Read the Arreat Summit, our Strategy Guide for Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. The expansion to Diablo II adds a host of new features to the game, including two new playable classes -- the shapeshifting Druid and the cunning Assassin.
Last year, we were briefly excited at the prospect of Blizzard revamping some of their older games, as a job listing made clear they were looking for a software engineer to work on Diablo II, Warcraft III and the first StarCraft. Our hopes were dialled down when Blizzard clarified that their goal was simply to “maintain our legacy games.”
It seems that goal has borne fruit, as they’ve just released the first new patch for Diablo II in five years. The update “focuses on system glitches introduced by modern operating systems.”
The biggest boon of this seems to be for Mac players, as the announcement on the Battle.net forum says that, “you can finally retire those old Mac PowerPCs. Included with the update is a shiny new installer for OSX.” This fixes a problem where Diablo II would no longer work on any version of MacOSX after 10.7 Lion, which much like the last game update was released in 2011.
“Make gameplay first again on modern operating systems” was bulletpoint number one on last year’s job listing. Bulletpoint number four was “Combat hacking to improve multiplayer”, and it seems work has started on that:
Diablo 2 Patch 1.14 Download Blizzard
We’ve also begun working to improve our cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities. There’s still work to be done, but we’re making improvements every day.
It’s always lovely when game developers continue to support their games so long after release, especially when there’s no financial incentive or even much public pressure to do so. Hopefully there are similar updates to follow for other entries in Blizzard’s back catalogue.
It's testament to the calibre of Blizzard's back catalogue that a 16-year-old game is considered worth patching. The last time Diablo 2 got a touch-up was in 2011: patch 1.13d polished Battle.net integration and swept away a few bugs. Though the changelog is short, yesterday's patch 1.14 is more significant.
'This update focuses on system glitches introduced by modern operating systems,' the official post reads. 'In related news, you can finally retire those old Mac PowerPCs. Included with the update is a shiny new installer for OSX.
'We’ve also begun working to improve our cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities. There’s still work to be done, but we’re making improvements every day.
'There is still a large Diablo II community around the world, and we thank you for continuing to play and slay with us. This journey starts by making Diablo II run on modern platforms, but it does not end there.'
Diablo 2 Updates And Patches
Compatibility with modern systems is nice enough, but it marks the beginning of a wider process we've suspected for some time. In November last year, Blizzard was hiring for a 'Senior Software Engineer, Classic Games'. We speculated then that Blizz could be ramping up to remaster greats like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft, but at the very least patch 1.14 is evidence of a commitment to modernising Blizzard's slice of gaming history.