I have to say that of so many old games I played, this is the first remaster that I am considering to buy and play. It even incited me to look up my old account and post here some feedback. Thank you for doing your best to remain true to the original gameplay and art!
A couple of notes as feedback:
The character selection screen looks good, but as some people here already noted, it is subpar to the original. Difficult to describe what is missing though. Original somehow had more “contrast”, “spirt” and “detail” in the characters.
Please fix the old bugs: paladin getting stuck during charge, barbarian leap bug, viper venom charge bug (if it is considered a bug), etc.
Stash sharing is OK, but do not allow people to store more than they were allowed to do in the original, hence exploiting the extra space. And should only be possible in town.
How come there is no announcement from Nebu on the legendary Arreat Summit?
you are totally right here. in order to keep true to the original a 1to1 copy of characters models and copy of the entire scene is needed to bring back nostaliga the way it was. in all their efforts to keep the game true this selection screen cannot be underrated how important it is. the devs put their own spin on the models. but this is a remaster not a remake. they have to look like the original characters 1to1. its the identity of the chars. i dont want to offend the devs but the amazon looks like a man. and in the original she was beautifully looking. copy paste the orginal scene if you have to but the way it is now cannot be released.
I am hoping the smaller characters are so that they can make more space for adding more classes for expansions in the future. That would make me happy.
Why is limited stash sharing such an issue? People will just create mules if they need more space, so why not eliminate the need for useless character creation, and give the people what they want anyway?
I feel like some of the artwork needs to be matched closer. Some of character features are off. The amazon looks like a man. The sorc has different clothes. Her face is a bit off too. The Assassin looks weird, and not like the original. I’m a 3d animator/artist/designer/etc, and I do all this for a living too. My suggestion would just be to remove the extra stuff. When you remaster, you remaster whats there, not add more barrels or random things that weren’t there before. Make it as close to the original as possible. The quality of life improvements are cool and much needed, but the visuals should be (imo) as close to original as they can be.
Other things I think should be changed:
I’m sick of seeing chat boxes in the corner, that are hard to read / quickly talk to. I liked being able to just hit enter and the text shows up in the middle of the screen like on classic battle.net
I hate that they’re moving it away from Battle.net 1.0 - StarCraft remaster is able to go on bnet 1.0 and talk in channels still. Why take this feature away from Diablo 2? Part of the entire fun of D2 was the Battle.net community. Taking away channels/ops/clans and all that is devaluing the experience in my opinion. I’m sick of all of these game launchers that integrate buddy lists (basically AIM) as the new social norm. Bring back channels and classic bnet features, and engagement will go way up.
However that is not to say that I don’t think it looks AMAZING. Because it does. But it could be slightly refined visually. Now that it uses 3D, the movements seem a bit more clunky and on par with what you’d expect, where the original 2d version is a little quicker. Otherwise, I’m very excited to play, I already purchased the game.\
Too bad they only gave alpha keys to streamers nobody cares about. So everyone can watch them play, instead of just letting us play. I love that being a loyal supporter of the (original) Blizzard since 1997 earns you the honor of watching streamers play the alpha. Seems par for the course at this point.
Curiosity here. Anyone know if they readjusted the value of assassins’ gear? It was always super annoying that you couldn’t sell even amazing gear for what a short sword with the same stats would be worth. Other than graphics and storage it’s probably the only change I’d like to see.
That is fine in theory, but people in the original did this thing called muling which, when done by a lot of people at once, causes unnecessary stress on the server. The shared stash tab doesn’t replace muling, but reduces the impact it has on the server, because instead of creating a game with one character, dropping the item on the ground, leaving the game and joining with another character, you just stash whatever you found that you think needs to be muled, and then later on you may log with one of your mule toons and do all of your item transferring with a single connection.
In fact, in my opinion, if it was possible to have more tabs (say, 10 or more), you could keep most of your important stuff there and make way less mule characters
I don’t get the dislike for the shared stash either. I mean, we could make an infinite number of mules anyway, it was just tedious, boring, and placed extra demands on the server.
