While Diablo II: Resurrected is not hoping to Diablo Gold precisely duplicate the original’s look, the newly-announced remaster is creating an impressive attempt to match a few elements. Watching a panel at BlizzCon today, I was delighted to hear about how they dug up early Blizzard resources to recreate and even reuse in the remaster. My favorite titbit: the new Tyrael reuses the angelic wings out of the actual 3D model used to make his 2D sprite from the first game.
While the original Diablo 2 is 2D using sprites (made from 3D models), Resurrected is rebuilding the whole match in 3D. During the board, Blizzardeers explained they made an effort to assemble original concept art, 3D models, code, leaves, and these to understand the original intent supporting artwork and better inform the art teams’ creative choices as they remade components. I’m a sucker for good archive .
This led to a nice discoveries such as locating the source files for mural textures in the Act II tombs, which they can then reuse for the remade tombs. I admire that technique in remasters – it is part of why the Resident Evil 4 HD Project mod is indeed remarkable, hunting down the buildings that Capcom had photographed as foundations for textures.
They also followed some of the techniques Blizzard used from the very first game. By way of instance, because the original Succubus enemies swallowed the entire body net of the Assassin (a sensibly efficient match dev practice with a frustratingly controversial public image, because of Internet loudmouths), they also reused their new Assassin’s body net for their brand new Succubus.
And with dear old archangel Tyrael, they are straight reusing parts of the first model. “We really took the Tyrael tails out of the old [3DS] Max file and just repurposed that for ours. We did very little work, very little modernisation of that, we just made it work.” That’s great, that. I appreciate it both as an artistic technique and for the care given to your character who looked very cool to me 20 decades back. I spent so long captivated by these wings that he simply didn’t look right to Cheap Diablo 2 Items me personally in Diablo III. The one most significant art asset in the game, no doubt.
