Blizzard Entertainment held a South Asia Press Event online (likely via Zoom app) where media outlets were able to interview Andre Abrahamian (game designer) and Matthew Cederquist (game producer) about Diablo II: Resurrected.
This press event seems to have been held a day after D2R tech alpha ended. It seems there was an embargo date to publish the Q&A today. So don’t expect a lot of new info.
Blizzard Entertainment announced Diablo II: Resurrected during BlizzConline 2021, but it was widely known after the leak that revealed it was in development by Vicarious Visions. It has been a long wait not only for the confirmation of the leak to become official, but also the longing for playing the game once more in modern PCs.
I was never very good at figuring out builds and proper gear in Diablo II, but there was always something alluring with slaying demons, and exploring deep gritty caves and ancient temples while completing quest objectives back in the day.
I am sharing some of the screenshots I took while playing through Diablo II: Resurrected tech alpha Act I and II. You can see how NPCs in Lut Gholein and monsters look like in HD. The quality is very impressive, and we could argue even better than Diablo III NPC, props and tileset graphics.
The Diablo II: Resurrected tech alpha offers console controller support. I plugged my PDP Gaming Wired Controller (Xbox One), and to my surprise the game automatically recognized a controller was plugged to the PC, and auto-switched to controller-mode UI a couple seconds later.
The UI will switch back to PC mode if you press keys on your keyboard, but switch back to Console Controller when you press buttons there.
The UI is a bit confusing at first, but the button icons appear on top of the UI to guide you which button to press. Now what I haven’t been able to find is how to edit button keybinds, but hopefully that’s something in development.
The Diablo II: Resurrected settings UI look very high-quality. The Graphics settings offer very high texture quality, texture anisotropy, ambient occlusion quality, transparency quality, shadow quality, anti-aliasing options, and you can set Legacy Video options too.
Blizzard PR sent a link to the Diablo II: Resurrected tech alpha press kit. The team shared 20 screenshots of the game. Tech alpha (Test #1) will include Act I and II of the single player, and three classes: Barbarian, Amazon and Sorceress.
Future tests will expand access to other content such as the remaining classes and PvP. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, follow @blizzplanetcom in twitter or Facebook for updates; and youtube.com/blizzplanet for gameplay videos.
Blizzard is reaching out to content creators to join tech alpha tomorrow Thurs, April 8. Those who pre-registered at Diablo2.Blizzard.com will have a chance to access tech alpha on Fri, April 9.
It is now official. Diablo II: Resurrected technical alpha begins in April 8 in the United States, and April 9 in South Korea. This tech alpha test will only have Act I and II, and limited to three classes: Barbarian, Amazon, and Sorceress. The game supports Ultra High Definition 4K (2160p) graphics and controller in this test.
Tech Alpha will last from April 8 until April 12, but fret not. There will be multiple rounds of tests.
The BlizzConline 2021: Diablo II: Resurrected Press Q&A was held privately over ZOOM on Friday, February 19 at 8pm EST.
The event was moderated by Eddiemae from TriplePoint. In attendance were Robert Gallerani (principal designer at Vicarious Visions) and Matthew Cederquist (game producer at Blizzard Entertainment).
Right off the bat. This is bordering between wild speculation and a longshot.
The BlizzConline schedule seems to only have room for two Diablo games on Day 1. It could be Diablo 4 and Diablo Immortal. Or it could be Diablo 4 and D2R announcement — leaving Diablo Immortal out as Blizzard did in BlizzCon 2019.
I will lay out both possible scenarios.
Back in June 2020, RandomMan00 shared in Reddit a special behavior in the diablo2.blizzard.com URL. In the past, the address resolved into a “Server Not Found” error. Then, the URL resolved into Error 403, which according to the Amazon AWS support site means the page is behind the AWS Firewall, blocking access to public view.
You don’t block it behind a Firewall for nothing. Only if you are working on content.
