from Hacker News

Diablo II: Resurrected

by eswat on 2/19/21, 11:30 PM with 190 comments

• by throwaway13337 on 2/20/21, 12:45 AM

  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.

• by grawprog on 2/20/21, 12:36 AM

  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.

• by hh3k0 on 2/20/21, 4:28 AM

  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.

• by moralestapia on 2/20/21, 12:35 AM

  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.

• by dangwu on 2/19/21, 11:33 PM

  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).

• by cwkoss on 2/20/21, 12:41 AM

  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.

• by FrozenVoid on 2/20/21, 1:08 PM

  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.

• by StillBored on 2/20/21, 12:56 AM

  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.

• by gnyman on 2/20/21, 12:25 PM

  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...

• by EduardoBautista on 2/20/21, 12:33 AM

  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.

• by NikolaeVarius on 2/20/21, 12:41 AM

  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

• by lanius on 2/20/21, 1:22 AM

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

• by pjmlp on 2/20/21, 3:45 PM

  > 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.

• by m3kw9 on 2/20/21, 12:13 AM

  2 was always better than 3

• by chrononaut on 2/20/21, 1:44 AM

  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..

• by xkeysc0re on 2/20/21, 12:21 AM

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

• by Espionage724 on 2/20/21, 2:12 AM

  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)

• by BossingAround on 2/20/21, 10:16 AM

  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).

• by LargoLasskhyfv on 2/20/21, 10:16 AM

  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.

• by pazimzadeh on 2/20/21, 2:05 AM

  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.

• by nathias on 2/20/21, 3:19 PM

  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).

• by nknealk on 2/20/21, 2:03 AM

  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

• by Decker87 on 2/20/21, 2:51 AM

  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.

• by krzyk on 2/20/21, 7:32 PM

  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?

• by warpspin on 2/23/21, 10:18 AM

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

• by jongorer on 2/21/21, 8:37 AM

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

• by wes-k on 2/20/21, 8:18 PM

  No mention of the secret cow level!?

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

• by k__ on 2/20/21, 12:36 AM

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

• by encom on 2/20/21, 2:13 AM

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

• by BugsJustFindMe on 2/20/21, 12:21 AM

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

• by dustymcp on 2/20/21, 5:31 PM

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

• by reshie on 2/20/21, 12:41 AM

  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.

• by huachimingo on 2/20/21, 1:31 AM

  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.

• by dj_mc_merlin on 2/20/21, 12:33 AM

  I personally enjoy the classic graphics more.

• by stefanmichael on 2/20/21, 12:36 AM

  I'm excited for runewords :)

• by ulisesrmzroche on 2/20/21, 1:23 AM

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

• by throwawayboise on 2/20/21, 12:31 AM

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

• by kingkawn on 2/20/21, 1:54 AM

  YES

• by Dirlewanger on 2/20/21, 12:14 AM

  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.