Dear D2:R Dev team,
I’m sorry to distract you from Twitter and Reddit, which is clearly where you spend most of your time these days, but we need to address the humongous elephant in the room that there’s simply no way to ignore any longer. Specifically, Diablo II (both the original release and D2:R), and the VERY diverse player base thereof.
Surely you have made note of the multitude of posts in your official forums from either old school “purists” or “new school” modern gamers who champion an evolving “live” game ecosystem. Did you also notice how they’re pretty much mutually exclusive? Whenever you opt to make a change in D2:R, be it rebalancing or adding new content/items, you alienate the old schoolers. Yet whenever you don’t make changes the new schoolers want, and/or in a timely fashion, you alienate them and get their forehead veins a’poppin. It doesn’t take a degree in community college Psych 101 to see that this is simply not a long-term sustainable situation. So let’s figure this out. Luckily, there is a really simple way out of this that benefits everyone (i.e. Blizzard, old schoolers, and new schoolers) without taking anything away from anybody. That’s right, nobody has to sacrifice or give up anything, and everyone gets exactly what they want. And here’s the bonus… it’ll make you money AND won’t take hardly any effort at all on your part.
For almost the entire development process of D2:R, you guys and gals were touting it left and right as “the exact same game you have always known and loved. No changes. Except for the graphics overhaul re-skin overlay, this will be the same as it always was.” Okay, that’s not an exact verbatim quote, but it was words to that effect. That was what you were pinning the lion’s share of marketing to; that concept of the game not being changed. You sold a ton of copies on the strength of that idea and that promise. And then you abandoned that philosophy completely. Who can blame the “purists” for maintaining a wee bit of lingering boo-boo lip? From their point of view you promised champagne and caviar, then delivered frozen fish sticks and juice boxes. In full disclosure, I am absolutely in this sub-set group. I just wanted original D2 with modern graphics. That’s it. That’s the whole reason I paid for the game. All the changes that have come since the release of D2:R are irksome to me and those of a similar mindset. It’s not about the pragmatic impact of those changes, let me be very clear about that. It simply doesn’t matter if the changes are perceived as “good” or “bad” or if the majority of players find that they make the game more “fun” (which is subjective and arbitrary.) It’s about the principle. If you say you’re going to deliver X, Y and Z, then don’t be shocked when you deliver F, G, and H and folks are a bit unaccepting. Especially if you then continue to add I, J, K, and L every few weeks/months.
Of course, the defense can be made (and has been) that Resurrected was never meant to be a static game release and left alone, hands off. It has been said in many places that “Resurrected” was meant to be a resurrection of the classic release, and pick up where the old game left off in terms of support, rebalancing, and evolution as the game community changes over time. In short, that by resurrecting the game, it was being given a fresh coat of paint (the graphics) and then the evolution cycle would continue from where it left off. And honestly, I think that’s a fair interpretation, and not a horrible idea. The problem comes from it not being called D2: Continues and the clear picture to the contrary that was painted during the pre-sale hyping of the product. A very specific expectation was set, and that wasn’t it.
So, how do we make everyone happy? Go ahead and release a companion game called D2: Reburied. Hell, call it D2: Resurrected II (Electric Boogaloo) for all I care. But the point is, actually give the players who want the game experience that marketed the product they were excited about and never got. And what would be the selling point(s)? I’m glad you asked!
First off, the same graphics overlay of D2:R. That’s a given. Secondly, absolutely no online support. That’s right, no online server play. BUT… put the damned TCP/IP back in. This release will specifically cater to those of us who want to either play solo offline, or occasionally have a LAN party or just play with our spouse or visiting friend in the next room. Or hell, maybe we find like-minded players online and exchange IPs. Third, and this is the really big selling point, Reburied would natively support all the previous game iterations. Whenever you fire up your game and create a toon, you get to tag it as playing a specific patch of your choosing. Everything from release day 1.0 all the way through to 1.14d. Everybody has “their” preferred patch from history, so let them play it. Draw the line in the sand between original D2 and D2: Resurrected though. If it’s not a patch that goes out to original D2, then keep it off Reburied. Reburied is, put simply, every version of the original game, but with the updated graphics. And let the work that’s gone into Resurrected stay exclusively with Resurrected.
But won’t this take a lot of development time and resources to create? No. You already have the graphics overlay done. Just cannibalize it from Resurrected. And I’m sure you folks have multiple Iomega zip drives in a vault somewhere with every patch version file saved for posterity. Just dig them out and take the 30 seconds to copy them over. The only “development” that would have to be done is simply getting one of your code monkeys to devote an afternoon to writing the “version picker” interface backend to link a newly created character with the appropriate chosen patch version game files. That’s literally it. Everything else has already been written and already exists.
