Not to say we aren’t overjoyed at receiving a new class, but the core game hasn’t really had any in nearly two and a half decades. However, Blizzard seems quite certain that it will be well-received, and is even contemplating future additions if things go as planned.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Timothy Vasconcellos who serves as the lead designer on the Diablo Legacy team, asserted that the Warlock’s potential success could be a catalyst for future additions but that it was up to the game’s “millions” of players to decide on whether that’s going to happen.

“We are excited for the opportunity we have right now to see what the community says about what we’re making… if it’s a positive reception and they [players] say: no, you guys actually did do this very intricate dance preserving the 1999 game, then maybe we can think about how we pursue those opportunities in the future. But we have to nail that; otherwise, we kill the game in trying to progress it forward,” he said.

The Warlock is currently available as part of Diablo 2: Resurrected’s Reign of the Warlock paid DLC and comes with three distinct paths for you to unleash either the forces of hell, your psionic prowess, or the fires of Chaos on your foes.

Whatever you choose, the Warlock’s probably a sign of better things to come for the beloved RPG’s remake. Know that Blizzard is watching, and probably has a lot of ideas for what comes next if the new class manages to capture the hearts and minds of its player base.

Perhaps even more surprising, however, is that it’s not just coming to the next paid expansion. Diablo Immortal players can go hands-on this June while Diablo 2: Resurrected fans don’t even have to wait – it’s out today in the paid Reign of the Warlock DLC. Three paths are available – Demon for using hellspawn against their own, Eldritch for harnessing psionic forces, and Chaos to inundate foes in an elemental inferno.

Of course, there will also be new items, Runewords, and sets for every class. The DLC also updates Terror Zones, adds a new end-game challenge in The Ancients, and introduces a new loot filter. If that wasn’t enough, Stash Tabs have received a much-needed quality of life update, as you can now store gems, runes, and other resources in their own dedicated spaces.

As for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, it’s out on April 28th. Pre-purchasing it now grants immediate access to the Paladin class. Head here for more details.

For instance, there’s the Classic Ladder for running through all four acts as a fresh character. Hardcore Classic Ladder is the same but you get only one life. Expansion Ladder is the same as Classic but includes the Lord of Destruction expansion. Finally, Hardcore Expansion Ladder offers all five acts to play through but with only one life.

Once the season ends, a Ladder character will migrate over to the non-Ladder modes along with any items equipped or in one’s inventory. Players must retrieve any items before the start of the season after next or else they’ll be lost forever. Check out some of the patch notes below and full notes here.

Diablo 2: Resurrected Patch 2.4

QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATES

General

• Added language support for non-ASCII written language
• Added player messaging for when a player tries to launch the game on an out of date patch version
• Added ‘Message of the Day’ capabilities to the main menu to allow us to share important game updates with all players

New Feature – Legacy Graphics Emulation

• There is now an option in the Graphics Settings Menu under ‘Legacy’ that allows you to choose between 3 different emulation options for the Legacy game graphics. The options are ‘GDI’, ‘Glide’, and ‘Resurrected’.
• ‘GDI’ emulates the software rasterization of the original legacy game and does not apply any filtering
• ‘Glide’ emulates the hardware accelerated backend of the original legacy game with bilinear filtering
• ‘Resurrected’ uses the Glide emulation with additional fixes in place to address an artifact that would occur with the original Glide rendering

Developer Comments: We feel ‘Resurrected’ is the definitive emulation mode players should use, but we noticed feedback during PTR that some players preferred the style of legacy graphics released at launch, which did not have any filtering and most closely resembled the software rasterization of the original legacy game. We hope these emulation modes provide players the means to choose the legacy graphics they prefer.

