Even if Diablo 2 servers are shut down, people will keep playing either single player, TCP-IP, or gasp private servers.
Meanwhile Diablo 4 servers will be long gone, probably, as a stark reminder that 40 years later Diablo 2, a game made by the company before them, will still live on.
Off-topic bonus: Remove all ATK and Def from anything other than weapons.
Now, an amulet, or a pair of boots drop. What could compel the player to want to use them?
Find the answer to that question and you’ll fix itemization.
Peace.
Yup. That’s an issue with all always-online DRM games (and forcing a single-player experience to run through online servers is a DRM measure).
The fact is that always-online DRM is piracy being committed by the publisher against the purchasers of the software. With always-online DRM, at some undisclosed point in the future the publisher steals the game from the customer who bought it.
Not accurate. If they do it like D3, console versions will be offline-playable. On the other hand I doubt systems 20 years later can still run D2 smoothly. Think about the efforts you need to run a win95-only game.
But you’re right, it will be still alive. If the franchise really failed as somepeople said, and acquired by another company, we may even see a D2-remastered.
Diablo 2 is still being played on hardware that is leagues beyond the original hardware required for it, and it still runs fine, installs fine and plays fine.
Hell even on modern hardware, if you so wish, you blow up the resolution and the game still looks fantastic in HD.
I don’t believe online-only prevented D3 from having bots, cheating, and hacks, so the only ones penalized are the average player.
Your Telling me your going to play a 40 year old game in 20 years… Yeah i dont think so mate. Thast stretching the truth a bit i think. Surely you will have better things to do with your time
I still use an emulator to play Intellivision/old school atari games, circa 1978-1983. So yeah, some people do still play 40 year old games.
Good gameplay is timeless, no matter how old. Doesn’t have to be complicated to be good gameplay, see Mario Bros, Joust or Astrosmash as proof of this.
I still play games from the 90s, which are going on 30 years old right now. If I haven’t gotten bored of them now, I doubt I will in another 10-20 years. I may not play them every day like I did back when they were brand new, but I still play them.
Great gameplay is eternal, especially if we’re talking about PC games where the basic keyboard and mouse haven’t changed.
… if made by Blizzard - or Activision Blizzard. Otherwise who knows. 20 years is a long time.
Correct, thanks to Blizzard and Microsoft. What about when D2 and Windows 10 are both out of maintainence for 10 years?
Diablo 2 was never binded to a specific windows version. It is still in maintainence today. But one day, although maybe far in the future, it will be out of maintenence.
I mean, in 20 years from now, the tendency is that PCs will be pretty much workstations mostly, and with most bulk processing being done in the cloud thus making them affordable terminals instead of powerhouses like the PCs we build today. I think PC gaming will become extremely niche.
I imagine it’ll become increasingly more niche but we’ll still be able to use them to play old games.
Though if mobile wants to take the current set of PC/Console gamers away from their platforms, it needs to get a whole lot better about a whole lot of practices real quick.
Mobile is an absolute cancer of micro-transactions right now that makes AAA gaming look pretty damn good by comparison.
Small problem: Windows XP isn’t sold anymore and not everyone who has a game system capable of running D2 has a copy of XP lying about.
Some of us actually bought our PCs outright because we don’t trust ourselves to not EDITED up the build even whilst following instructions to the letter, so Windows 10 came installed on our machines already. We don’t have a physical copy of that anywhere.
How do you propose THAT dilemma be solved?
All that aside, I’m with the OP. Always-on DRM is a cancer to gaming.
I don’t have a copy of Windows XP lying around either. It’s pretty easy to get an ISO online.
Also a virtual machine is just software that runs on my computer. I didn’t actually install Windows XP on my computer, I just have software that emulates it. You don’t have to mess about with your PC’s operating system.
At some point somebody might create something similar to dosbox that lets you run games in a more simplified way without needing to go through the process of setting up a VM and installing DOS.
If for whatever reason you’re completely against using emulators then yeah, eventually you’ll be screwed when it just stops working on modern systems.
Though even that will take a rather long time. I can get Diablo 1 working on Windows 10 without emulators. The original game, not the re-release they did recently.
