Honestly I thought they did an amazing job with the graphics, so in that respect I think that they were faithful to it (Excluding Amazon’s face LOL and some other characters.. the character models could have been more faithful for sure, but the other environmental stuff was fine). But I was highly skeptical that they weren’t gonna just cave into people’s demands and change the game. I’ve said this before in other places, but I’ve gotten over it in terms that I didn’t buy D2R and am not planning on ever buying it and also I look at D2R as a fork / mod of Diablo II that is developed by the Blizzard folks (aka Not Blizzard North). In this aspect, I’m fine if they change whatever they want, ruin it or whatever because Diablo II is Diablo II, it has already been released, and D2R != D2 so whatever. D2R is effectively a game for a new generation of players (including some old timers that are fine with or are expecting even old remasters (at this point the word remaster isn’t even being faithfully executed, you are correct in that the SC remastered is more faithful to what the word remaster is suppose to mean. With the latest changes coming in I wouldn’t say D2R is a D2 remake because I don’t think it is, but I also don’t think it’s a remastered either, because it’s pretty different to the original and the new 2.4 changes - and definitely changes coming after 2.4 - will continue to make the fork deviate further and further away). It seems people don’t understand the reason why a lot of the design was done the way it was and what makes D2, D2. The bad and the good is what makes the experience we had. And in a separate conversation we could of course spend hours just talking about what each particular topic of change means, and what changing it means: Stash Tabs? Shared Stash? Etc). To pick just one of these, Shared Stash let’s say. Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 were made so that people pretty much don’t twink their characters and are only playing and finding gear with just that character themselves. At least on Single Player. On Battle.net people can obviously trade so this particular piece doesn’t work in the same aspect but that would make sense given that it’s multiplayer. For Diablo 1, Single Player literally didn’t even have a stash. Since your SP map didn’t re-roll (Same as in D2, but with the added effect that the Diablo 1 map not only didn’t re-roll but it didn’t re-roll because the entire save state was saved), so what people ended up doing was just dropping all of their stuff in town (Close to the fountain and Cain) and just playing the game. Once you finished beating the game, you would need to go back to your town, pick up anything you wanted to keep (like a squirrel) and keep it in your inventory, and get rid of everything else. Afterwards you could re-roll a new Single Player map and rinse and repeat.
In Diablo II, Blizzard North added a stash (The small classic 6x4 stash) so you didn’t have to leave everything on the floor. However it was obvious that making the stash that small was done also so that you could have a little bit of item persistence given that Single Player maps don’t re-roll but they don’t save all of the game world state either, adding to the game / difficulty randomization. Having a small stash means people were forced to make decisions about what items can be kept and what can’t be kept. Not having any official method of transferring items means that you are only playing untwinked, and it truly is SSF (Not this newish PoE style SSF definition people want to use of \"Oh I’m playing by myself but I can still give all of my other characters items that the other characters found\". I can see the logic with that and it has its merit - that’s more of a \"I’m passing down my inheritance to my child that is in the same world as me\" mentality - but SSF traditionally I would say would have meant something like: \"Two Single Player characters are completely independent from each other in completely separate parallel universes, thus no \"inheritance\" is possible and only untwinked play is viable). But regardless, on SP we can use the multiple instances / LAN approach to be to replicate battle.net \"trading\" behavior and twink our other characters. Of course twinking massively changes the intended game experience for Single Player characters, and it also shows in the sense that most of the items in D2 suck, so if you’ve twinked your character, finding a Bonehew, or any other item most likely won’t give you that dopamine rush you would have gotten if you had a fully isolated untwinked chararacter that had crappy gear and then found a Bonehew. In that latter case, Bonehew could be a massive godsend from the RNG gods. So it’s interesting how when you play untwinked, all of the 95% of crappy D2 items actually make sense and feel satisfying. It may sound like I hate twinking or something but I don’t, most of my life I’ve twinked, but I can clearly see the design of D1 and D2 weren’t made for twinking (at least on Single Player). For bnet, well trading is essential so people are obviously going to twink just through the nature of everyone being together and trading. But don’t tell me SSF means \"I’m playing alone and finding items with my own hands\". The hands of who? In their case, it’s the hands of their human - real world - persona VS the hands of the actual character playing in the game world. It just seems people want to have their cake and eat it at the same time - in terms of definitions.
Since D2R introduced an official Shared Stash, that change alone changes the original intent of the game’s experience. They’ve removed LAN which is something I’m completely against for different reasons, but it also affects Single Player people that want to 1. Be able to play with people in an offline capacity, at least offline away from official battle.net servers and 2. Allow people to self mule with a modified dll that would have to be done with D2R. Of course point 2 is \"Solved\" given the shared stash, but it has the consequence of changing the intent of the original Blizzard North developers. But like I said, to me D2R is a fork so whatever, it’s a different generation, a different game, so it could have a different set of standards by their current player base.
They (Blizzard) said that they couldn’t keep LAN because of security reasons due to people being able to try and re-use the networking code as a way to try and test/build attacks/exploits that could be used on Battle.net, I think there is reason to believe that would be true, but I don’t think this is the main reason. The reason is obvious that it is to protect their corporate profits and try and prevent people from pirating the game. From a business perspective, I think that removing LAN _AND_ having DRM _IS_ the right approach for them. If we look at PC Diablo III, 10 years later, and we still don’t have a DRM-free version of Diablo III working on PC. People tried early on to have some sort of Private Server (similar to WoW’s Private Servers), and nothing. So from a business perspective, D3 DRM was extremely effective and successful, but it came at a huge cost of consumer rights, which I’m not in favor of. As I said, I agree that from a business perspective, DRM was the right approach (especially the way they did it of having always online DRM and maybe not even having all of the code locally), but as a consumer I refuse to support it. I actually did buy D3 Collector’s Edition on PC back when it first came out, and I played D3 Day 1, 3:00 AM ET and had those Error 37 errors lol, but I was a lot younger back then. When the Blizzard stuff happened recently (with the California lawsuit), I made the difficult decision to officially delete my Battle.net account, which meant I lost all of my purchased Blizzard games, including my D3 CE license (So no more Tyrael wings for me). But oh well. If I want a DRM free copy of Diablo III, I’ll re-buy a D3 copy on my Switch. Luckily, the majority of my \"purchased Blizzard games\" were actually physical copies of my old D2 / War 3 / etc original 16 digit license keys that I had imported into the Battle.net system to get the newly generated keys used with their updated installers. So in reality I lost only a fragment of my stuff. If this was a fully digital account, then I would have lost 100% of the purchases.
Anyways, as you can see, I have a lot to say about this but I’ll stop here lol. I suppose you can say most of this are thoughts that have been developing for years, but I haven’t really had an outlet to express it given that I don’t have any social media accounts. The Moving Caravan is a perfect place for me to let it all out LOL.
. But another reason was that it was unplanned. I’ve been thinking about whether or not I wanted to even say this for many years and idk, yesterday just felt like the right time to do it and it just came out naturally.
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