Diablo II: Resurrected (2021 Remaster) Review

The clever bit of engineering here is that the old game is still running. New three dimensional models are rendered on top of the original simulation, and a button flips the presentation back to the 2000 sprites in real time without a hitch, which is both a great preservation trick and a persuasive argument that the art direction always held up. Almost nothing else was touched. Skill trees, the horadric cube, the merciless inventory grid and the runeword economy survive intact, and the quality of life additions are limited to shared stash tabs and automatic gold pickup.

That restraint is the right call for a game whose difficulty and opacity are the point. Act two's Maggot Lair is still miserable, the endgame is still one boss run repeated for hundreds of hours, and none of that is a flaw the remaster caused. What it did cause was a launch week of server collapses and character rollbacks that pushed players away from an otherwise careful piece of work.