Diablo 2 Ressurrected : 44$ USD (54$CAD)

[ClassicPeon]

SNIP

I've contributed all i need to by simply stating the facts. Once again, there is no need for this discussion.

I am not throwing opinions at you, simply facts.

They arent changing the core game engine, they are adding a few features. The graphic polish is going to be running on top of the games engine IE the old game is still going to be running underneath. They said this themselves at blizzcon. You have been showed sources on this already so i dont know how you can still "think you're wrong".

A remake is a reimagining of the game to a more modern gameplay standard. A remaster is basicly a graphics update. If you start altering the engine of old games you change the core of the game, making it no longer a remaster.

You have absolutely no basis to compare the remaster of diablo 2 with wc3: reforged. I dont know what makes you think you have?

As for your last point, all evidence points to the contrary since(and you probably dont know this either so i'l explain it) the team doing the Remaster for D2 has done several other remasters and their whole thing is keeping it as close to the original as possible.

The WC3 team was a team inside blizzard who got to fuck around with whatever they wanted.

Its apples and oranges you are comparing with absolutely no basis for comparing them

[Triceron]

They arent changing the core game engine, they are adding a few features. The graphic polish is going to be running on top of the games engine IE the old game is still going to be running underneath. They said this themselves at blizzcon.

If we're gonna stick to facts then it's more complicated than simply this.

Yes, the core game engine is the same as what ran before, but we don't actually know if they're changing anything to the core game engine.

They've specifically talked about changing systems of how items were handled, and how it used to be hard-coded so that it wasn't possible to add new items, only able to modify existing ones (ie modding or patching). They changed/reworked the system so that it now allows them to create new items. They're just not reworking the gameplay aspects of the engine. That doesn't mean they aren't changing the engine at all.

[Mivoc]

If you don't like the price, don't pay it. The game company sets the price they want you to pay, and you can say yes, or no. You don't get to run the company and set the prices.

That's how the real world works.

Besides, surely some of you have gotten jobs since D2, haven't you? 40 bucks is pocket change if you like the game. If 40 bucks is too much, maybe you need to not be spending on games anyway?

Again, it's luxury pixels. Don't like the price, don't pay it.

I feel like the thread should end here. If you don't like the price, do not pay it. Its a free market and if enough people decide its to steep Blizzard will be forced to lower it. If a ton of people purchase the game at that price, then there are obviously people who see the value in paying that much money.

If you truly feel the game is worth the price of admission for yourself but not your friends, maybe the game is not for them. This is how the world works, everyone values everything differently.

[Kolvarg]

They arent changing the core game engine, they are adding a few features. The graphic polish is going to be running on top of the games engine IE the old game is still going to be running underneath. They said this themselves at blizzcon.

Please do quote and provide timestamps on the exact moments where they say that word for word. Because they didn't. It's not a "graphic polish", it's an entirely new graphics engine running on top of the old engine.

Just because something can be explained in simple terms doesn't mean it's actually simple to do on a technical level.

A remake is a reimagining of the game to a more modern gameplay standard. A remaster is basicly a graphics update. If you start altering the engine of old games you change the core of the game, making it no longer a remaster.

You have absolutely no basis to compare the remaster of diablo 2 with wc3: reforged. I dont know what makes you think you have?

They're both oficially named as remasters. They both have the goal of upgrading the graphics and modernizing interface and network capabilities. They both have the goal of recreating the original core gameplay as it was. They both require changes and additions to the old engine and systems to work.

What makes you think they're not comparable? What exactly about the W3 original engine and core was altered, that isn't going to be altered in D2R?

all evidence points to the contrary since the team doing the Remaster for D2 has done several other remasters and their whole thing is keeping it as close to the original as possible.

Actually, if you are referring to the Crash Bandicoot and Tony Hawk remasters, by your definition they are remakes, not remasters. Crash was rebuilt using Vicarious Vision's Alchemy engine with little to no access to the original source code, and Tony Hawk was rebuilt based on the old code using but using Unreal Engine 4.

Regardless, is Blizzard the only company who ever released a bad remaster/remake/game/whatever? I agree that this is at least something that increases hope and the likelyhood it will be good, but it is by no means irrefutable evidence that it will be great no matter what, much like W3R is not irrefutable evidence that everything Blizzard will release from now on will be bad.

There's just no way to know. And as hopeful as I want to be, having made 2 very good remasters (or remakes, as you'd call them) does not necessarily mean they will be able to pull the same off with D2. It's a very different game with an entirely different technical challenge on a completely differente genre than anything they've worked on at least recently.

[Triceron]

They're both oficially named as remasters. They both have the goal of upgrading the graphics and modernizing interface and network capabilities. They both have the goal of recreating the original core gameplay as it was. They both require changes and additions to the old engine and systems to work.

