‘Diablo II remaster coming is unlikely due to lost code and assets’

It is unlikely that there will ever be a remaster of the 2000 released Diablo II. According to the makers, this is related to the fact that a backup of the source code and all assets were lost during the development of the game.

When Erich and Max Schaefer and David Brevik had come a long way in developing Diablo II, it turned out that the entire backup of the game’s source code and assets should be considered lost. In an interview with Gamespot, Max Schaefer says there was an irreparable case of corrupt files. His brother Erich says there should have been a backup but they ignored it.

In the end, the creators were able to recreate much of the code and assets from versions of Diablo II that they brought home to play there. The reconstructions turned out to work, but the history was definitively lost and so was a large part of the art assets. According to Erich Schaefer, the latter makes it very difficult for Blizzard to ever make a Diablo II remaster; the company would have to make them from scratch.

Blizzard announced Diablo IV at the beginning of this month, although it is still unknown when the game will be released. Prior to the BlizzCon event, where the announcement was made, there were rumors that Blizzard would be coming up with a remaster of Diablo II.

Incidentally, Blizzard indicated two years ago that Diablo II was not ripe for a remaster for the time being, partly because the game would have a problem with hackers who regularly negatively influence the results of the leaderboards. The company also mentioned that players had a desire to solve problems surrounding bots and spammers. Blizzard, through Peter Stilwell, indicated that it first wanted to fix these problems, before even starting the big job of a remaster.