A Diablo 2 remaster is a castle in the sky because a lot of the game’s source code and assets were corrupted and lost forever (via GameSpot).
At ExileCon 2019, Diablo creators Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik shared that there was a moment when it all could have been over for Diablo 2. In the 11th hour of Diablo 2’s development, the entire backup of the game’s source code and assets was deleted. “Not just our code, but all of our assets. Irrevocably, fatally corrupted,” Max Schaefer said. “We were supposed to have a backup but neglected it. We spent a day or two in sheer panic,” Erich Schaefer recalled, and honestly, that story does sound horrifying.
Fortunately, Blizzard North was able to recreate the game from the developer version that the employees had as personal test copies. “[We] finally rebuilt a lot of it through what people had at their homes," Erich Schaefer explained. “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.”
It wasn’t a real happy ending, however. Erich lamented that the team “lost all the history” of Diablo 2. “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,” he stated. That would involve a lot of time, money, and manpower that Blizzard is currently dedicating to Diablo 4.
The possibility of a Diablo 2 remaster was floated before BlizzCon 2019 kicked off, and of course, the highly-anticipated Diablo 4 was announced. This revelation implies that a remaster is exceedingly unlikely, however, Diablo 4 promises to return to the ‘darker roots’ of the franchise, which would satisfy those with a hankering for classic dungeon-crawling.
