Diablo II: Resurrected

You can see why their model is working. Almost everyone in the game sports some kind of cosmetic effect.

Of course, I’d be remiss to point out that you really need to shell out to get enough stash space to prevent frustration. One of the $60 supporter packs will get you just enough points and also give an alternate look if you need it. But for the same amount of money as a retail game you get a lot of content.

This is the classic article about AoE networking, which describes the deterministic simulation at the heart of AoE and later AoE 2:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_o...

The vast majority of details like animations are not implemented in the deterministic simulation. If we play our copies side by side, our villagers probably aren't animating exactly the same, the particle fx can be based on different random seeds (or just not present depending on culling or graphics details), etc. But anything that impacts gameplay is absolutely deterministic. It's OK if our villager is graphically facing left on my screen and right on yours, but the unit of wood they just chopped happened on exactly the same simulation frame.

Modern RTS games take this pretty far. In Company of Heroes when a tank blows up, people are thrown out and bits of it fly away and hit other units etc. The 3D FX is free to do whatever it wants to, with the one restriction that it cannot in any way impact gameplay. A tank can land on a soldier, but maybe it did on my screen and didn't on yours, so we can't make the soldier die! And in the simulation running on the game company servers, there aren't even any 3D graphics or physics running.

So the same technique can be used to upgrade old games. You run an invisible copy, and build a 3D version that looks at the location of the sprites and game state and makes it look pretty. Inputs in to the 3D version (you're probably rendering a 3D camera with perspective any maybe even rotation) are translated back to inputs to the 2D version.

This is absolutely fool proof in terms of maintaining consistency. It is guaranteed. But it's not a trivial task, you have to build a completely new rendering system in a way that's more complicated than you'd implement in a fresh game (say Diablo 3).

People are still playing it, but its certainly no longer a smash success. WoW classic really exposed the weakness of easily min maxed old games like vanilla WoW. I hope they learned their lesson and "update" D2. Otherwise yeah it'll be a trip down memory lane and then after the 5th Baal run I'm out.

Have you tried checking out Wine? At least on Linux, these days just about all games run pretty well. It's very possible the story might be different on macOS though, I really wouldn't know personally.

Considering Diablo II Re should not be GPU demanding I was surprised as well.

My experience has been you should always do BootCamp for Windows gaming due to performance losses. But for something like DII Re I guess it could be good enough.