Blizzard doesn’t have a great track record on remasters right now, their Warcraft III remaster was very poorly received, but this is their announcement trailer for a re-make of Diablo 2 and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack for $40 coming to Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One, and the Xbox Series X & S consoles later this year. Sadly, I don’t see any mention of a macOS release, giving up on decades of support by Blizzard.
Blizzard says that Diablo 2’s 2D graphics are revamped with “…full 3D physically-based rendering, dynamic lighting, revamped animations and spell effects…”, they’ve re-shot the cutscenes, and added surround sound for the game’s audio and soundtrack. Like many recent remasters, Blizzard says you can swap between the new and old Diablo 2 graphics quickly.
Vicarious Visions and Blizzard are co-developing the re-master and say that progress is supposed to be portable across platforms for characters and their inventories.
Diablo 3’s console port was awesome, I loved playing it with direct control on a gamepad instead of the sort of indirect control you had on computers with a mouse and keyboard. Hopefully this is an easy slam-dunk for Diablo 2. There’s an “technical test” of Diablo 2 coming soon for Windows players who opt-in and are chosen by Blizzard at their Diablo 2 site. Who loves to get exploited by one of the richest companies in video gaming to test their products without compensation? I guess I do, because I signed up for the test and if it comes without any NDA I’ll write about the experience.
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