Last year’s Warcraft 3: Reforged was a bit of a disaster. A remaster of a beloved game – perhaps even the most beloved strategy game of all time – it turned out to be a disappointing upgrade, lacking features and riddled with technical issues. That would have been bad enough as it was, but Blizzard even decided to make the baffling decision to replace the original Warcraft 3’s client with the new release’s meaning the original game’s multiplayer was removed entirely, and in the process, even several crucial multiplayer features were lost.
Blizzard recently announced Diablo 2: Resurrected, an ambitious yet extremely faithful remaster of their classic action RPG, and it’s not surprising that there are many who have trepidations about how it will handle the original game. However, Rod Fergusson – who joined Blizzard from The Coalition last year as the head of the Diablo franchise – has given assurances that even once the remaster is out, the original game will remain untouched, and that Blizzard will be avoiding a repeat of the Warcraft 3 situation (which he points out happened before his time at the company).
“It’s a different team, and that was before my time [at Blizzard],” Fergusson said while speaking with PC Gamer. “One of the things we wanted to make sure was that D2 original stayed D2 original. We were going to make sure that that game stayed there. For example, if you had a horrible code hacking mod that invalidated the security of the game but that’s your favorite way to play, you can still go do that, because we’re not going to support that kind of mod on D2R. Keeping the two games separate was a big part of that.”
Diablo 2: Resurrected will launch later this year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It won’t feature cross-play at launch, but Blizzard will continue to look into possibly adding support for it down the line.