As Tom learned at BlizzCon this weekend, the original Diablo is being remade in Diablo 3—with production director John Lagrave citing a love of the series' roots as his team's main drive for doing so. For those of you hoping for similar treatment regarding the first Warcraft and Warcraft 2, Blizzard has all but shut the idea down.
As reported by Eurogamer, the company's co-founder Frank Pearce denounced suggestions of potential remakes during a Q&A panel. "We are fortunate enough to have all of the original source code and assets to everything we've done in the past," said Pearce. "But actually, it turns out, it's really hard to access that stuff, unlock it, and figure out how it all works. Because we're old, we've forgotten.
"We had some dedicated folks that were passionate about the idea, dig up the Warcraft 1 assets and code. They got it working and they got it running in a window. And I played it. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was awesome for its time. I promise you, in today's world, by today's standards, it's just not that fun anymore."
On the off-chance that wasn't explicit enough, Pearce continued to drive his point home. He added: "We have limited resources with everything that we choose to do. We would much rather work on amazing content for World of Warcraft for you guys, or for Overwatch, or evaluating what a future project pipeline might be and devote our time to that, rather than going back and digging up those fossils... We totally appreciate your enthusiasm for those old games. We love them too"
Just not enough to remaster them, it seems. Warcrafters can however look forward to its Nostalrius server returning under a new name, and PvP Brawls in the 7.2 update.
WoW next big patch, Undermine(d), gets a release date, starting the countdown clock until my gaming time is entirely consumed with doing donuts in my new ride
Bobby Kotick says he'd never have raised World of Warcraft's subscription by even a dollar because 'it's a prickly audience, you don't wanna do too much to agitate them'
