Eh, I’m not gonna bother refunding. I liked the game in beta, and I liked the original, so I’ll just hold on to it until a patch, or until I can scrape by enough to buy that i5 I’ve been eyeing.
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I played the original D2 on a 486/DX2-66 that had been upgraded with an Evergreen 586-133. It was painful, but playable. Useless in multiplayer, though.
Over lockdown, I finally upgraded from my trusty 16GB Win7 Phenom II X6 1090T/Radeon 7970 system (built 2011) to a 96GB Win10 Dual X5670 Xeon system with an RX580 (purchased for ~$1000 in late 2018) in order to finally gain the SSSE3/SSE4.1/SSE4.2 support I was missing with the 1090T, but then my triumph was smacked down by the sudden emergence of AVX being a new limiting factor.
Oh sure, I have a NUC with an i5-8500 in it that I could use to run D2R, but a NUC ain’t exactly a gaming machine, y’know? So I’ll be waiting for the patch. It ain’t exactly like I have a choice, plus I’m not somebody looking for a chance to grandstand and holler and make a big show of how inconvenienced I’m gonna be to have a wait maybe an entire extra WEEK to play this game. The horror.
Electronics shortages are looking like they’re going to be going on for another six months or so (at least!) in RAM, CPUs, GPUs, even basic components like chokes, capacitors and other SMCs, so the only gamers upgrading are going to be a handful here and there as parts become available. We’re probably not going to see the entire gamer market upgrade until we’re well into PCIe v5 territory.
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Well, I think they’re working on it. I saw a post about it on WoWHead news feed.
Well that would be largely GPU rather than CPU, they have said most of the underlying code is the same, but you are correct.
That said, I wasn’t trying to imply they didn’t do any work here. I just meant people have had 21 years to experience this game. It isn’t something new, it was just a chance to see some QoL improvements and a new coat of paint on an old experience. That isn’t usually a system seller.
I enjoyed the beta, or I would have just returned this and moved on. I just don’t like being shown something, given no information that anything had changed, and then being sold a broken product.
Also, while it isn’t really a big deal, having your update be: “Oh, well, I guess you didn’t read the requirement we didn’t write, but since we are so benevolent we may possibly give you a working product in the future” is really never a good look. A lot of us are programmers or at least have worked in IT. Just say a change had unintended consequences and you are working on it…
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You are doing exactly what I assumed: you attach “21 year old” to D2R to underestimate the system requirements and/or the value delivered by the game.
The gameplay logic (that implements the game design) is largely the same but literally everything else around it is radically different.
Better graphics often requires better CPU/MOBO/etc too (I’m not referring to AVX that obviously isn’t essential here) especially when it is running at a higher framerate than the original. Something has to transfer that detailed geometry to GPU in every single frame. The new minimum and recommended CPU specs are significantly higher than the original D2 requirements (single-core single-thread 1GHz processor with much slower MOBO and RAM than what we have today).
It is a brand new game (a very good one) for someone who never played it and you are downplaying it as “new coat of paint on an old experience”.
Regardless of what the developers said (or were forced to say) during their interviews I’d go as far as saying that the primary target of D2R was probably not the hardcore players who have been playing D2 for 20 years. A lot of them are complaining about the lack of mods and the removal of TCP/IP. Integrating D2R with their fancy “global BNet” and keeping the BNet servers of the original D2 also make me assume that creating a 100% compatible version was never the goal.
The far majority of games out there - many with higher functionalities work very well wth “previous age” hardware. It’s strange to blame those hardware when this game happens to be an exception rather than the norm of the industry.
It’s very bad industry practice to force users to upgrade their hardware regularly. Not only does it generate enormous amount of waste, it is also unnecessary.
We already have a culture of planned obsolescence in the mobile world where everyone has to change their phones every 3-4 years for their apps to keep working. We don’t need to have that same culture in the PC world.
