Diablo 2 Devs: “Not Trying To Fix The Original,”

Diablo 2 Resurrected lead artist Chris Amaral and design lead Rob Gallerani said they never try to fix the original game or make it any easier. The idea was to stick to a 70/30 ratio, where 70% of the classic version remains intact.

Design lead Rob Gallerani and lead artist Chris Amaral spoke to PCGamesN about the remaster: “An authentic remaster of people’s childhood” without any plans to change things for the new generation.

Gameplay

Blizzard and Vicarious Visions turned their look at already existing modifications to Diablo 2.

“When we approached quality of life on this game, we definitely wanted to make the game more accessible, but not easier. So things like making the inventory huge, or making it so all of your items can stack, right? Picking which loot to take and discard is still an important decision, so we’re not going to make the game easier” – Rob Gallerani.

HD and SD

One of the goals for the team was to make it easy for players to switch between HD and SD at the press of a button. This meant that interface elements from the different versions had to match each other for a seamless effect.

“Now here’s kind of a fun story for why we chose the size we did for the stash. Because you can toggle at any point between HD and SD, we have to make sure that shared stash is accessible in SD. Well, the 10×10 is actually the vendor screen grid. So we knew we already had art for that in SD. So that’s actually why we went with that number – it was bigger, it was art that already existed in the SD. Anything we add in HD as a quality of life change that didn’t exist in SD, has to still work. There was no shared stash in SD 20 years ago.

It’s the same with controller support, right? So if you switch to controller, you’ll notice that the HUD stays in HD, but the game goes to SD. And that’s because there was no controller HUD at all. And to try and fake that was like nope, I don’t think people will like that because there was no parity of what the controller icons looked like in the original game.” – Chris Amaral.

Diablo 2 Resurrected is set to release somewhere in 2021