What makes you think they're not comparable? What exactly about the W3 original engine and core was altered, that isn't going to be altered in D2R?

WC3R has a lot more modified and fixed under the hood than D2R aims to do. Keep in mind that D2R does not plan to support modding even if it may be possible in the future, while WC3R was open and ready to upgrade the World Editor and all its facets for the custom content community (which I am an active part of).

Wc3R was actively rebalancing the game, until it turned out to be pointless and they reverted a bunch of their latest changes. They were actively adding new abilities and items to the game and patching them straight into Warcraft 3. On top of this, they originally planned to redo the entire campaign system, including all the in-game cinematics. They backed out on this though. I would say they planned on a semi-remake, but settled on being a half-assed remaster by the end.

D2R seems to be more in line with what SC Remaster did; just stick to a fairly basic graphical enhancement with some quality of life improvements.

[PenguinChan]

$40 seems fine for a graphical update and modernizing some things. While I completely understand how a few people would (and always will) think $40 is too steep for something they already own and can buy for like $3, that's fine. Buy it on a sale later on when it hits $20 or something - it's not like it'll stay $40 forever anyways.

[Ludvig]

Goddamn business trying to make money to pay their employees decent wages! I want more cheap-ass shit from China (but I still personally want to make a decent wage)!

Some of the employees at Blizzard are known to barely be able to pay rent and some even skip the cafeteria lunches because they can't afford it. Even veterans have claimed to receive raises which equate to about 50 more cents per hour. Oh, and on a record quarter they decided to fire 800 employees. Great business dude.

[mistmitpandas]

The price is a total joke for a remastered which doesnt give lots of bonus things like a remastered. I wont buy it. A graphical update cant cost $40. $20 would be too much but on the border.

[Soon-TM]

Whatever the price is, I will wait until ~6 months after release and decide whether it lives to my expectations or not. I'm certainly not going to pre order it, least of all after the WC3:R fiasco.

If it turns out to be another mediocre remaster, I can always buy it later for $10 or so - as it was the case with WC3:R

[Drench]

I understand that they have been working a lot of D2 : Resurrected, but 54$CAD (or 44USD) is beyond greedy for a remastered title.

Are they going to use the same old argument about giving us lord of destruction included? Please. This game has been out for 20 years, come the f*** on*.

Personally, I don't mind paying for it, i've been a fan since day 1 of D2 release, but all those friends that I want to play with, and newer player, they won't pay that much.

I'm I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous ?

Yes.

Not only is it hard to build over a engine. But they made engine stuff and then they remade the whole game with restrictions to cater to old angry neckbeards.

Its hard to make a phone game with a few people. $40 is fair.

[ClassicPeon]

If we're gonna stick to facts then it's more complicated than simply this.

Yes, the core game engine is the same as what ran before, but we don't actually know if they're changing anything to the core game engine.

They've specifically talked about changing systems of how items were handled, and how it used to be hard-coded so that it wasn't possible to add new items, only able to modify existing ones (ie modding or patching). They changed/reworked the system so that it now allows them to create new items. They're just not reworking the gameplay aspects of the engine. That doesn't mean they aren't changing the engine at all.

I'm specificly talking about the game engine. This might be a little confusing if you arent a programmer and dont know about stuff like MVC or whatever fundamental they build their game on back then.

Things like loot drops are basicly just a large table for each mob that rolls a % to drop. Its not really connected to the game engine.

The game engine runs things like collider checks, make sure your input translates into the model script and so on. Its basicly the controller of the game. This is what they arent going to mess with because of 2 things.

1. its going to change the game
2. There is no reason to mess with this if you want it to be as vanilla like as possible

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SNIP.

Once again you show you just dont know what you are actually talking about.

It's not a "graphic polish", it's an entirely new graphics engine running on top of the old engine.

Thats literally what this means:

The graphic polish is going to be running on top of the games engine

Just because something can be explained in simple terms doesn't mean it's actually simple to do on a technical level.

I've never said it was

I've never done anything like what they are going to do. Even though i'm a programmer i have no idea how to approach this.

They both have the goal of recreating the original core gameplay as it was.

no. They dont. Wc3: Reforged's goal was to recreate the gameplay experience close to the original but with an overhaul to make it more smooth to play.

Diablo 2 remaster is not recreating the gameplay. Its literally the same gameplay as its the same engine.

Actually, if you are referring to the Crash Bandicoot and Tony Hawk remasters, by your definition they are remakes, not remasters. Crash was rebuilt using Vicarious Vision's Alchemy engine with little to no access to the original source code, and Tony Hawk was rebuilt based on the old code using but using Unreal Engine 4.

I know. I didnt state it was. I stated their goal was to make it as close to the original as possible. With D2 they have evertying including the old engine to be able to do that.

