Diablo II: Resurrected Interview
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With Diablo II: Resurrected on the way, Eurogamer sat down with Blizzard’s head of the Diablo franchise Rod Fergusson and the game’s principal designer Rob Gallerani to learn more about this upcoming remaster. The resulting interview covers the remaster’s design principles, quality of life improvements, new features, online functionality, and more.
Here’s a quick excerpt to get you started:
You mentioned embracing the quirks of the original Diablo 2. Can you give me any examples of those?
Rob Gallerani: There are certain things players are like, oh, why is this a mechanic, right? And those are the ones that are very easy for us to say, well, we have to keep that because that's core to D2. So things like a very small inventory, stamina management, potion management, tomes for your scrolls - those are things in other games just become button presses. But that's something that's core to the game, core to the loop.
When it comes to things that could even be perceived as bugs, these are things like, if you stand in this one spot during this one boss fight, the boss can't get to you. It's like, okay, well, yes, that's a bug. I seriously doubt that was what the original creators intended. But it's become such a well-known thing that people can do that we're like, okay, we should keep it. Or even translations, when they were translated to French originally, they were not really a real translation. They just put the word le in front of it. It's like, okay, well, it's probably a poor translation, but at this point for 20 years that magic item in France is known as that thing. So we don't change that.
That's where we would have it. It's really a special case for all of these things. It's been around for so long that it's become part of what the game is.So basically what you're saying is the cheeses that worked when I played Diablo 2 when I was younger will still work when I play it again this year?
Rob Gallerani: Yes! Even even down to balances, right? So obviously the game has been rebalanced over the years, so if you haven't played it for 20 years it will be changed, but as of live Diablo 2 right now, that's the balance we're going with. So if you liked your hammer paladin, your hammer paladin still is pretty awesome.
And then, there’s also this PC Gamer article that tries to compare the original Diablo II with the upcoming remaster.
