English
Gamereactor
news
Diablo II

Blizzard isn't at the right point to remaster Diablo II/Warcraft III

Peter Stilwell explained the situation.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field

Fans have been asking for remasters of Warcraft III and Diablo II for a while now, but when asked about these particular projects by PCGamesN Peter Stilwell, senior producer at the Classic Games team, said that this is quite a large undertaking right now, and the games aren't quite ready to be remastered just yet.

"The whole 'listen more than you talk' approach with StarCraft was working so well, we were like 'what do we need to do for the others,'" he explained. "Right now when you read the [Warcraft III] forums or talk to the community, the map pool is so stale. Not only that, there's a bunch of maps in there that aren't that great, that just get vetoed every time for whatever reason. That was the overriding thing, please give us another pool."

"Then the other thing is Undead only really has one build order, it would be awesome if we could change the balance a little bit to help [people] figure out different ways to play the game. There isn't that overriding sense that you get with StarCraft where they're like 'don't touch it, the balance is perfect.' [For Orc] you have to have a Blademaster, you have to have the Death Knight for Undead - make some tweaks to some heroes so that maybe the other guy has to scout me and figure out what I'm playing with in order for him to develop his own strategy."

"That's the cool thing about StarCraft, the unit selections you make need to be scouted for them to be properly prepared for it, we want to try to achieve that level of balance for Warcraft III. That seems like most of what that competitive community cares about right now, so that's what we're dealing with directly. Matt Morris and our design guys are working on another pool, they've got it on a PTR, so that we can get some candid feedback before we say this is the official one. Hopefully very soon they'll be happy with that and then we can actually get those balance changes out on the PTR as well."

Diablo II is another kettle of fish entirely, however, as it's not about the competitive aspect, but instead there are things like leaderboards to worry about. "With Diablo [II] the big one is the botters and the spamming is out of control, [people asking] could we please fix that," Stilwell said. "Keep rolling seasons but maybe eventually be good enough at combating them that you see real names at the top of the leaderboard again."

He finished by saying that it's all about keeping fans happy while balancing their requests for remasters:

"Those are the type of things we're focusing on outside of StarCraft at the moment. With SC, after we had done that compatibility pass to make it run on modern systems and all that, the next resounding thing we were hearing from the community was Remaster. That was the proper segue - [then we had to] go dark for a year to do that, right? So we don't feel like we're at that stage yet with the others, we want to have that moment where the community is cool to play [the version of the game] while we figure out whatever, [so] we don't have to cringe every day as we read the forums."

Which of the two would you like to see a remaster of first?

HQ
Diablo II

Related texts



Loading next content