AI

• Improved the reliability of pets, summons, and mercenaries teleporting to the player instead of being despawned

Barbarian

• Updated Barbarian Leap and Leap attack animation behavior to give it a smoother trajectory that should keep the Barbarian on-screen at all times, and reduce jerkiness when he lands

Character Selection

• Newly created characters will now sort to the top of the character selection list

Gameplay

• When holding down a mouse button to target an enemy with a skill, the skill will continue to execute after that target dies
• Minimap will now automatically re-open after death if you had it open prior to dying
• Arrow and Bolt max quantity increased to 500
• Throwing weapon quantity has been increased by 50%
• Blocking will no longer interrupt a player while performing a skill or attack. If a player character triggers a block during this time, the damage will still be negated, but the animation will not play
• Changed how attack speed is determined while dual-wielding weapons. Swapping weapons between hands should no longer result in dramatically different attack speeds
• Character hit recovery will now have diminishing returns when being hit by another player
• Quick cast skills behavior has been unified such that left click quick cast skills behave in the way the right click behavior operated

Developer Comments: We want to fix some of the awkward lockouts that reject player input from casting skills. For PVP, we added a way to reduce hit recovery spam to prevent edge cases of characters being locked out for too long.

Mercenaries

• Mercenary UIs will now display if the mercenary cannot use a skill because they are too low level

For this PTR test, developer is focusing on Ladder’s presentation in the front end and how the new balance changes affect it. Once the Ladder season ends, a character transitions into non-Ladder modes with any items or loot they may have garnered. You’ll then have until the start of the Season after next to retrieve items from a shared stash stab. “For example, once Season 1 ends, you have until Season 3 begins to retrieve items from your Season 1 stash. Any items not retrieved will be lost forever,” says the developer.

As for Uber Diablo, players can continue summoning it by selling Stone of Jordan rings. The difference with patch 2.4 is that it will now spawn for all players within the same region instead of the same server. Summoning progress is also tracked separately for each game mode but new messaging is being added to inform players when Uber Diablo spawns next.

Diablo 2: Resurrected for Xbox One, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. Check out our review here.

Speaking in response to one such tweet, Blizzard Entertainment boss Mike Ybarra has asked players to stay tuned for more news on Overwatch and Warcraft in the coming weeks, which will be followed by Diablo. He also clarified that Blizzard is a large studio with multiple teams who are supporting live projects.

Overwatch is set to receive more Legendary Skins in 2022 than any prior year. World of Warcraft fans are yet to receive any news about 2022’s updates.

Of course, it also needs to be mentioned that Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 have long been in development with no word on release dates, except for the fact that both will not release until at least 2023.

Microsoft has also announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion- click through here to read more about that.

Blizzard is a big studio and we have talented and growing teams supporting live games as well. Over the coming weeks, you'll be hearing more on that from Warcraft and Overwatch. Diablo will follow. Stay tuned!

— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) January 25, 2022

Pointed out by the Twitter account Does It Play?, which comprises of a community regularly testing and checking video games and consoles for playability without an online connection (they maintain a very useful Excel sheet covering the games and consoles they have tested), Diablo 2: Resurrected on consoles has a DRM check where the game needs to go online at least once every 30 days for it to be playable offline. This means that if a user’s console is completely offline over 30 days, the game has to connect to the internet for it to do the necessary security check with the authentication server before it can be played.

This is concerning, given that in a situation where the authentication server goes down, the game will become unplayable. Similarly, if any of the consoles lose their internet functionality, the game is just unusable. The issue plagues both the offline physical disc and the digital version of the games.

As mentioned the aforementioned tweet, it does set a dark future for the preservation of video games, as DRMs like these risk the game into going to obscurity because of an online check.

No official statement by Activision Blizzard has been made about the issue yet.

In more news regards to the company, Activision Blizzard is being acquired by Xbox.

You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline, one of the first console games to feature check in drm.

It serves no real purpose and can be removed with hacks.

Dark times pic.twitter.com/EVnPVhXisD

— Does it play? (@DoesItPlay1) January 17, 2022

However, while previously the understanding had been that Vicarious Visions would get to remain, well, Vicarious Visions, and operate as a separate studio, it seems like that will soon change. Polygon recently published a recent citing anonymous developers at the studio as sources, who claim that Vicarious Visions is soon going to drop its name and be fully merged with Blizzard Entertainment. If Blizzard keeps up its naming conventions for its satellite studios, its possible that Vicarious Visions ends up being renamed to Blizzard Albany.

