https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/osY64fwk
This one is specifically for Diablo II
This one will prove to be challenging if the plan is to try and replace the Battle.net 1.0 infrastructure with the current implementation (which I don’t believe is the goal here; see below). I sort of covered one of the major downsides of the current design which is the “ghost town” effect (compared to the lobby systems that were used in StarCraft and Diablo II) when they began advertising for the initial wave of software engineers for their classic games (which was mainly for allowing those games to run on current day operating systems).
This position is at this underlying level in terms of the older closed and open Battle.net realms (which aren’t as secure as they need to be). The old lobby is a player interface which I consider core to the Diablo II experience whether it be the chat lobby with other players avatars or the named games portion.
I can see the desire for trying to bring these older classic games into the current implementation due to the underlying social features and network security features that are already built into that current Battle.net platform. However, I kind of doubt they plan on going that route since this position clearly states it is for their classic games. So I believe it is about mainly making that older infrastructure more robust with those classic games (like better security, better data validation, more robust handling of network issues, maybe working with the main Battle.net engineers to find ways to bring some of the social aspects like friends lists and clans/communities to the older implementation) which would therefore allow their classic games to also be brought into the Blizzard application.
As for an actual StarCraft style remaster? Based on some things that David Brevik said in some recent interviews where he mentioned Blizzard may no longer have any of the higher resolution assets (that would be surprising consider how deep their vaults are for that kind of stuff), I still believe a higher resolution version is further off since there is a greater challenge for modernizing those sprite graphics in a ARPG style game (where the older combat animations don’t feel tacky with higher resolution textures) without changing the actual underlying systems compared to an RTS (completely different game play and therefore different engine requirements). It doesn’t mean I don’t believe it is not going to happen; it most likely will because of that “restoring them to glory” statement plus the fact that they can see how active those keys for those games are.
