and remake them from scratch with modern technology and CGI,' says Fergusson. 'We wanted to take this really dramatic story and take all 27 minutes of the cinematics. The cutscenes have been completely redone rather than upscaled from the original files, but with involvement from people who worked on the cutscenes back in 2000. If you want to type 'pp' in chat the old-fashioned way, you still can.Ĭompletely remade cutscenes: This is the one place where D2R actually is a remake. There's an auto-party system for automatically joining games and automatically inviting people to your game, but it's optional. If you want to run over it to pick it up, you can run over it.' There are new hotkeys. 'If you want to pick up gold by clicking on it, you can still do that. After the alpha test Blizzard also opted to increase the size further, meaning they'll be plenty of space for loot.Īuto-looting and other QoL upgrades are optional: 'Auto-gold is a feature we've added that you can turn on or off,' says principal designer Rob Gallerani, who works at Vicarious Visions, a studio now under the Blizzard umbrella. It's probably the biggest quality of life change over the original game. You'll now have a shared item cache to use between multiple characters, so you won't need to devote other characters to the task of schlepping and storing gear. Those are the sounds you're still going to hear.'Ī shared item stash: Say goodbye to mule characters. The things you have those Pavlovian response to, knowing it's Diablo 2.

'But we're not changing those iconic sounds, like placing a skull into a socket or putting a potion into your belt. 'We're taking the atmospherics in the world up, so you can hear the wind blowing through the streets and the rustling in the jungle,' Fergusson says. The surround sound mastering is new, but the sound effects themselves are not. Basically, all you need to know is it's in 3D and the dynamic lighting will gel with the new models. 3D graphics and Dolby 7.1: A whole new graphical engine which Blizzard takes pains to point out uses 'physically based rendering' and entirely new animations, models and textures, and visual effects.

Diablo 2 remastered announcement