Two of Diablo II‘s former developers think that if Blizzard would indeed work on a remaster, then they wouldn’t do justice to it with simply updating its graphics.

IGN interviewed Max Schaefer (the executive producer of Diablo II and co-founder of Blizzard North) and Matt Uelmen (composer) about Torchlight 3, but they also talked about a possibility of a Diablo II remaster, which was rumoured in May. Here’s what Schaefer had to say:

„First of all, I think it’s probably impossible to capture it… It wasn’t even a true 3D game, everything was rendered sprites and so to capture the exact feel of what happens when you click in a 3D environment is going to be challenging at best.

[The development team on the remaster is] going to have to spend a lot of their time [on capturing that feeling], not just on recreating maybe slightly higher fidelity graphics and all that… that’s the easy part. It’s easy to go back and kind of 1:1, make the game look better. It’s going to be the feel and the atmosphere that are kind of inherent in the technology that was behind it, which was… at this point we can look back and say it’s kind of ‘spaghetti code.’

It was [built using a] custom engine… it was stuff that hadn’t been done before. I would assume that a remaster is going to be done using an established graphics engine with its conventions and its quirks, and so much of what made [Diablo II] special was the feel and the intangibles, so it’s a daunting task. The ideal remaster would be something that retains that feel and that atmosphere, that has a modern take on the graphics. Honestly, I hope they pull it off. I’m glad they’re doing it and I don’t have to,” he said. At least he was self-critical (see the spaghetti code comment).

Diablo II’s remaster isn’t even announced yet. If it does exist, then Blizzard would have to announce it at an online BlizzCon in November or so, with a shock release in about a month (its rumoured release date is late 2020).

Source: WCCFTech

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