Blizzard wasn’t kidding when it told Polygon that the new remastered Diablo II would be faithful to the original. You’ll even be able to pick up where you left off with your 20-year-old savegames, IGN Middle East reports.
“Yes! Yes, keep those!” producer Matthew Cederquist told journalists, saying that the team called it “the best feature ever.”
As a lapsed player myself, the very idea is giving me chills — dangerous ones, ones that I imagine are akin to what Gollum felt in The Lord of the Rings when he decided to pull The One Ring off his brother’s throttled corpse. I thought I could safely leave this game behind, but no. It seems I may need to track down an old friend soon.
Staying the hell away from this.
True story: I had to give my fairly valuable account and discs to a friend sworn to never, ever return them, because I kept seeing unique items in my dreamshttps://t.co/t7V7Oa26SH
— Sean Hollister (@StarFire2258) February 19, 2021
For the rest of the original game’s fanbase, though, this might be incredible news: players like me spent large amounts of time grinding Diablo II’s bosses and levels to dust searching for unique items, not to mention selling them online and trading them inside a game that wasn’t really designed for that sort of thing. (One particular rare item, the Stone of Jordan, was actually used as a makeshift form of currency.)
Now, all of that progress is theoretically yours instead of having to start from scratch, and it might even be portable, too: theoretically, the game’s cross-save abilities across PC and console mean you could even load up your OG save on a Nintendo Switch.
Blizzard told our sister site Polygon that the remaster basically is the original game, so it’s not too surprising that original saves still function:
This isn’t a remake,” said Fergusson. “We’re not reverse-engineering it; we’re not rebuilding it and trying to make it look and sound like [Diablo 2]. This is [Diablo 2]. […] It’s right there, underneath the surface. The entire simulation, the engine for this game, that lifeblood of this game, is [Diablo 2] right underneath. So there’s a toggle switch, a legacy toggle, that when you press the button, you’ll see behind the curtains, and there is Diablo 2 in 2D sprites running right there, and you can play the way that you played 20 years ago.”
“[W]e kind of shoved it in and it worked!” the team told IGN Middle East.