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I’m not really sure what this thread primarily concerns, exactly, but I note that the offline version of the game is precisely like the original classic version of the game in that player definitions and properties are all stored client-side, and not on the servers (unlike Diablo 3). I mean, if you run the game from the DR2.exe you are bypassing the blizzard launcher completely–and Battlenet does not run. You can even disable your Internet connection and run from DR2.exe and your character is all there–levels and items and inventory. I also noticed that when I play offline through Battlenet the player states and inventories are still saved clientside–which I really prefer! I did not care for the D3 server-side stuff and so I declined to buy the game at all–I didn’t like the cartoony graphics, either…
This game is everything I always thought the original could be–my God, I can see everything so clearly and wonderfully! What a difference… It is really like an entirely new game! I’m having much more fun with this game @ 4k than I ever got from the original either at 8x6, or with a scaled-up-to-4k 8x6 (of course!) This game is a real peach, and I am crazy about it, now… Anyway, Kudos to Blizzard for sticking with client-side! Makes a lot of difference. Now–if they’d just put LAN back in…
I still play offline on Battlenet, however, because I noticed a few things that seemed to be introduced through the Battlenet connection (not talking about regular patches) that were not present when running offline. Since I don’t have a “classic option” when running on Battlenet (or not) I am thinking that running offline sans Battlenet is “classic” mode while running offline through Battlenet is the DR2 version of the game. Is this correct? Thanks for any info…
Classic is without the LoD expansion. So whether you run offline (no internet at all) or offline through the launcher, it will be D2R. The classic version, only got a facelift and not the extra stash goodies.
This is a joke right?
Also you realize that AVX has been implemented in CPUs since Sandy Bridge?
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game was run without avx now is not because blizzard paly for the time at sh*ti server ,to many ppl buy game and cannot play 
next time we should wait and read what happen when they put new game oon the platform
I will say no ; like me, my cpu don’t have AVX but have a upper spec than required, but my CPU is an Xeon… and don’t have the AVX microcodes…
And so I’m waiting for a patch or will be refund…
Why changing my cpu for D2R while it’ works perfectly on other app/games.
I have never been annoyed by the AVX… And we talk about a game coming from 2K which one was runnng on Athlon 850MZh…
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lol i was playing first release on 133mmx, now i am considered trash with an overclocked i7 running at around 4.7ghz per core which has 7-8 times the calculating power than the specified i3-3250. i surpass the minimum requirement list… if avx was mandatory it should have been specified.
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Thanks man…I guess that during the betas there was a “classic” button–I think I read about it. I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at… Thanks for clearing it up! LoD is exactly where I want to be…
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Which Xeon? As already stated, most mainstream CPUs since Sandy Bridge have these instructions. Just because it’s a Xeon doesn’t mean squat.
No, it is the same game, but with some QoL and visual improvements. Which is fine, that is all it ever claimed to be. However, there is absolutely nothing brand new about it. Clearly you didn’t read all of my post.
Can’t they just recompile the game without AVX? OG D2 worked just fine without it.
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Trying to shift blame onto consumers/players is asinine on both Blizzards part and other posters. Blizzard has already gone on record and stated that AVX was not an intentional requirement and it will be patched out, then using “minimum spec” as a kinda-sorta-scapegoat. People played the beta and it ran 100% fine can’t even launch the game, anyone would be PTFO if they pre-ordered based on beta experience and then couldn’t even launch the executable.
Blaming other people for using older CPU’s is flat out ignorance and a sad attempt at elitism. I have more money into my peripherals & monitor than most people have in their tower, that doesn’t make me “poor”. Why would I rebuild my entire chip-set when my i7 930 @4.3ghz on a Rampage III Extreme motherboard -fossil that it is now- still runs literally every game I throw at it at high settings? Battlefield 5, Doom Eternal, Metro, Cities Skylines, and other games FAR more demanding on the CPU & GPU than a 3D graphics engine layered over a twenty gear old game that could run on a f&^%ing calculator? Think before you post.
There’s been no significant reason to upgrade CPU’s for years unless you use your PC as a work station, content creation, or benchmark. After the i7 launch Intel rested on its success and gave minor iterative improvements for years, as AMD had no response until a year before COVID. Now there’s a national chip shortage due to COVID in combination with crypocurrency… It’s literally the worst time imaginable to build a new PC.
This is Blizzards mistake and they will either fix is like they said, or they’ll lose out on customers. Don’t blame people for running older CPU’s when those same CPU’s can handle far more demanding games than D2R just fine.
/rant
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And you clearly didn’t read the second half of the sentence you quoted. Believe whatever makes you feel better.
The minimum requirements of the game did not specify the need for avx, this is not serious on your part and it is not serious that you are taking a long time to solve the problem in question!
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Please Blizzard, fix this annoying problem…
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