As BlizzCon 2020 prepares behind the scenes, Blizzard Entertainment lets us know that Diablo II Resurrected has just been the subject of a big update, 2.4, already available and which will bring a lot of changes in the balancing of the game, especially at the level of classes, which will change the game’s paradigm. Blizzard specifies that the last Diablo II class balancing update dates back to version 1.13c, released on March 23, 2010. An eternity! The list of changes, new features and other fixes is listed on the official website and there for several tens of seconds of scrolling. Otherwise, Blizzard lets us know that Diablo 2 Resurrected has over 5 million players today, which is a very good performance.
GAMING COMFORT UPDATES
General
Support for non-ASCII characters
Added a system message for players trying to launch the game from an outdated version
Added a “Message of the Day” system to the main menu to allow us to share important updates with players
New Feature: Legacy Graphics Emulation
There is now an option in the graphics settings menu, in the “Legacy” section, that lets you choose between three ways to emulate Legacy graphics. These options are “GDI”, “Glide” and “Resurrected”.
“GDI” emulates the software dithering of the original game and does not apply any filtering;
“Glide” emulates the accelerated back-end of the original game with bilinear filtering;
“Resurrected” uses Glide emulation with additional fixes to address a display issue that occurred with the original Glide renderer.
Developer Comment: We believe “Resurrected” is the benchmark emulation mode players should be using, but noticed during the RPT that some preferred the launch’s Legacy graphics style, which had no filtering and looked like more to the software dithering of the original game. We hope that these emulation modes will allow everyone to choose Legacy graphics according to their preferences.
AI
Improved the reliability of pets, summons and mercenaries by making them teleport towards the player instead of disappearing
Barbaric
Updated Leap and Jump Attack animation to give them a smoother trajectory and allow the Barbarian to stay on screen all the time, while reducing hitch on landing
Character selection
Newly created characters now end up at the top of the selection list
Gameplay
Holding down a mouse button to target an enemy with a skill will cause the skill to continue executing after that enemy dies
Minimap now automatically opens on character death, if it was already open before dying
Maximum amount of arrows and dashes increased to 500
Increased the amount of thrown weapons by 50%
Blocking no longer interrupts the player when performing a skill or attack. If a player triggers a block at this time, the damage will cancel, but the animation will not play
Changed the way attack speed is determined in dual weapon combat. Switching hands should no longer change attack speed as significantly
Your character’s hit recovery will now have diminishing returns when hit by another player
Changed the behavior of Quick Skills so that Quick Skills associated with Left-Click work the same as Quick Skills associated with Right-Click
Developer Comments: We want to fix some incongruous locks that prevent the player from casting spells. In PvP, we’ve added a way to reduce the chaining of cooldowns to avoid the very rare cases of players getting stuck for too long.
mercenaries
Mercenary UIs will now specify if a mercenary cannot use a skill due to its low level
Online game
Added a system message for players trying to create a private channel with a name that exceeds the character limit
Added an in-game /offline command to set your presence to “offline”
Added an option to allow players to control access to private games on console
Added a button to show/hide the game password
Sellers
Players can now purchase keys and pre-filled tomes with a controller
Performance
Optimized particle effects on some consoles
Added visual effects quality option on PC
Optimization of quick put away actions to reduce delay
Settings
Offline game difficulty scaling settings will now persist between game sessions
Added an option to limit or not confine the cursor to the limits of the game screen
Added a VRAM usage bar in the settings menu
