Last week, IGN Unfiltered published their interview with David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder, senior designer/lead programmer for Diablo, and principal designer of Diablo II).
Around the 1 hour mark, Brevik went into some minor details as to why he believes it will be a technical challenge to remaster the older titles. This wasn’t the first time that he mentioned this aspect either in terms of the methods (programming tricks) he used to create the core designs involved with getting a character to move in the game or how the monster AI worked.
This IGN Unfiltered interview shed more light on why.
I can say from a technical standpoint it’s gonna be extremely difficult. You will not be able to capture it exactly the way it was, and the number one reason is because of the shape of the screen.
A lot of the ways that the AI and stuff activates is from off-screen. If they were going to keep the same radius of awareness, you would get a whole bunch of stuff (like monsters) on the edge of the screen just kind of like, “I’m getting ready to do something here!'” If you alter the radius, then everything’s coming from different angles and at different speeds and doing different things than you’re used to and the way it’s run.
Part of the reason that Diablo plays the way it does is because of the grid that’s underneath, so you would have to mimic that kind of movement and grid that’s underneath Diablo II in order for it to really kind of have the same feel.
As Brevik noted, displays back then were CRT’s with a nearly square aspect ratio (4:3). And the above details he mentioned can be observed when using a “high resolution” patch that allows the game to display in resolutions larger than 800×600. The actual textures themselves are the same; all this patch does is show more of the map which is usually off screen including idle mobs and adds padding to the UI.
Basically trying to remaster the game utilizing a modern 3D environment is going to have an impact with making the gameplay feel the same given the added details mentioned in this interview. This also makes sense given the genre where there are a lot more sprite animations involved for things like the combat.
Given the hiring Blizzard did for their classic games team, they are likely going to give it a try. There are remasters of their older titles in the works since Activision Blizzard’s Fiscal Year 2017 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission states they are planning releases of remastered versions of titles from their library of IP. But after hearing more of Brevik’s explanations, I think that any possible Diablo II remaster is going to be farther out than what I previously thought (or may not happen at all if they aren’t able to come up creative solutions to the technical challenges that Brevik alluded to).
Disclaimer: for full transparency, I do own common shares of ATVI (Activision Blizzard)