This isn’t something that Blizzard Entertainment or Vicarious Visions have officially confirmed yet, but word should arrive sooner rather than later, so stay tuned.

The PS5 dominated proceedings for hardware, being the best-selling console of the month in terms of both, revenue and units sold. This ends a 33-month streak that saw the Nintendo Switch leading the charts in terms of units sold, starting in December 2018, right up until August 2021. The PS5 is still the best-selling console of the year in dollar sales, while the Switch still leads in unit sales.

On the software side of things, it was a pretty eventful months, with a number of new releases seeing impressive debuts. Madden NFL 22 is still on No. 1, where it was last month. It is the fourth best-selling game of the twelve-month period ending September 2021, and the second highest-selling game of 2021. Beyond that, however, there’s plenty of new releases to speak about.

Tales of Arise, for instance, debuts at No. 4, and in the process, sets a new record for launch month dollar sales for the series. Bandai Namco has already confirmed that the RPG has gotten off to a solid start where sales are concerned, so this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Meanwhile, Life is Strange: True Colors at No. 10 does the same for its own series.

In the charts, we also have FIFA 22 (No. 2), NBA 2K22 (No. 3), Diablo 2: Resurrected (No. 5), Deathloop (No. 6), and Sonic Colors: Ultimate (No. 13). WarioWare: Get it Together! also comes in at No. 15, and sees the best launch for a WarioWare game since 2007’s Wii title, WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1450083531586084866

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A lot of it can be blamed on the servers, according to Fletcher, since the infrastructure just isn’t capable of handling the level of player activity that the game has been experiencing in recent days. Exacerbating the issue is the constant rollout of updates, which caused the servers to misbehave, since it kept backing up processes instead of servicing requests.

Blizzard also kept a significant chunk of the game’s legacy code, which was responsible for keeping track of a number of operations for players. As a majority of the returning players put signficant stress on the 20-year old service, it eventually began buckling, which caused all sorts of issues.

“In 2001, there wasn’t nearly as much content on the internet around how to play Diablo 2 ‘correctly’ (Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin/Ancient Sewers/etc for magic find, etc),” Fletcher wrote. “Today, however, a new player can look up any number of amazing content creators who can teach them how to play the game in different ways, many of them including lots of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in quick succession. Though we did foresee this—with players making fresh characters on fresh servers, working hard to get their magic-finding items—we vastly underestimated the scope we derived from beta testing.”

Blizzard is taking three steps to address the issue while it works on a major technical patch – rate limiting, a login queue, and “dividing critical functions into smaller services”. Player response to the ordeal hasn’t been positive, but it would certainly be great if the fix bears any fruit for the betterment of the game.

Resurrected hits you immediately with the updates to its visuals, probably its most significant change. Cutscenes have been rebuilt from the ground up, and they look as good as any game’s cutscenes I’ve seen on the Xbox Series X. Granted, there’s only about half an hour of them total, since the rest of the story is told in gameplay, but it’s stunning what the cutscenes have become compared to where they were two decades ago. Visually, the rest of the game is upgraded as well. Improvements are naturally less obvious from an isometric perspective than in cinematics, but everything looks beautiful nonetheless. The way the environments evolve based on different times of day or sources of light, as well as the minute detail that’s gone into the different weapons, armor, or enemy types. Even from a distance, it’s easy to get lost in how good this game looks.

What the upgraded visuals magnify even more is how much variation there is throughout Diablo 2’s design, especially in character design. There are countless enemy types, some of which don’t even show up in every instance of an area, and they’re just as finely detailed and mesmerizing to look at. The seven different classes all look just as unique as well, both in the opening decision screen and in gameplay. The environmental design flexes its variation between acts, when you jump from the grasslands to the desert or you’re all the way down in the outskirts of Hell. Some of the dungeons are highlights, too, like the terrifying caves in Act 2 that are dimly lit, tightly packed, and filled with scorpions and spiders. It’s not as sprawling as other modern RPGs that are meant to hold your attention for thousands of hours with repeated updates, but there is still a huge amount of content here that you can spend dozens of hours playing and not see everything.