We players know that you have the tracking code built into the Blizz launcher. We know that you have direct access to the numbers. You know how many people fire up D2:R just to play offline, and you know how many hours they play offline. You know how many people are playing pre-LoD mode and how many hours they play. You have the ladder / NL statistics for all the modes. And you occasionally read your official forums (even if you’ve long-since stopped actually communicating yourselves). You know all the things, because you hire people and give them the specific job description and responsibility to be the community poobah. Look at those numbers. You know that there is sufficient interest to support this product because you already know that a not-insignificant number of people want this. And it requires next-to-nothing as far as your development investment. At most, we’re talking 30 man hours, and that’s only if that one code monkey is almost done writing the version picker interface and then misplaces the thumb drive he’s saving his/her work on, and has to start again from scratch.
And just like that, everyone is happy. People that enjoy the ongoing evolution of D2 via Resurrected get to keep having that experience in Resurrected. They can compete on ladder and do all the things that they love doing, and without having to deal with us meddlesome “purists” all up in their Wheaties. Those of us who just want to play old school D2 with updated graphics, and do so on our historical patch of choice absolutely frozen in time never to be changed, get what we want. And Blizzard, as a company, gets to sell this product and make money on it. And there’s no ongoing cost to host servers. It’s literally pure profit for you. It’s a win/win/win. And maybe best of all, the D2:R forums would suddenly clear up as 80% of the ongoing debates are rendered completely and totally irrelevant in an instant. We’ll all stop stepping on each other’s toes and feeling like we have to “defend” the game experience we want, or risk losing it. And “If you don’t like it, go play Reburied” can be the new default go-to response, and it’ll actually be a viable option because of the graphics.
Of course, this does present one little pickle of a situation, doesn’t it? What if the only reason not to do this is because of fear of “losing” so many current D2:R players to its companion sister game? If that were the case, then it would imply that D2:R (and you, the Dev team) failed to read the room right, took a big wrong turn, and went down the wrong road with your philosophy on Resurrected… and you know it.
Some people will read this open letter and absolutely love the idea, and would happily buy Reburied if it were to come to fruition. Others will have no interest in “living in the past” at all, and wouldn’t be interested in it even if it came with two free Ginsu knives and a lifetime supply of Nutella. Not only is that completely fine, it’s also the point. D2:R is one game, and it’s trying to walk an impossible line of pleasing an incredibly diverse and widely varied player base. Things change over time, and D2 has been chugging along for two+ decades now.
Imagine if D2 weren’t a game, but your favorite musical artist, and they’ve been consistently putting out new albums over the span of their career. You have your favorite album or time period of their work. Wouldn’t you be a little annoyed if you could only listen to the latest album? Why not let your fans listen to whichever of your albums they want? It doesn’t make them any less of a fan, and they’re still supporting you. It’s okay to like Dylan before he went electric. It’s okay to like The Beatles before they went psychedelic. It’s okay to like Metallica after Justi… wait, no. No it’s not. 
Point is, even if you read this and have no interest in playing this hypothetical product / game version, I don’t think you can give a viable reason why it shouldn’t be an option. I don’t see how it in any way affects players who enjoy D2:R as it currently is or takes anything away from them, or does anything except give a not-insignificant portion of the player base who feel disenfranchised an option to still play the game they love(d) in a way they can enjoy now, and into the future. It places no burden on Blizzard whatsoever. I’m open-minded to the possibility that there’s something I’m overlooking or forgetting that makes this an unviable idea and/or possibility, but for the life of me, I can’t think of it. The only argument I can come up with, playing Devil’s advocate in my own mind, is that by being exclusively offline, there are piracy concerns. I freely admit that’s a relevant factor, but I think the overall situation renders it mostly moot. Are that many people going to put in the effort to pass around cracked copies of what is essentially a 20+ year old game? Sure, there will be some piracy, but that has always been the case with offline games. Diablo 1, the Hellfire EXP, original Diablo 2, and then the LoD EXP all not only survived in that environment, but went on to make record profits (at the time) for a gaming company. Given that the only cost associated with “development” of Reburied is maybe one person’s salary for a week, I think a few pirated copies is a very acceptable tradeoff and nothing that would preclude the release. Blizz would still make a hefty chunk o’ change from it and the bottom line on the ledger would be well in the black.
So anyhow, that’s that. Dev team, go consult with your corporate bosses and get on it. I would have suggested that you just go ahead and throw the new graphics on the original D2 as a patch update, but then that wouldn’t address the multiple versions idea, nor would it have incentivized you to do it by waving the prospect of getting essentially free dollar bills in front of your faces.
Every time you release a patch, you include some wording about “we have heard the feedback from the community…” in the patch notes. Well, have you heard this, or do we need to play it for you through a cranked Marshall JCM-series full stack?
Sincerely,
WarDance
