Go hxxps://diablo2.blizzard.com/en-us/#visuals and see the difference. It’s day and night. Yes, you have better polished HD assets, so what? The whole point is to pay tribute to the original designers who designed one of the best games out there. Instead of being creative doing your own thing, here the goal is different: clone the old graphics and atmosphere.
Please, please , please, pay attention to the atmosphere.
Tristram: This is like 50+ degrees difference in brightness. Why?
Barracks: Blue should be blue, not sepia or brown. Black is black, not grey.
Burial Grounds: Broken filthy stones, sould be broken filthy stones, not a floor cleaned by the cleaning service of Tristram city-hall.
Lut Gholein: Again, stop cleaning the floor. Clean your office, clean your apartment, but do not clean the graphics.
Sewers: Congrats! You made it perfect or even better than the original. This is how you should redo the rest of the environments.
Diablo 2 is all about horror, death, blood, corpses, the smell of death and filth all over the city. Stop cleaning the floors. Stop having too much brightness. The game should be dark. If you are going to remake it, make it either the same or darker.
I cannot think Blizzards designers are incapable of doing this. This must be coming from the lead designer as conceptual art. It’s so simple. They can do whatever they like with Diablo 4, but please do not mess up Diablo 2.
Because you have actual 3d lighting going on there. It’s inevitably gonna look different and bring out the color contrast more than the more basic lighting you had in D2. The actual colors of the textures are the same. In this specific case, there’s a lot of fire going on in Tristram. The lighting treats fire as a light source (which it is) unlike in the base game where it was just a graphic. So as a result, everything does look brighter, because that’s what fire does.
Same deal, it’s not the colors that change really, it’s the lighting that is much more complex and behaves more like, you know, light would, changing the tonalities.
The floor really doesn’t look “clean”. It looks like an old abandoned stone walkway with overgrown grass. The difference is that again, we have much higher resolution textures and better lighting that makes it look more realistic.
Gotta kinda agree on this one, although for a different reason. It doesn’t look cleaner to me, but the walkways are much less visible than in the original. I think they should be more pronounced. If anything, it looks “dirtier”, like sand covered everything and you can barely see the streets.
Well, all I can say is that, they used a modern 3d lighting model that is more realistic. Sure, they could have dimmed everything down but then it would be TOO dark and it would impact gameplay. Some compromises have to be made when you’re making a complete change in graphical technology. It’s impossible to make it look exactly like a low-res 2d game.
I actually noticed some of the same things watching say act 2 when looking at the ground textures. You can always go to the old graphics, but upgrading the visuals this much its just going to look a lot different. There is no way around it much more detail needs to be added. 3d lighting vs tile based lighting. Its going to look a lot different.
Also kind of a side note, but is this really diablo 2 tech support? It really should be in general discussion
My point is that they shouldn’t reinvent the wheel unless they intend to make it better. It’s been more than 20 years after the original release of Diablo II and the gfx technology has greatly advanced since then. Using better graphics and better lighting mechanics they should be able to create a more immense undead atmosphere – not the other way around. Diablo is dark game – period. That being said, they should be very careful to not over-brighten the map with light sources. Less is more. As I said earlier, the “Sewers” look great, so they just need to re-try several times until they achieve the same feeling for the rest of the regions; and fine-tune the graphical lighting technology to the what the game atmosphere’s needs – not the other way around. If today, we cannot recreate a dark, undead, filthy, hellish, horror atmospheric game, then the technology has gone backwards.
Diablo was a pioneer back then. Blizzard North pushed the gaming tech one (or more) step(s) further by making it. Today, Activision/Blizzard should be reminded of that and try to push even further.