Diablo 2: Resurrected

I have to say I was rethinking my pre-order stance after Cyberpunk: 2077. Full disclosure I ended up having a lot of fun with my ~150hr playthrough and would have bought it for $60 at any rate so It probably doesn't even matter. But yes.. of course I pre-ordered D2: Resurrected.

WHO IS HYPED?!





https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/diablo_ii_resurrected?p=168304

 

I can’t even begin to speculate how many hundreds of hours I have invested in the original Diablo II. It’s the only fantasy RPG I’ve ever really gotten into. This will be the first game I’ve pre-ordered since Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.


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I loved Diablo II and its expansion in the day. I also loved Titan Quest.
But few years ago tried to play Torchlight and Path Of Exiles and I dunno, I just can't do it anymore...
I mean, the games are good and well executed, but it's just me... After like playing for about 30 minutes my brain gets all existential on my ass and I zone out and start thinking what am I doing with my life... Just don't get enjoyment out of mindless hack and slashes anymore...

 

I definitely respect that. But it's funny within the last year or two I just did a complete SP run through of D2 all over again and it was a lot of fun. I think the ARPG I've melded with the most since D2 is Grim Dawn. I just appreciate the dark atmosphere and I think D3 got away from that just enough to remove the true horror aspect and the grime. No one does cinematics better than Blizzard though, I can't wait to see these reworked D2 cinematics.

 

I just hope they will put more effort into D2 that they did W3... Heard it was pretty bad...
Grabbed AoE II DE a few days ago, man, if there is an example of how remasters should be made it's definitely AoE II DE.

 

I've watched all the videos for D2 remaster at this point. Even though it's 46 minutes that deep dive assuaged all my fears about this. It's a long video but definitely worth the watch especially for some of the behind the scenes glimpses and stories from an engineering perspective.

 

Heh, 40-something minute “deep dive” video, that certainly brings back memories
I still love Cyberpunk 2077 though

 

While it has been at least 7-8 years since I last played it, I still have my level 80 paladin from the first time I fired up the game more than two decades ago.

 

Same here. It was the only single player game which I was so into that I remember many times I would sit down and play and stop when I realized it's daylight again outside. I think it's the reason my favorite color is light green ))

My absolute favorite time was plowing through levels with the sorceress using blizzard and firewall.

 

Hype factor=High.

 

Well OK, I watched the trailer, heard the Tristam theme I haven't heard in a long time and stayed a while to listen.



Shame it will be only available on Battle.Net. I might have considered buying it for the nostalgia alone.

Didn't you pre-order CP2077 just recently?

 

Are you saying solo play will not be possible? Data costs a fortune here so I haven't watched any of the videos, I've been assuming all along this was a buy so long as they didn't alter the game in some unpalatable way. Having said that I well remember the bot/cheat game economy; I was hoping they might do something about that but it would require a change in drop rate. As an example I still have D2 on my small laptop to this day and have played it as recently as a few months ago having never found a single high rune through all the years right up to today. All those rune words using them back in the day were created by cheats, there would not have been a single one utilizing high runes in the game without them. There is also the incredibly unbalanced nature of the characters where some cannot make it past the Ancients in hell without being rushed by another character. I don't know if you folks recall; you can get to a point where you can't get meaningful experience anymore to attain a higher level but are still not powerful enough to jump that hoop. None of this really hurts me the way I use the game now as I know which builds can beat the ancients in hell and all the other trivia one needs to know to beat a game that was literally patched around the fact that bot farming couldn't be stopped and was feeding the items needed to play the game into it.

 

I'm pretty sure they said there's an offline mode but any character created in that mode obviously will not be available in any other mode.

 

What's you guess on the bot/dupe economy? Or did Blizz comment on it?

 

All your questions are answered in the deep dive

 

lol, well... The idea was if you gave a brief synopsis I wouldn't have to use any of my precious and very expensive bandwidth getting an answer to the question. I'm talking 50 bucks per 200 megs: Indiscriminate video consumption can add up fast.

 

They said something to the effect that it's pretty well protected with the latest battle.net security methods, but they fall short of making any bold claims.. because.. reality. They joked in both the Deep Dive and Q&A that they don't want to throw the gauntlet down to the internet. I think the popularity of the game is going to bring the scenario that they don't have to worry about any gauntlet throwing to get people to try to hack/dupe. I don't play multi at all and I don't try to hack/dupe so I'm not exposed to it and I'm not up to date on current trends, but I would imagine based on what they are saying it's not going to be much different than whatever D3 is doing.