Muling is no different than stopping to fill up for gas while being on a road trip.
Muling has been a part of the game for 20 years, it’s usually an integral part of the game everyday, but it only takes up a few minutes per day. It’s a way to take a quick break from the grind, a time to grab a snack/drink and a time to have conversations that don’t normally occur during game play. It seems people who complain about muling are people who don’t often do it, and likely have not developed any skill or efficiency in that part of the game.
Absolutely 100% false and ridiculous. I’ll go as far as to say you know it is and you’re intentionally lying just to make a point. Never in the history of this game have I ever heard Blizzard or anyone else make this claim. The stress on the servers is from rapid game making such as 5 second Pindle runs. Even 1 minute Chaos or Nihl runs are not a problem. The stress is not characters moving in and out of games, that’s ludicrous to imply.
It’s literally basic client/server knowledge. If you can reduce the ammount of times people connect and disconnect from your servers, you relieve server stress. Even if it is a little, it’s better not to have it than to have it. From my experience, having wrote a lot of backend code in my life, it sounds to me like something that improves server quality when removed or mitigated.
“5 second Pindle runs” are obviously even worse, substantially so.
I’ve also heard Brevik comment on it recently, but I’m talking with my word, not his. I don’t go by what other people say. I think Muling is anti game design. Not only for the unnecessary server usage, but also because characters were designed to be played, not to sit at level 1 carrying baggage. You can hate me for it, I don’t care. If you think I’m a liar for having an opinion based on empiric experience, good for you.
The restriction system is 100% based on rapid game creation and rapid switching between screens. Creating a game then jumping in and out of the game with different characters from different accounts has no affect on servers if following the simple protocol that prevents being restricted from the realm.
About 5 ladders ago I literally spent 6 hours jumping in and out of the same game hundreds of times with hundreds of mules from dozens of accounts reorganizing all my mules and mule accounts after completing my ladder holy grail.
That’s alright. But it’s not my thing to lie just to prove a point. I say what I think. I actually like to be wrong, it means I learn more. Although I have my reasons to believe that from a technical standpoint, finding an alternative to muling would be beneficial to the game in many ways. If the server stress is not a problem (which I still think it could potentially be especially if you include botters who get a lot of loot and can very likely automate those muling tasks and do them in a matter of seconds), you still have the fact that you have a significant percentage of the character database being occupied by mule characters. A single character entry is only a few kilobytes in a table, but when everyone (thousands of players) makes more mule characters than characters they actually play, you’re still bloating the database with useless characters (which can make database access slower, or just overall increase storage costs).
I get it, you like to mule and manage your items. Would it be less enjoyable to you to sort your items in stash tabs rather than go switch characters and stuff? I know I spend a lot of time managing my stuff in D3 (which has tabs, although arguably not enough of them for nonseason) and it’s still a chill task to do, I like to separate tabs for class sets, gems, weapons, jewelry, etc, group all the sets together, and organize everything so I do waste a few hours on that. But that’s just me.
Nothing stops those who actually liking muling from continuing to do so. Just because a shared stash is there, doesn’t mean they have to use it, and they if truly do enjoy muling, then they would continue to do it.
Or infinite accounts as we do now. Back when I was playing online D2 (before switching to PD2) I couldn’t even remember quite how many accounts I had - it was all written down in an OpenOfficeCalc spreadsheet.
Infinite accounts are unlikely on BNet 2.0, so I think they should allow infinite toons
The way I see it, muling is a workaround players found to obtain infinite storage, and making multiple d2 accounts is a way of having infinite characters. Since you could have both of those things in D2 vanilla (in a roundabout way), I think it would be fair if you could have it all in one account now.
I’m a fan of unlockables myself, so maybe you start with 10 and have a way to unlock more (say, you unlock 5 more for every difficulty you beat with a new character, or maybe you unlock a pack of 10 every time you kill hell Baal for the first time with a character).