[Kolvarg]

Thats literally what this means

Calling it a "graphics polish" implies only art assets are being changed, and only slightly improved. For instance, simply replacing a 3D model with a more detailed model. Or a low-resolution texture with a high-resolution texture. What they are doing is vastly more complex than that, since the original engine does not even support in any way 3D graphics, modern screen resolutions, or higher than 25fps rendering.

no. They dont. Wc3: Reforged's goal was to recreate the gameplay experience close to the original but with an overhaul to make it more smooth to play.

Diablo 2 remaster is not recreating the gameplay. Its literally the same gameplay as its the same engine.

W3R is also not recreating anything, it's literally using the same engine. The majority of gameplay overhaul is not related to engine changes at all as far as I can tell, and if they are, they're not really significant.

And regardless, how does W3R's changes actually relate in any way to how badly it turned out?

I didnt state it was.

You did "The team doing the Remaster for D2 has done several other remasters" (source).

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WC3R has a lot more modified and fixed under the hood than D2R aims to do. Keep in mind that D2R does not plan to support modding even if it may be possible in the future, while WC3R was open and ready to upgrade the World Editor and all its facets for the custom content community (which I am an active part of).

Wc3R was actively rebalancing the game, until it turned out to be pointless and they reverted a bunch of their latest changes. They were actively adding new abilities and items to the game and patching them straight into Warcraft 3. On top of this, they originally planned to redo the entire campaign system, including all the in-game cinematics. They backed out on this though. I would say they planned on a semi-remake, but settled on being a half-assed remaster by the end.

D2R seems to be more in line with what SC Remaster did; just stick to a fairly basic graphical enhancement with some quality of life improvements.

Well, D2R doesn't have a World Editor, but they did talk about mod support in the deep-dive panel (iirc they are disabling old .dll injection method of modding, and replacing it with a new more proper way to do it), also "confirmed" in twitter:

MOD SUPPORT

Why you would want to manipulate this Hell? Are you some sort of demon yourself? Woe! Yes, mod support will be here in Diablo II. I beg of you to go easy on a poor old man.
(source)

Rebalancing the game doesn't necessarily make it a remake, otherwise most patches are remakes, no? Afaik there were changes that would affect the meta, for sure, but not really affect the overall core gameplay of the average player. And yes they had plans to bring a couple of points up-to-date on a lot of story changes and retcons, but nothing major - iirc there were only a couple of bullet points they were aiming to change. The planned cinematic changes were also mostly visual improvements.

D2R is also remaking the majority of art assets from reference, also fully rebuilding all cinematics. Also reworking and modernizing UI and online play. Also adding certain new features. And while they, for now, are claiming there will be no changes, there is no guarantee they won't backtrack on that.

Ultimately whether you consider it a "remaster" or a "remake" is entirely up to how you define those terms. The industry standard doesn't seem to call anything a remake other than very extreme re-imaginations where very little of the actual original game is left (such as Resident Evil 2 and FF7).

Either way, the main reason W3R flopped was not because of balance changes, or even the changes they made being subpar. Afaik the main reason was it was incredibly buggy and unstable, and most people couldn't even play even offline.

My point is that regardless of whether you call it a remaster or a remake, on a technical level it's just as complex or even more complex than W3R, and thus it's entirely possible to have similar issues. And that W3R backtracking on planned features between pre-orders and launch is exactly why I wouldn't take anything of what they announced about D2R to be a guarantee and to not change between now and release.

[Triceron]

Rebalancing the game doesn't necessarily make it a remake, otherwise most patches are remakes, no? Afaik there were changes that would affect the meta, for sure, but not really affect the overall core gameplay of the average player. And yes they had plans to bring a couple of points up-to-date on a lot of story changes and retcons, but nothing major - iirc there were only a couple of bullet points they were aiming to change. The planned cinematic changes were also mostly visual improvements.

It's a difficult thing to answer.

You are correct that it's just a patch, but 'just a patch' can mean a lot. Look at how WoW today looks so vastly different from Classic that they had to make an entirely different Classic version of WoW. Look at how the patches in WC3R ended up messing way too much with the meta, to the point where they even had to roll back massive changes (Necromancer) and the state of the game today is really not balanced at all.

There's a lot of nuance involved with balancing, and much of it has to do with adhering to certain design philosophies that may be gone now since there are no original developers or vision holders to keep the course steady. That is what is so difficult about updating balance tweaks in Diablo 2.

There are plenty of mods that simply tweak numbers and bring things into balance. Make niche builds more viable, and trim a bit off the top builds so that everything is a bit more viable and less cookie cutter right? Great in theory, but it also easily loses its 'Diablo 2' feel once you consider all the changes that have been made. There has to be parity across the board, otherwise it's a matter of 'why did they boost Assassin builds but not my terrible Paladin builds?' or 'Melee builds are still worthless', and there's really little to do there since that's how Diablo 2 is generally played now. Yes, we're fully aware that melee builds are pretty terrible.

