Awesome!
Great acquisitions for GOG.
And they needed it, too!
Travelers looking for the authentic Diablo experience can play the game as it was in 1996, with period-appropriate 20 FPS SVGA graphics, and the ability to matchmake through the classic version of Blizzard’s Battle.net® online-gaming service.
For those wanting something a bit more modern, Blizzard and GOG.COM have collaborated on an updated version of the game tuned for today’s gaming PCs, which includes out-of-the-box Windows 10 compatibility, a host of bug fixes and high-resolution support.
That’s pretty cool. I recently tried to buy digital copies of older stuff on Battlenet and was disappointed.
I hope Warcrafts include the soundtracks. Those were in my cd players hundreds of times.
This is awesome news.
Not that I remember the expansion being any good, but I wonder if they can get licensing for Hellfire.
GOG did the work for modern compatibility, that’s why they’re getting it.
Excellent news! Thanks for the heads-up, Telefrog.
It’s pretty interesting that they went this route instead of doing it all in-house and putting them on Battlenet.
Does anyone have the skinny on what modernization has been made and how it plays?
I’m tempted to pull the trigger but the price is pretty steep for a sub-par experience.
Where does one find news of the Warcrafts? I can’t see that anywhere.
It was mention by Blizzard in their announcement post on the Diablo website and also been mentioned by at least GOG’s Germany twitter account. Additionally, Ars Technica have some details on why Blizzard partnered up with GOG for this release rather than bringing it to their own store.
I’ll probably try it out tonight after work and post my impressions. But I’m guessing others will be able to do so before then.
Particularly interested in the high-res support. The 640x480 graphics are one of the main reasons that game is hard to play these days. That said, I played so many hundreds of hours of this game, and knew it so well that there was no challenge or discovery, I’m not sure I could go back for long regardless. I once played through the entire game 3x in a row without a break, just to finish some strategy guide details.
Oh hey, you’re probably a good person to ask this question. I only played through the game once, so I’ve always wondered about this: Was it ever possible to afford Wirt’s equipment? In my one game, all the items he had were always way more expensive than the gold I had. I remember once checking with him, and he had the perfect item for my Rogue. It was an upgrade in every way over what I was using. But I had to have a lot more gold to buy it.
So I kept going through the dungeon and gathering gold and throwing piles and piles outside the church. Eventually I had enough gold, so I picked it all up and I went to Wirt. And of course, he was now selling something completely different that was way more expensive than the gold I’d gathered to buy the previous item.
Was he just in the game as a big tease?
My experience was that by the last third or fourth of the game, provided you killed and looted everything, you’ll have stacks upon stacks of 5000 gold piece piles laying around town. Wirt’s stuff is randomized, so you might find an upgrade in his wares.
I like the reference to the “period-appropriate 20 FPS”. That’s right kids, in those days we were lucky to get 20 frames per second and we liked it!
Really happy to see Diablo released on GOG. Now if only No one lives forever 2 releases on GOG too. :)
I’d like to get a glimpse of an alternate universe where these GoG releases were announced at Blizzcon instead of Diablo Immortal, just to compare reactions at the reveal and the weeks following. They didn’t bring over Diablo 2, so no bump from that, but I’m still curious.
It isn’t a HD remake like WC3, it’s just the original Diablo with some changes to make it run on modern operating systems and scale up to monitor resolutions. This isn’t big news.