatively frequently (although lately i haven't had the chance to), and i would love to have a few of the new b.net improvements and maybe a minor balance pass.
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
I know this post was from back in November but @SmokeStacks I don't think you need to do that stuff to play Diablo 2, unless you purchased it digitally and that purchase is tied to your BNet account.
A few days ago I broke out the old discs and installed it again. Accounts in Diablo 2 are fickle things that you can create easily and you lose characters after 90 days of inactivity anyway. Forgetting your password there isn't a big deal.
If you want to play Diablo 2 in a modern resolution, there are mods for that (single player only, you'll get banned online), but I've heard these also can break the game because you can attack enemies off screen who can't even see you and won't retaliate. AI is only active a little beyond that 800x600 window.
Just send it but black out everything but your photo and name? I don't get the apprehension over something like this. You provide just as much info introducing yourself to someone.
But D2 wasn't all roses. The charm system was terrible. Having to carry around an inventory of crap to augment your dude was terrible, because it meant never picking up loot. Likewise, the original Horadric Cube was crap because there was no in-game documentation for ANY of the recipes except the story recipe to craft the Horadric Staff and open the temple of blah blah blah.
Also, class balance is way better in D3. Blizzard has always been committed to the long-term life and upkeep of their games, and they put a lot of patches into Diablo 2 back in it's day. Some patches with some amazing things. But there are still tons of things that got overlooked, ignored, passed over, and all that. Like talents that are completely worthless. Talents that don't work as advertised. And builds that just flat suck.
The D3 team has done a way better job of ensuring that there are multiple viable playstyles per character than we ever had in D2.
That's the long way of saying this: D2 was great, and if they add it to the modern BNet client, I will buy it. But there's no way D2 can compete with D3. D3 is a way better game by leaps and bounds.
The only thing D2 even remotely has in it's favor is a better story, and let's not kid ourselves. Nobody cares about the story of Diablo. It's all about loot runs.
But yeah D3 is better in every other way.
Opinions are just that. But I think the D3 system of Rifts/Bounties and adventure mode in general is way better than repetitively clearing Mephisto over and over ad nauseum.
What I'm really, really hoping for personally is that Warcraft III Complete in HD might be testing the waters for Warcraft IV (maybe some sort of synergy business bullshit tie-in with the Warcraft film).
I am that desperate for Warcraft IV. That being said, I will play the shit out of a pretty version of Warcraft III with no promise of a sequel (and maybe some streamlining of mechanics).
In the area of wishful thinking, besides Warcraft IV, I'd kind of like them to try something different with scale. We've had 20 years of Warcraft RTS games where everything is more or less the same size (which probably has multiplayer reasons as well). As is the case for Starcraft and its sequel. Maybe mix it up a little bit in single player? Huge ass city and castle environments, massive dragons that literally force other air units out of the way or can crush troops under the talons, that sort of thing?
Depends on what patch you played and if you played the expansion or regular.
It also mattered how you played.
I know exactly what you mean. D3 at release was a mess and compared to D2 it was awful. D3 now vs D2 is actually a toss up. For me nostalgia always wins. I play D3 at the start of a new season for maybe 2-3 days and get bored and quit. But if I installed Diablo 2 right now I would play it for months.
But I like the customization of characters that D2 provided.
The character building was pretty much the only reason I played so many hundreds of hours of D2, and probably the biggest reason I haven't bothered picking up D3 yet.