A mod like Project D2 attempts to fix this by giving all melee Splash to compensate for their underperformance. It works great too! Finally niche melee builds are viable now, and heavy-hitters like Paladin Charge actually feel strong and can be used properly as a build. However, this isn't Diablo 2 any more. It's a very different feel, a very different game.

I'm not sure where the fine line of balance would be to keeping D2 while doing tweaks, but I'm generally against it since they aren't likely going to be hiring a full design team to address the balance from ground up. Generally, that's in the hands of the fans now.

Either way, the main reason W3R flopped was not because of balance changes, or even the changes they made being subpar. Afaik the main reason was it was incredibly buggy and unstable, and most people couldn't even play even offline.

It was _everything_. There's no aspect of Warcraft 3 that actually works as intended. I find it hard to make it comparable to anything, it's just a terrible remaster/remake on all levels. That it actually made a ~20yr old game *worse* is absolutely shocking.

My point is that regardless of whether you call it a remaster or a remake, on a technical level it's just as complex or even more complex than W3R, and thus it's entirely possible to have similar issues. And that W3R backtracking on planned features between pre-orders and launch is exactly why I wouldn't take anything of what they announced about D2R to be a guarantee and to not change between now and release.

I agree on this, on the level of technical work it probably is somewhat similar to what WC3R attempted. Reforged simply bit off more than they could chew by trying to address game content on top of the art and technical work, like redoing campaigns and balancing.

Hopefully D2R keeps things stupid and simple and just pushes out exactly what the fans want - a graphical remaster with (customizable) quality of life additions.

[Kuja]

That is pretty high for a remaster. If there was new content, then I would understand. But not paying that much for just a hd resolution pack.

[ClassicPeon]

That is pretty high for a remaster. If there was new content, then I would understand. But not paying that much for just a hd resolution pack.

There is more to it then that but i think you know that

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SNIP.

You cant just "replace" a 2d sprite with a 3d model. If you actually knew what you where talking about you would know that

[NewportsDentarg]

Gaming is still cheap entertainment. Even at this price.

[inafume]

$45 is too steep for a remaster of an awesome game but I'll gladly pay $144/year (not counting expansion costs) for World of Warcraft.

Sure, you could argue that you have played it to death and never want to play it again, or don't care about it looking good on your system.

It does boggle my mind though that in 16 pages of comments I only came across one that pointed out Nintendo does this all the time. It's as if people were in a 20 year coma and this is the first instance of this ever happening, and they will not stand for it.

[A Cunning Plan]

It's pretty pricey but I will buy it anyway if it gets good reviews. I was stupid enough to pre-order WC3:RF so.....

[Kolvarg]

*snip*

Yea, I agree. The whole remaster vs remake is very arbitrary and it's very easy to get into grey zones. Especially when you consider that there's also ports and very simple "remasters" of 1 or 2-year old games, and especially considering the origin of "remaster" in the music industry which is not really anything like it's used in gaming nowadays.

I suppose everything played its part and contributed to W3R's result. My point, I guess, is that while rebalancing might technically change it from a remaster to a remake in some definitions, it's not really bad by itself. Rebalancing W3R might alienate some oldschool/hardcore fans, but be good for new players. Similarly, the choice to keep the gameplay intact might be good for oldschool/hardcore fans, but alienate potential new players more used to a more modern/streamlined gameplay.

It's more work, of course, and more moving parts mean more chance of failure, that's true. But imho it wouldn't have been half the shit show if it actually worked properly as a game, and hadn't made the original unavailable. But I suppose there's no way to know for real.

At least with D2R they are promising not to disable the original, so there's that, but I'll still hold my excitement until the game is actually released. There's no reason to believe it will be bad just because W3R was, but there's also no reason to believe it's not possible for something like W3R to happen again, even if it's not exactly the same.

You cant just "replace" a 2d sprite with a 3d model. If you actually knew what you where talking about you would know that

... That's exactly my point? Do you even read and try to understand what you're replying to?

[Zuben]

AoE2: Definitive Edition is 20€ on Steam, which feels reasonable for a remaster of an old game. Blizzard's games have always cost more and been slower to drop the price over time, so considering that WC3: Reforged's 30€ price tag felt alright (back when we still thought we were getting a good game). The asking price of 40€ for D2: Resurrected goes past the reasonable and the premium, entering territory where I would say it's greedy. Maybe it's related to the operating costs of Vicarious Visions vs Team 1, or they're simply calculating the following of Diablo is strong enough that customers won't be put off by the higher price, especially since they're releasing this amidst anticipation for D4 and Immortal.