Those (including myself) hoping for Blizzard to give longtime fans a remaster of Diablo II (which has long been rumoured to be in the works) have been dealt an unfortunate dose of reality. During a panel at ExileCon 2019, the creators of the Diablo franchise – Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik – shared a few stories about the series during their time at Blizzard, including one that makes the likelihood of a Diablo II remaster difficult to foresee.
Erich and Max Schaefer recalled that in the final hours of Diablo II‘s development, the entire backup of the game’s source code and assets was lost. “Not just our code, but all of our assets. Irrevocably, fatally corrupted,” Max Schaefer said. His brother Erich added, “It’s all gone. We were supposed to have a backup but neglected it. We spent a day or two in sheer panic.” Luckily, the team at Blizzard North was able to reconstruct a lot of the code and assets from the version of Diablo II that developers took home to play. “[We] finally rebuilt a lot of it through what people had at their homes,” Erich Schaefer said.
Unfortunately, the other important pieces, namely the art assets, were not recovered. “We lost a lot of the assets, art assets. It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo II remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They’d have to make them from scratch.”
Unlike the original Diablo, which had its source code reverse-engineered due to devs leaving key files buried on the CD, that’s unfortunately not the case with the sequel. However, stranger things have happened, and Blizzard may just have the original code, assets and all, buried somewhere in their offices. But until someone at Blizzard discovers them, we can at least look forward to Diablo IV, which should arrive for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC in 2020.