Diablo 2: Resurrected won't pull a Warcraft 3: Reforged & overwrite the original game
It looks like Vicarious Visions and Blizzard learned a lesson from the disastrous decisions of Warcraft 3: Reforged, plus Diablo 2: Resurrected will have mod support.
One of the most confounding and terrible decisions surrounding the abysmal launch of Warcraft 3: Reforged was that instead of featuring its own files for the game, it instead rewrote the original Warcraft 3. This forced players into a corner where they could not go back once they were in for the remastered real-time strategy relaunch. They were stuck with Warcraft 3 in its Reforged state and all the issues that came with it. When it comes to Diablo 2: Resurrected, it sounds like Blizzard and Vicarious Visions took the lessons learned from Reforged to heart. Ressurrected will not only feature mod support, but won’t replace the original Diablo 2 game on your system.
This factoid was revealed in a Blizzard Q&A for Diablo 2: Resurrected during BlizzConline 2021, put up on the Diablo YouTube channel. When asked if Diablo 2: Resurrected would replace the original Diablo 2, D2R principal designer Rob Gallerani replied “no, absolutely not.
“Everything you have about [the original Diablo 2] currently will stay D2,” Gallerani expllined. “This is a separate product, separate game. You can play 'em both at the same time if you want.”
This should come as welcome relief to anyone who remembers how Warcraft 3: Reforged launch. Besides issues such as Blizzard claiming intellectual rights to any mods created for the game and early technical issues online and off, a big part of what drove Warcraft 3: Reforged to have one of the worst Metacritic user ratings ever recorded was that downloading it replaced the files of the original game.
It remains to be seen if Blizzard’s strange policies regarding mods will remain in place with Diablo 2: Ressurrected’s promised mod support, but it at least seems as though the publisher learned its lesson about tampering and/or burying its old games with the new one. With Diablo 2: Ressurrected launching on consoles and PC sometime in 2021, stay tuned for further updates and details about the remastered classic later this year.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Diablo 2: Resurrected won't pull a Warcraft 3: Reforged & overwrite the original game
