Remastering a game as venerable as Diablo II has got to be something of a tightrope walk. On the one hand, you’re expected to maintain the core experience of the game, but at the same time it’s also 21 years old and things have progressed. Toeing that line was a big part of an interview with studio design director Rob Gallerani and project lead Michael Bukowski.
A great deal is made about maintaining the original game’s legacy, such as its overall difficulty curve and even tweaking the lighting engine so that visibility wasn’t too dramatically changed. That said, there are improvements made overall, such as automatic gold pickup, improved friend list and chat functionality, and clearer UI verbiage as some examples. The devs even discuss what bugs to keep and what to fix.
As for the future of D2: Resurrected, the devs have not fully ruled out adding post-launch content, but they want to focus on getting the release game solid first.
“We wanted to build a really strong foundation before we started talking about the third and fourth floors on this building. […] We definitely have lots of ideas, but right now we’re waiting to make sure that we get the core game right. […] We’ll have to see once the game goes live what we do about new runewords, new items, rebalancing, things like that.”