 

It's not often I get this far out, you can't throw a rock to where you can use a telescope to see civilization from here. I do hate asking to be spoon-fed but sometimes a man needs a little help from his friends. If I remember rightly they enumerate every player item in D3, I don't think that was the case in D2 making duping a difficult to stop affair as there was no way to sort the cheats from the real found items. I never played much in open battle net but did play with my kids and a select group of friends; other than that all single player. Never on open battle.net other than to go to the trade games.

 

I never actually followed through on that. I bought the Xbox version when Best Buy was running a B2G1 sale before Christmas but returned it.

 

They keep repeating how the game engine under the covers is still D2, and they had to do that to keep the feel. Same 25fps under the covers even though the rendering engine will fill in gaps. Same grid system still. It's literally D2 with a massive visual rework and ability to run well on modem systems. You will also seamlessly be able to switch between the old and new renderer on the fly since it's the same old D2 underneath. They said all the "quirks" are going to still exist because it wouldn't be D2 without them. They are adding QoL features like a shared stash for your chars so you don't have to use mules etc..

It does seem though that it will be using up to date battle.net security.

 

Looking at D2R really makes me wish someone would remake Fallout 1 and 2 in the same fashion.
That would be a day one buy for me.

 

It makes me wonder why they haven't. Only explanation I can think of is that the rights to those titles in particular are in some sort of rights limbo, in much the same way the No One Lives Forever franchise is.

 

As far as I understand everything Fallout belongs to Beth. IIRC they even pushed update few years ago when classic Fallout games were pulled from GOG and then returned back which replaced Interpaly with Bethesda logo.
I guess Beth had zero interest in older games as they were developing their own. But now since Microsoft owns Zenimax I just hope they would give it a AoE DE treatment.

It's actually kinda funny. Half-Life remade on modern Source engine (Black Mesa), AoE II DE, and now watching D2R gameplay with new coat of paint makes it look so fresh. These 20 year old games with a bit of care and work play so good even to this day... Or maybe it's nostalgia kickin' in...
Either way my attention has been piqued by D2R. I just wish it was available elsewhere as well, not only on Battle.net.

 

Black Mesa was a fan project.


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What's wrong with just using battle.net to grab it? You only have to have it running when playing the game.

 

Oh this battle.net online only crap brings back some nightmares. Back when D3 was launched, right a few days after, I was sent on an assignment in Africa. Needless to say I wasn't happy that D3 wouldn't work in offline mode as I knew what internet speeds I'd be on there. I really hope they won't do the same with this remake. I wasted many hours and in the end I just gave up and played it a couple months after the release when I got back home. I can't say how disappointed I was as I had been looking forward to it for a very long time. Of course, after playing the game, I was disappointed for other reasons

 

No offline mode means no buy for me, absolutely no chance whatsoever.

 

Don't like creating useless accounts (even throwaway ones) and installing useless software on my machine for just a single game.
Just my preference

 

They said it has offline play. Perhaps there's some nuance there. I'm imagining there's no getting away from having to be online to at least acknowledge that it's a legit copy. (Or buy and download it in the first place)

 

I don't mind downloading the game or an install check; sounds like I'll be good.

 

Same here. My battle.net has only 2 games, D3 and Warzone

 

Now that the print media is getting out there I can see there will be offline mode, also, TCP/IP, along with B.net. Still going to do ladders, and they claim their stricter B-net security should tone down the duping although as they've freely admitted they don't want to throw down the gauntlet I'm thinking they know they're going to lose that battle. Doesn't affect me as I'll be offline or TCP/IP but I think a whole new generation will experience the fun of Baal bots and their runs. As well as incessant spam, 11-year-old boys thinking they're all grown up when they curse, all the other fun stuff D2 online brought upon its players.

 

I'm guessing people are already experiencing hacking/duping in a multitude of ARPG's with online features that already exist today. I don't think they need to wait for D2:R for that. No new ground will be broken there.

I'm replaying D3 again after I basically blew throught the game in SP once then the Expansion SP one time (I was just in it for the story and cinematics really) and then dabbled a bit again when they did the very first darkening of Tristram D1 homage. Probably put no more than maybe 70-100 hrs into it total all said which is like a grain of sand on a beach in D3 hours really. Having fun just doing a solo run through the campaign again with Necro. I never bought that addon, but it came with the D2:R preorder most expensive option. Having fun, though I only did really one run through the campaign before so It's been long enough for me to forget a lot so it feels a little fresh.. I still had a bunch of Marquis gems in my stash, that was about the gem construction level I stopped at on the one last go round. I threw a +4000 Thorn topaz on the crusader weapon slot and all the enemies are just dying hitting him.. it's a little silly lol.. I should maybe crank the diff up.

