Diablo 2 remastered for PC and consoles

[anon32019413]

I was hoping for Linux or Raspberry Pi release of the original un-remaster version.

The original plays pretty well on Linux in Wine. I was going through the Den of Evil this morning to try it out, I haven’t touch that game in years.

For Action/RPGs I really liked the Balder’s Gate: Dark Alliance games for XBox, PS2 and GameCube. As well as the Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest games for PS2. They were a little more comfortable to play being controller based instead of the somewhat awkward mouse interface of Diablo 2. Balder’s Gate: DA has a good story but it’s very linear. Lots of items to collect and upgrade. Very good 2 player co-op support.

If you don’t like spending money, then try Path of Exile. It’s like Diablo 3 but much more polished. It’s a tough game. Your first character build may have problems completing the higher level content. It’s generally worthwhile to accept that you’ll have a “practice” character that you throw away before committing to a more planned out build. (either plan your own, or check out the hundreds of build guides online). PoE’s skill system is absolutely bonkers. Any class can access any skill in the entire game. Some skills completely alter the game mechanics, such as giving you complete immunity to a certain type of damage but also setting your hit points to 1 permanently (so all those +1 HP nodes you picked up on the skill tree are worthless). Not that people usually pick up such a double-edged skill, but certain builds don’t need any hit points because like I said: bonkers.

[Professor59]

Yes, I found and installed a variety of patches. None got me all the way there.
Thanks, tho

[bwente]

Haven’t upgrade to Big Sur yet, so I can still play Lord of Destruction and Unreal Tournament 2004!

[DukeTrout]

@beschizza

This is very bad news for me. I sank so much time into that game. I had a full set of lvl 96+ characters.

I feel ya, Rob. I didn’t have a full set, but I had some badass Necromancers and Amazons.

[Ratel]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Hellgate developed by Flagship Studios, who later turned into Runic, who produced Torchlight. It’s the same people.

I actually know a bunch of those guys, and while a few people might have moved over, as I understood it at the time the Hanbit (?) handed the code over without their blessing, and they were unhappy about it. No one I knew moved to Runic.

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

@Shuck

I think only adding Max Schaefer, one of the founders of Blizzard North and Flagship, as a producer.

Apparently both Schaefers, and it sounds like they brought over some remaining staff that might have followed them out of Blizzard North. Seems like they shed people on all sides, and the bulk of the staff for early Runic came out of Baldree’s team.

Thing is Flagship was practically the entire leadership and core personnel from Blizzard North, as structured since before they were part of Blizzard. So smaller separate team or not, he was working for the Diablo Guys.

Point being not that Diablo Guys did the thing. But that you can’t really say that Baldree “ripped off Blizzard” when some of his coworkers and staff had been working on Diablo since before Blizzard was involved. There is some continuity there, and given that Fate came out 3 years after Diablo II. You can’t really say this:

@Shuck

Torchlight wasn’t directly influenced by Diablo

Cause Jesus look at it. Though I’m assuming that’s just awkward phrasing on your part. It’s about as much continuity as you tend to see with this stuff. These days you tend not to even see that much with direct sequels made by the same company. And it’s exactly how influence, iteration and spread of ideas in media tends to go. The old teams break up, move around, retire, new people come in, things are added, expanded, refined along the way. Some body does it better, some body else does it different enough to spawn this different thing. Sports franchises take your ideas to monetize load screens…

@Shuck

but Flagship’s publisher owned it and at the time still intended to put it out.

Wasn’t it the international distributor? I just remember it was strange/sketchy it doesn’t seem clear that the company that claimed to own it, did own it (or Hellgate), and there were later accusations along the lines of Runic reusing IP without permission. The gist from brushing up earlier appears to be the other company claimed to own everything, and Flagship eventually agreed to sell it to get out from under the mess.

All I remember from the time is it didn’t smell right.

@Ratel

(?)

I tried to brush up on it earlier and I’m still confused. Especially with regards to the rights issue.

[Shuck]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Flagship was practically the entire leadership and core personnel from Blizzard North

Leadership, yeah, entire core staff, not so much. I’m friends with/have worked with a number of the original Blizzard North Diablo I, II (and original III) devs, who weren’t part of Flagship (and some of the Flagship devs, who weren’t from Blizzard).

I think Runic, in the end, amounted to the Mythos team (which wasn’t much more than a dozen developers), and from Flagship south, both Schaefers and Hu, who had worked on D2.

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Though I’m assuming that’s just awkward phrasing on your part.

You missed my point - Torchlight was based on Mythos. Mythos was influenced by Fate. Fate was influenced by Diablo I/II. So yes, Fate was a (streamlined) Diablo II-style action RPG, but by the time Torchlight came about, the Diablo influence was somewhat more indirect. The Fate/Mythos/Torchlight design came from Baldree, not the Blizzard North guys.

Torchlight gets discussed as an ARPG “made by the guys who made Diablo,” but it was very much not that, despite a couple Diablo guys being involved. Hellgate, on the other hand, was very much that, an (unsuccessful) spiritual successor to the Diablo games, made not just by a good number of Diablo devs, but based on ideas that had been kicked around at Blizzard North before it shut down.

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Wasn’t it the international distributor? I just remember it was strange/sketchy it doesn’t seem clear that the company that claimed to own it, did own it

@Ratel

as I understood it at the time the Hanbit (?) handed the code over without their blessing, and they were unhappy about it.

I’m not entirely clear what the relationship of Hanbitsoft was with Flagship before Flagship went under, besides being an investor in Flagship who were doing the Korean release of Hellgate as a multiplayer online game. (Mythos may have been part of the deal.) When Flagship went under, their game rights were divided between Hanbitsoft and some other investors, and Hanbitsoft had already invested enough money that they felt it worthwhile to spend even more and buy up the rest of the rights for Hellgate and Mythos, to own them outright, everywhere.

Flagship hadn’t bothered to tell their employees they were shutting down, much less their partners like Hanbitsoft, so everything was a mess when they unexpectedly closed. Hanbitsoft ended up buying Flagship’s office computers at auction so they could recover the source code and assets for the games they were releasing. Hanbitsoft put together their own teams to continue working on the games. There was no deal between Hanbit and Runic, nor do I think there was ever any (serious) discussion, even - Hanbit was planning to release Mythos (though they took so long, Torchlight came out first, and better, making it rather pointless), and Torchlight took less than a year to develop, even with entirely new assets, using the OGRE engine as its basis and Baldree coding game systems he’d already done twice before.

[LurksNoMore]

This is sounding alarmingly appealing.

[CanadianBeaver]

Indeed. This is only the first look as well, plenty of development cycle left to go with alpha and beta testing to be done. Lots of time for changes and to drool all over it.

[fnordius]

No Mac OS version. Huh.

This is a deal breaker, as I love the new M1 Macs. I don’t have Windows 10, and have no intention of ever getting Windows. I also don’t play console games, so not investing in that just to have a subpar experience due to missing muscle memory: game controllers just never clicked with my brain.