One of the many reports that surfaced ahead of BlizzCon 2019 revolved around a Diablo II remaster, and it happened to be the only rumor that didn’t turn out to be true. However, if you’re thinking that an announcement will be made later on down the line, then hold off on that thought because according to Diablo II‘s developers, a remaster is highly unlikely.
The reason? Almost all of the game’s original assets have been lost.
According to creators Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik, Diablo II‘s source code and assets were fatally corrupted during the game’s development and there was no back up available. Blizzard Entertainment then scrambled to reconstruct the code and assets from Diablo II‘s play test version that the developers had taken home to play. However, the original files were never recovered so a remaster would have to be built from scratch, which is no easy task.
In an interview with GameSpot, Erich said:
[We] finally rebuilt a lot of it through what people had at their homes. I had a big chunk of it. Went home, pulled out the hard drive or whatever we did back then. Spent a few days reconstructing it, which ended up working fine, except that we lost all the history. We lost a lot of the assets, art assets. It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 Remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They’d have to make them from scratch.
There’s no official statement from Blizzard on the original report.
[Source: GameSpot]
