Diablo II patch 1.14 – Murasama•net

Back in 2010, Bashiok (former Diablo Community Manager) posted the following:

We’re glad the changes in 1.13b are being well received. We don’t think we’ve hit every issue obviously, there are still quite a few, as well as feature requests, etc. that we hope to address in future patches.

But, 1.13b won’t be the final version of this patch. Work is already in progress and near completion on a 1.13c that addresses a few additional issues. This new version will require new patches to be generated and tested, but it won’t be making its way to the PTR as we don’t feel the changes warrant it.

We plan to give a one week warning before a Diablo II ladder reset, which will coincide with the release of 1.13. You’re not likely to hear any updates on release schedule before that one week warning.

I also want to impress upon everyone that 1.13 isn’t and never has been intended as a final patch for Diablo II. I realize with the long delays in getting it to PTR, and longer stretches of time inbetween patches that it seems like it’s necessary that 1.13 encompass everything because, well, there’s just no guarantee that anything will come after. Or in a timely fashion. But, there is a solid long term plan of action for future support of Diablo II. There’s obviously plenty of room for skepticism, and I can’t blame anyone for that. But even with that skepticism I hope that we can get the message across that we have no intention of stopping here.

Diablo 2 patch 1.14 will be released after the d2 patch 1.13 later this year, it should be the prepatch in Diablo lore before Diablo 3 release and should be very demonic.

Patch 1.14 obviously never came to pass because Diablo III ended up being higher priority (considering how many times they scrapped designs and core systems, there realistically was no time for them to put any resources into D2). Given the state of D3 vanilla at launch, that also took away any time to do anything more with D2 (plus during that period after release, they also had to begin focusing on the expansion). They also had to deal with release issues including having to work on the Paragon system and the Infernal Machine events. They also had to burn precious time working on loot 2.0. What remains to be seen is whether or not their implementation of seasonal ladders will placate players until the next expansion. And that still means a part of their focus going forward will be related to that next expansion.

Note: I’m sure there would only be a few people from the D3 team that would actually be working on D2 anyway. From what I know, there was only one or two individuals who actually coded the later patches, and did it alongside their other responsibilities. Plus there is also a real resource constraint on the Mac side as they now only have a few Mac programmers that are stretched across all of their games (seems they cannot hire enough Mac coders as they are continually recruiting).

To put it really simply, the continuing/ongoing issues with Diablo III, as well as work for the next expansion, will mean that whatever plans they had for D2, is going to remain on the backburner for a long time. Which is actually unfortunate.