Diablo II: Resurrected

I was pretty addicted to Diablo 2 for a couple years as a teenager. Never got into WoW or anything, but I wasted at least one entire summer doing nothing but playing Diablo 2.

Never was a big fan of 3. It felt more like playing some kind of diablo themed version of gauntlet or something with a bit more depth. It didn't feel like Diablo 2. I tried another recent one that was supposed keep the spirit of diablo 2. I think it was path of exile. I never got into it the same way. It was better than Diablo 3 but still didn't quite capture what made diablo 2 so addictively awesome.

As far as atmosphere and everything goes, diablo 1 was always best at that. Diablo 2 brought the series in a different way, but diablo 2 was something else.

The open battlenet games were utterly ridiculous. Hacked items to the point of nonsense. Like you couldn't even see what was happening on.the screen, but it was fun playing with those sketchy editors that were more often than not likely malware.

Mostly though, my memories are from the closed battlenet games. Lots of time spent gaming with random people I never seen again, but we'd spend hours getting through an act or two together, race for treasure and just have good times. Helping low levels run through the game so they can mule for their high level characters and farm, cheap shots from high level characters that went hostile immediately, good PvP duels, item runs, and just generally lots of fun.

I still remember the day I stepped into a game playing my level 84 hardcore(permadeath) character...somebody went hostile immediately, I was somewhere pretty obscure so I thought it'd be alright, stepped through the waypoint...was dead before the screen loaded, of all the places I picked...that's where they were, that game had like 60 way points or something...that was pretty heartbreaking...

I dunno, I've yet to find an online game with the same kind of community. There was hackers, griefers, people really into the game, item farmers, pvpers, it was a varied mix of gamers under a barely moderated environment, yet somehow it worked and it was pretty amazing. At least when blizzard was active with d2. Near the end it started to decline and the hackers took over, still in its golden age, d2's closed battlenet was pretty great and I haven't really gotten into an online game in the same way since.

I loved D2 back in the days, but I don't know how good that gameplay aged...

Was really looking forward to playing Helm's Deep maps on Bnet with the new WC3 but alas

If you've got the budget, you can keep the existing simulation under the covers identical, and build a 3d mapping over the top of it.

That's how most RTS games are built. Company of Heroes for instance has a low fps deterministic simulation which provides the multiplayer game logic, and high end end 3D mapping with physics and particles etc layered on top to make it pretty.

I wonder if they are using the same backend servers as old client or if that got a rewrite as well and players will be in separate environments.

I played a couple months of evenings of D2 during the pandemic: the online experience was quite a mess. Got temp bans several times for switching characters soon after login. Rampant botting to the point that people made bot services that would give you waypoints upon request as they spam their d2itemz4sale.biz or whatever URL. Seems like there is no moderation budget so they just have a bunch of blunt automated rules.

Lots of quality of life issues remain in the game, like potion management after death, managing projectile consumables in the inventory, friend system is a bolt on through the chat system. I wonder if they made any changes to address un-fun parts of the game or if this is functionally identical.

Still had quite a bit of fun. Was able to tank Uber Diablo with a Zeal paladin to drop annihilus.