Today more than ever, the Mac community might be the one responsible for the development of Diablo II: Resurrected.

Back in October 2019, a player complained that after updating his Mac computer to Mac OS Catalina, Diablo II no longer worked.

Shortly after, customer support Kaldraydis responded: Our dev team is investigating the compatibility issue with Diablo 2 and 10.15 Catalina.

Editor: The reason this issue happened is that Apple terminated support for 32-bit software in their Mac OS Catalina. Not an easy solution to fix. The main reason is that Diablo II source code was corrupted and lost — as revealed by the original Blizzard North developers.

Therefore, any attempt to recreate Diablo II to port to 64-bit is impossible. The only way this can be done is by building new 4K and low-res art assets from scratch.

There can never be a Diablo II: Remastered, because there are no 100% assets to remaster. In effect, Diablo II needs to be rebuilt from scratch onto a new modern game engine.

In the same month, October 2019, another customer support technician responded:

Nearly a month later, on November 2019, Kaldraydis confirmed they would work on a future patch to address the incompatibility issue.

No further updates were posted in this thread from November 2019 until March 2020 (4 months). The update offered no foreseeable solution; but he assured the team had been working all this time on a 64-bit version of Diablo II.

Nearly 2 months after that March update, there was an allegued leak that Vicarous Visions (a game studio owned by Activision) was working on Diablo II: Resurrected.

If true, that would be a big deal, because Vicarious Visions has ported several Activision games to Nintendo Switch, Consoles, Android, iOS and other platforms.

Most recently, at that point in time, Vicarious Visions had ported Destiny 2 to PC… and that totally means Vicarious Visions and Blizzard Entertainment had interacted to bring Destiny 2 to Battle.net — giving some sliver of credulity to the leak.

The leak inspired me to write an article gathering all the crumbs that surround Diablo II, the Mac OS Catalina issue, and precedent of Blizzard Entertainment outsourcing projects to develop StarCraft: Remastered and Warcraft III: Reforged.

Another customer support message went out around the time of the Vicarious Visions leak.

In June, customer support started suggesting the option to use Bootcamp as a workaround until they could provide a solution; and even providing links for a refund to those who had purchased Diablo II recently. This message was posted 8 months after the issue started.

That was about the last we heard from customer support. Six months later, just 19 hours ago, a final update was posted, and the thread was locked.

This is the new pinned message in the forum directory. Blizzard removed Mac support from the Diablo II system requirements page in the Battle.net Shop.

This is a hard pill to swallow for many who waited 15 months for a solution. But that closing message? “Should we be able to restore this support in the future we will update accordingly” That right there tells me there are plans for a Diablo II restoration in 64-bit, but no longer will provide customer support updates.

If the project has been in the works these past months, there won’t be updates until the allegued Diablo II: Resurrected is officially announced — if ever.

Diablo II: Resurrected at this point is myth based on an anonymous leak shared with Actugaming — who have the precedent of publishing past leaks that turned out to be true. So for now, Actugaming has the benefit of the doubt on Diablo II: Resurrected by Vicarious Visions.

Now that Apple announced that iOS apps will play natively in the the new Macs powered by the M1 ARM-chip — one might have the internal argument that if Diablo II is built for iOS … this may allow the seamless integration with those Macs. But would doing this affect Diablo Immortal as both games would inevitably clash in the App Store?

Thanks for the tips, @Flamb744

Update 10pm EST — Flamb744 reports Actugaming editor-in-chief responded his question about the status of his Diablo II: Resurrected leak. The Actugaming editor-in-chief cryptically said: “Soon.”

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