Blizzard is bringing a new class to Diablo II: Resurrected for the first time ever, giving players a new way to make their way through the nearly 26-year-old RPG for the first time in decades with the Reign of the Warlock add-on launching today, February 11. It’s a big swing for the remaster, as it toes the line between preserving the original experience and creating something entirely new. The team is aware that some might view it as sacrilegious, so it isn’t making this change lightly.
In a group interview on the Blizzard Irvine campus last month that Kotaku was present for, game producer Matthew Cederquist and game designer Tim Vasconcellos talked about adding to the legacy of Diablo II and whether or not the Warlock is the last addition fans can expect. It sounds like the Warlock was one of a handful of classes in discussion, but it wasn’t the only one.
“We started with maybe, I don’t know, three or four [classes] that were top of mind,” Cederquist said. “But then we kind of shopped that around to the team, and the team was most excited about two specifically out of those, but then we thought, ‘All right, we’re gonna rock out the Warlock just because the team was so excited about it.’ They’re like, ‘oh yeah, we can make this amazing.’”
While they wouldn’t say what the runner-up class was, Vasconcellos says the Warlock’s summon-based blend of melee and ranged functionality lets it take up some unfilled space in Diablo II’s line-up. But still, the team worries about “painting over the Mona Lisa,” so to speak. They wanted to find ways to make the Warlock feel like a natural fit, as if it had always been in the game, and the devil is in the details.
“We looked at the warlock and said, ‘Okay, so what would make this feel as if we were coming out of Diablo I and this is a class that would have launched with Diablo 2?’” Vasconcellos said. So you’ll find references […] Did you notice the Diablo I icons in the skill tree? Subtle hints like that try to make it feel familiar, as well as something that’s new still in the game. How it’s expressed and what space do you actually have to develop in that are all things that we’ve tried to consider, and we’re eager to hear from the community of whether or not we actually accomplished our design goal.”
Blizzard reiterated during the interviews that the people working on Diablo II: Resurrected are longtime players who still play the game to this day and want anything new they bring to the package to be additive, but whether or not the studio keeps doing this will depend on whether or not players take to it. Although the team said they would like for this to not just be a one-off marking the series’ 30th anniversary, they had nothing further to announce at this time.