The long tail —

16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II

New update helps the game run on modern operating systems

No rest for the weary.
No rest for the weary.

These days, you're lucky if some games from certain big publishers get a year or two of post-launch online support before they're unceremoniously dropped. And then there's Diablo II. Blizzard issued a new version 1.14 patch for the nearly 16-year-old game Thursday, five years after the game was last officially updated (not to mention, four years since the game's sequel launched with its own attendant post-release problems and patches)

The new Diablo II patch doesn't add any new gameplay features, balance tweaks, or anything like that. Instead, Blizzard has added compatibility with modern operating systems like Windows 10 and OS X. But Blizzard says it's working on improvements to the game's "cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities" and hints at more improvements to come.

"There is still a large Diablo II community around the world, and we thank you for continuing to play and slay with us," Blizzard writes. "This journey starts by making Diablo II run on modern platforms, but it does not end there. See you in Sanctuary, adventurers."

Today's patch comes a few months after a Blizzard job posting seeking a "senior software engineer, classic games" to work on continued maintenance for Diablo II, Warcraft III, and Starcraft. That posting said the job would involve "creat[ing] conditions for experiences that look as good as they play" and "own[ing] implementation and curation of features new and old," so we can probably expect more significant updates to all of these Blizzard classics going forward.

That's an impressive amount of dedication for a company that has plenty of new games to worry about supporting. We can only hope Blizzard games like Hearthstone and Overwatch will still get such dedicated support (and have such dedicated communities) in the year 2032.

Channel Ars Technica