So there’s a toggle switch, a legacy toggle, that when you press the button, you’ll see behind the curtains, and there is Diablo 2 in 2D sprites running right there, and you can play the way that you played 20 years ago.” The entire simulation, the engine for this game, that lifeblood of this game, is right underneath. It’s right there, underneath the surface. “We’re not reverse-engineering it we’re not rebuilding it and trying to make it look and sound like. “This isn’t a remake,” Rod Fergusson, executive producer of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard Entertainment, told Polygon in a recent interview.

In 2021, the original looks like something Minecraft vomited up - a murky smear of pixels and jerky motion. The fact that Diablo 2 suddenly looks like a modern game released in 2021 isn’t a missed opportunity it’s a gosh-danged miracle.ĭiablo 2, in 2000 and in my memory, was a gritty, violent take on loot-based adventure games. Frankly, the whole thing felt like a bit of a rip-off.īut then I hit the button that lets me hot-swap from the updated graphics to the original, and my jaw dropped. The game plays the way that I remembered it, and at first, I also thought it looked the same. I’ve been playing the technical alpha of Diablo 2: Resurrected to get a sense of how the game is coming along, and what I’ve seen after only a few hours makes me hopeful for the full release.ĭiablo 2: Resurrected is another one of those Blizzard games in which the remaster is kept as close to the original as possible, while updating the look of the characters and environment. Not how it was, but how you remembered it When done correctly, that sort of rerelease always feels like a magic trick. Everything about the game’s graphics has been updated and improved, without touching the soul of the experience itself. I have no idea why they’re expecting me to pay for it again. Yep, this is the game I loved back in the day. Diablo 2: Resurrected also looks similar to other hack n’ slash games available today, so my 2021 brain just accepted things at face value. I didn’t think these games looked like murky, blocky messes when I originally played them, because they looked similar to every other game on the market at the time. I’ve experienced this effect before, most recently when playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2. I wasn’t surprised because it looked so good I was surprised because it looked exactly as I remembered it. Diablo 2: Resurrected shocked me in the opening minutes of play.

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