What did the developers find in the original Diablo 2 archives?

Blizzard wrote:

There's a lot of the love and care going on in this - we're very passionate about Diablo 2. I can even give you a little anecdote - when I started on the team, naturally as a designer I want to know as much as possible about this game in order to make good decisions on a remaster.

I asked around - what kind of files and leftover archives do we have from before - from Blizzard North. I was given some and told 'that's it' - which I quickly disbelieved. I like to do just do my own little digging around to find out things.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 36:19 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

So I dug around a lot in archives and in different teams, because naturally for a game from 20 years people have moved on to different teams data has moved around across our other games - across Blizzard.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 37:03 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

It was within 'folders within folders' I like to say, that I found a lot of old source files from Diablo 2; stuff we should archive. There was a lot of stuff indeed - we're talking model source files, old tools that Blizzard North used to create the sprites and things like that.

All these things I spent months and months organising and communicated that out to the teams. I got the Blizzard library team to help out to, to help share as much info as possible.

All of this helps a lot with when we're adapting these old models and making new art out of it. A lot of those pixels aren't good enough and we have some kind of source model we can make closer decisions.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 37:18 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

On that day when we found it [the archives] I think that really helped me greatly - we sent all that imagery - even the models, we sent over to the outsource teams and different art teams, which they used as a stepping stone.

The only piece of art we re-used 1:1 were

Tyrael's wings. We actually took the wings from the old MAX file and then just repurposed that for ours. We did very little work - very little modernisation of that - we just made it work.

We did follow a lot of the rules that the old game used for example - the

Succubus and Witch - I think with an old Blizzard North model - they've re-used the Assassin mesh for the body and we do the same thing. We used our Assassin mesh for the

Succubus.

Chris Amaral - Lead Artist 38:09 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

Another example too is - because we found a lot of stuff - there's a lot of old texture files for some environments on the game, so for example the walls you see in the Act 2 tombs? With those kind of paintings on them? - They're the same textures we're using as we found the source files for those.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 39:00 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

There was even concepts we repurposed - we found a couple of concepts that were amazing, from 20 years ago.. the Bloodhawk and the Bloodhawk Nest, and we used that completely to rebuild our new asset.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 39:56 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

We look at D1 as well because naturally this being a sequel to Diablo 1, especially within the timespan (Diablo 1 - 1996, Diablo 2 2000) - a lot of things carried over from development. So going back to see D1 and what its like also helped us make decisions.

Even some of the art too - we discovered certain things that we didn't even realise before until later down the line. For example - in the

Chaos Sanctuary you see a lot of statues with these black knights - those are actually the same Chaos Knight you see in Diablo 1.

Sometimes some of the things I find - even source files from D1 - were useful for us for reference, so we could make the new statues and stuff like that.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 41:42 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

Even the Sorceror from D1 and the Act 3 hireling share very similar models - it was just additional helmet, or a bit of detail on the chest, but that was it.

Chris Amaral - Lead Artist 42:48 19th Feb 2021

Really insightful commentary on this from the devs - I'd highly recommend watching the video hosted by MrLlamaSC on this.

One of the main things people brought up whenever a remaster was suggested was how 'all the original source files had been lost'.

The archives really show off how visionary Blizzard North's art team were - limited only by tools and technology available at the time.

BillyMaysed wrote: 4 years ago

So whats all this stuff being put in the forums for? Wasn't this all on the home page under Resurrected FAQs?

Stormlash wrote: 4 years ago

@BillyMaysed Just following orders

BillyMaysed wrote: 4 years ago

is it for search engines or something? just curious.