I definitely think I put the most hours into D1 (I was in the beta and I played that thing nonstop for I don't even know how long..). I put much less hours into D2.. and way less again into D3. I'm imaging if we had hours tracking on games since back then my top three games by hours spent would be Doom, Doom 2, Diablo .. everything else would be a DISTANT 4th place, it seems based on Steam that distant 4th place is Skyrim+Skyrim:EE at a combined 720 hours. I don't think I've got close to that with D2 and D1 is definitely over 1000.. Doom and Doom 2 I don't even want to know..

 

I really hope modders can add some-kind of endgame system, not really interested in doing baal runs.

 

I was in the closed beta for D2 and 3; I think they liked my gaming DTRs as it would have been an uncommon data point back in those days. Although gaming laptop was a bit of a misnomer back when D2 came out. I played the least of D1 having first started it just before I got into the beta for D2. Back then my middle son got into drugs and it was a really bad time. Even after he got out of it we had serious problems on the communications front. For some reason though while playing D2 we could chat. The world keeps on spinning and we all moved forward but to this day Diablo has become an ad hoc meeting place for my family. I still play with my kids and some of my grandkids are old enough to join in. Of course I'm just there to chat, the game was spent years ago. Still, for all that is fun to get together and mindlessly play while recounting the minor events of our lives. D2 for us will be a good thing, the grandkids have never played it and now well be able to get 8 of us in the same game instead of having a limit of 4 with D3.

 

Sorry that happened, but it seems like things turned out OK. That sounds like a great reason to get D2:R as long as everyone has a capable enough PC! The sys req seems pretty achievable on the lower end side with meager hardware. Even the recommended is only a 1060.

I also replayed D1 fully right before the other D2 playthrough. Even at its age D1 still holds up as long as you toss QoL mods at it. I still listen to the soundtracks once in a while while working.

 

lol, oh yeah, you're a fan. Blizzard did some great work back in those days when considered against their contemporaries; IMO across the board. Much like Cyberpunk, D2 resurrected had me at hello; the only way they could have lost the sale was to remove single player or something along those lines. I became curious out of what might become of D3 when you've got both new 2 and 4 in the market. I wandered over that way and noticed that they are switching the merc over to being able to mount a full set of gear with some gear properties also transferring over to the player character. What's fascinating about that is they said it would benefit offline play. They almost never say that, usually they mention solo play which is more correct when the game has no offline mode. So... Gaffe or spoiler?

 

Hah, the follower stuff in the latest D3 patch is definitely for soloing, which is what I always end up doing. I think that was supposed to drop today! I did a whisky/bourbon tasting tonight so I haven't checked... checking..

Nope, seems to just be in PTR today, not GA yet. Should be great for solo though as you can tailor the follower to be a little more useful. I don't know how long usually between PTR and GA deployment, but I might be done with this run by the time they launch it. lol.

 

It's variable, seems to me that it normally hinges on how difficult it is to get it balanced. Sometimes they'll run a second PTR if things were really whacked during the first. At other times they make a few changes and let fly. It'll be running for at least all of this ladder so you've got it waiting for you when you get to it.

 

It definitely seems like this is more substantial than a lot of previous D3 patches, might be a while.

 

They are saying D2 saves will work. I wouldn't think too many have D2 installed or an old backup of saves on a floppy but who knows? That implies that the old trainers probably work or could work with a tune up.

 

I do, and this is amazing news if true.

 

It's from Blizzard so you won't get a much better source until you try it out yourself. I also have some saves; a kicker, hammerdin, etc. I don't think I'll use one though, I'm likely to stick with single and start from scratch.

 

Heh, I think I also have a save of my D2 char on some DVD-RW in my parent's house

 

dvd rw was pretty cutting edge back in the day you could use it like a hdd

 

Another thing I'm really hoping is once they're done with D2:R, they remake D1 using that engine. It does operate off the same-ish grid system. Be kind of cool to see them release like a D1 DLC for it, though I guess Darkening of Tristram might be as far as they're willing to go with any D1 love.

 

No question it came up early during internal discussions...

 

Ehm... Let's not get ahead of ourselves. First let's see for D2R turns out, then we can think about D1.

 

I just started a trapper.

 

Oh, we know it's going to be good.