We are just 16 days removed from BlizzCon and poor apology aside, I believe we had some good announcements that got a lot of people excited for the future of Diablo and Overwatch. Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV are officially announced, in development and on their way, but for the last 2 years, heck probably longer, one rumor seems to pop up and nothing is ever announced, or remotely hinted at.
That rumor is that a Diablo 2 Remaster is coming or will be announced.
I know the Diablo II fanbase would love to see that game come back and be remastered. There is a demand there for it to happen. Usually, there are a few things to be taken into consideration, from how much it would cost to remaster the game to the company has all the assets and code for this to happen.
Well…
It seems that we have a good idea if we could see one, but I don’t think its an answer that Diablo II fans wanna hear, at all.
During ExileCon a few short days ago, the creators of the Diablo franchise, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik shared a few stories about the series that popularized the action role-playing genre. One of the more intriguing stories came about when the moderator asked the gentlemen to recall a scary moment in Diablo II‘s development.
This one-story, in particular, that sounds like a developer’s nightmare, and to any developer who visits here at GamingLyfe, you have my sympathy if you went through this. Erich and Max Schaefer recalled that in the 11th hour of Diablo II‘s development, the entire backup of the game’s source code and assets was lost. Max Schaefer was quoted saying “Not just our code, but all of our assets. Irrevocably, fatally corrupted.”
His brother Erich added, “It’s all gone. We were supposed to have a backup but neglected it. We spent a day or two in sheer panic. [We] finally rebuilt a lot of it through what people had at their homes,” Erich Schaefer said. “I had a big chunk of it. I went home, pulled out the hard drive or whatever we did back then. I spent a few days reconstructing it, which ended up working fine, except that we lost all the history. We lost a lot of assets, art assets. It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They’d have to make them from scratch.”
Yes, The team at Blizzard North was thankfully able to reconstruct a lot of the code and assets from the version of Diablo II that developers took home to play. However, the root code and assets were apparently lost, which means Blizzard would have a tough time making a Diablo II Remaster today. Granted, stranger things have happened in the game industry, Activision was able to hire a team and recreate to source code for the Crash Bandicoot games and those have gone on to become successful hits with gamers worldwide.
At the same time, Blizzard could possibly not see any value to remaster Diablo II right now, but even that could change, as they thought WoW Classic wasn’t profitable, and it turned out that they were wrong.
Only time will tell if it will happen, but as it looks, for now, it just might not happen.