"Diablo 2: Resurrected is here to hold us over and celebrate the original’s 20^th anniversary, and while its age shows in a handful of ways, it’s a beautiful, meticulously crafted remaster of the original that retains so much of what made the game so good with a handful of quality-of-life improvements that prove again why this game and this series are so successful."

Within acts, though, the level design begins to show its age, specifically because the game generates a new instance of each area every time you load into the game, creating a new layout and repopulating the area with demons. That means that unless you’ve activated one of the handful of waypoints in a certain area, quitting out of the game effectively erases your progress from that point. This design has almost come back around to being in style with the rise of roguelikes and procedural generation, but in this case it’s still more frustrating than anything. Losing all the demon-killing and layout-memorizing progress in an area is a disheartening step back, and in any mandatory dungeon, some of which can take hours, it’s a crushing blow to start back from level 1, especially when you lose it because the game lost connection to the servers, which happened to me more than once. The level design also shows its age in that many of the areas within acts look so similar. It’s the type of game where you may want to have a pen and paper handy to write down sequencing of different areas, since it’s as easy as a wrong turn to get lost and the minimap is passable at best.

But while I can nitpick all I want about level design, the gameplay is the reason so many people put hundreds of hours into this game, and for the most part, it has aged spectacularly with very few core changes from twenty years ago. Your class choice dictates a lot of what your experience will look like. Regardless of your class, Diablo 2 is a fantastic RPG, with so many different combinations of weapons, armor, and character skills that all feel almost equally satisfying. It’s common now to see loot-based games where some weapons are clearly more fun than others, but I was amazed at how consistently satisfying combat was in Resurrected, both in regular combat and against some of the grand and unique bosses. On top of that, it’s to this day a remarkably intricate game that requires your full attention. Demons have different weaknesses that your abilities and attacks can exploit, and totems scattered around each area can either give you a stat boost or refill your mana, health, or stamina. And for the first time, this is all playable on console, with a mostly seamless transition to many fewer buttons. Potions are mapped to the D-pad, while abilities can be activated by up to twelve different buttons or combos.

This all contributes to a very methodical, thoughtful experience. It’s very easy to lose track of your health or get overwhelmed by a horde of demons, but the game encourages you to take it slow, kill one enemy at a time, and absolve yourself of any shame in running away. Of course, if you lose track, this is also a brutally difficult game that can take your head off at a moment’s notice. Not only do you need to think of your current life, but you often need to plan ahead for a potential corpse run, thinking of the nearest waypoint, where you can place a portal to your base, or which enemies might be hovering over your body as you return unarmed.

"Diablo 2: Resurrected is both a beautiful remaster of the original game and a stellar action RPG that, aside from a few aged details, could very well have been released today."

Every one of these gameplay mechanics saturates so much of modern-day gaming, especially in action RPGs, but it’s incredible to see how well Diablo 2 can still hold up against its modern-day peers. Still, there are some nitpicks I have that hold over from the original and show the game’s age. The point-and-click inventory management system is much less user-friendly on console than PC, especially with potions, which you often have to manually replace in your potions slot instead of having a dedicated button for each, which seems like an easy solution. The attack button and the interact button are also the same on console, leading to far too many occasions where I take damage or ultimately die because instead of attacking a demon I’m aimlessly opening and closing a dungeon door. Lastly, the amount of running through already-cleared areas becomes tedious, most notably in dungeons when you have to trek back down to a fourth or fifth level, and an ability to jump to the furthest uncleared level would be a quick fix that skips so much downtime.

Despite my nitpicks, though, Diablo 2: Resurrected is both a beautiful remaster of the original game and a stellar action RPG that, aside from a few aged details, could very well have been released today. Visually, both the cinematics and every detail in gameplay have been brought up to today’s standards with few drawbacks, and gameplay is as satisfying as most other games in the genre today. There are certainly areas where Diablo 2 is clearly from another era, but Resurrected brings it up to modern speed, and it can almost go toe-to-toe with its newer counterparts.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.