Hi, I’m Chris Wilson.

As you probably know, I'm a huge Diablo II fan,  to the extent that I co-created Path of Exile  

as an homage to it. Well, last week, Blizzard  shadow-dropped a new character class in Diablo II,  

for the first time in 25 years, in an  update called Reign of the Warlock.

This is a unique situation for me  because it's the intersection of  

my lifelong love for Diablo II and  my career, where I had to design,  

scope out and release almost 40  expansion updates to a live Action RPG.

There's a lot of feedback online about Reign of  the Warlock, and I want to present my personal  

point of view on it. I want to talk about some of  the decisions that the developers likely faced,  

the various choices they had available,  and the consequences of those choices.

I've got nothing but respect for the  Diablo 2 Resurrected team at Blizzard who  

are pushing hard to bring us new content for  the game we love. They may watch this video,  

so I want to make it clear I've been  having a great time in Reign of the  

Warlock so far and I'm just trying to  provide a fellow developer's perspective  

on what it's like trying to thread  the needle on an update like this.

I should make it clear that I am not affiliated  with Blizzard, and these opinions are my own.  

While some people on Reddit may have decided  that the Chris Wilson on the Diablo team is  

the same person as me, that's actually not the  case. It's just a popular build in this meta.

When working on changes to Diablo II, you need  to be so careful. This is a very special game.  

It launched the entire Action RPG genre. It  feels like wherever I go in life, I can ask  

someone if they have played Diablo II before,  and they not only say yes, but have incredibly  

fond memories of playing it as a kid, a teenager  or while at university. Diablo II is a common,  

shared memory among all of us. And that's  why it must be treated with the utmost care.

And it's very clear that the D2R team does  deeply care about this. This is most clear  

when you see how they have partitioned off the  changes into a new era that you can choose on  

a per-character basis. If at any point a change  is made that hurts the game, players still have  

the original pre-Reign of the Warlock era of  Diablo 2 Resurrected available to enjoy forever.

I've seen people comment that various quality  of life improvements in Reign of the Warlock  

are "paygated" behind the purchase of  this update. I suspect that the intent  

wasn't about selling more copies, but about  preserving a museum-piece baseline. To me,  

those features being only available in the  new era is the ultimate sign of respect to  

the original game. The team seems fully aware  of the care that needs to be taken around this  

important piece of gaming history, and are  treating it with the respect that it deserves.

So, Reign of the Warlock includes a new character  class, but doesn't include substantial new  

exploration content, like a new act for example.  I think this may actually be a strategic mistake.  

Now it may sound a bit rich of me to just wave  my hand and inflict the expectation of dozens of  

developer-years of work on their team. I'm  fully aware of how much effort it takes to  

produce an entirely new act for an Action RPG.  It would take a year plus of development and  

millions of dollars. But I feel this would very  much have paid for itself several times over.

I suspect the most likely reason that this  update didn't contain a new act is that the  

extra year of development would push it out  from being able to be released this month,  

where Blizzard is celebrating the 35th  anniversary of the company, the 30th  

anniversary of the Diablo franchise, and doing  the marketing for its new Diablo 4 expansion.  

It may not have been possible, due  to this timing, for them to consider  

the dramatic increase in scope that a  new act would entail for this update.

My issue with the update is that without an act,  it essentially boils down to a new character  

class, some quality of life features, and some new  endgame content. But the quality of life features  

and endgame content are only really relevant for  enfranchised players who are actively playing  

and will benefit from them. Most people don't  re-engage with a game just because it now has  

a materials stash tab or an uber variation of the  ancients fight. They want new experiences from it.

A new act would pretty much have guaranteed  that everyone who had a chance of re-engaging  

with Diablo II would have purchased and played  the update. Without new exploration content,  

it's down to the Warlock to sell the  update. But I have some concerns with  

one of the aspects of how the Warlock  was showcased at its announcement.

Several of my friends were hyped by the  announcement stream and then immediately  

found and watched additional videos that  showcased late-game Warlock gameplay using  

pinnacle runewords like Enigma. Getting to see  the character dominate the game's hardest content  

took away some of their desire to play. This is  something that I learned the hard way with Path  

of Exile. You want to show enough to interest  people, but if you show everything, some people  

may skip playing that update entirely because they  have seen it all already. My recommendation is  

to show the fantasy of the character, and a fair  demonstration of its abilities, but to try as hard  

as possible to encourage players to discover new  end-game builds and their rewards by themselves.

Something interesting to consider with  the Warlock is that it probably wasn’t  

the result of someone sitting down and asking  what class would be best to add to Diablo II.  

It was simultaneously announced for Diablo 4,  Diablo: Immortal and Diablo II. Because Diablo  

4 is Blizzard’s current flagship Diablo product  and is generating a lot more money than Diablo II,  

it’s very likely that the priority was finding  a class that fit in perfectly with Diablo 4 and  

could essentially be ported to the other two  games for marketing benefit. As someone who  

cares deeply about every change to Diablo  II being in its absolute best interest,  

the idea of a class being added because  it was in Diablo 4 did upset me a little.

But despite this, I think the Warlock  class itself is cool. Thematically I  

don’t have any concerns with it. It fits  in with the world well and is fun to play.  

I feel that the D2R team did a great  job putting a D2 spin on the class.  

Things like binding Demons really feel like Diablo  2 concepts, similar to Iron Golem and Revive, and  

very likely wouldn’t be the way the class works  in the other Diablo games which I appreciate.

However, the Warlock was very clearly designed  with modern ARPG sensibilities and decades of  

genre experience behind the team. As a result,  it doesn’t really have many bad skills and that  

makes it stand out when compared to Diablo  II's other seven classes. This class is a  

strong spellcaster, a strong summoner, and  is strong at both ranged and melee combat.  

It even has a teleport. It feels like it  has been designed to appeal to everyone,  

and because of that, it doesn't really feel  like an actual Diablo II character class.

At the time of recording this, which is before  any nerfs were done to the Warlock, its power  

level is pretty high. People are even saying that  the Spectral Throw build is stronger than a Mosaic  

assassin. This is one of the difficulties when  designing a new character class in isolation for a  

game. Developers don’t want to risk undershooting  its power level and having people hating it on  

release, so it’s very tempting to aim a bit  high with the power level. Unfortunately,  

release day is when people have had the least  time to actually solve the puzzle of boosting its  

power using other game elements, so if it feels  punchy on release day to give people a positive  

first impression, then it’s probably really  broken once built correctly a few weeks later.

Blizzard faces a difficult problem here, because  one group of players rightly doesn’t like it when  

certain builds are massively more powerful  than other builds, as it makes them mandatory  

for competitive players to play. Another group of  players really hates the idea of their fun being  

ruined by nerfs. They like a powerful character.  So far, the D2R team has been very careful with  

nerfs, which is sensible, but they are going  to have to take a stance on the Warlock soon.

Some people have suggested buffing the legacy  classes to be as powerful as the Warlock,  

but this runs the risk of kicking off a live  service power creep cycle, where class power  

gets raised, making the game feel easy, so new  harder content is added, and then a new update  

comes out with even more power that is able to  dominate that content, and the cycle repeats.  

This is something that Diablo 2 hasn't had to deal  with since version 1.10 in 2003, but if it's going  

to start receiving continued updates then the  developers will need to be very mindful of it.

One thing that was immediately disappointing  to me was that Reign of the Warlock removes  

the ability to switch to legacy graphics  mode. One of the coolest things about  

Diablo II Resurrected is that it allows  you to toggle between the new remastered  

graphics and the original legacy graphics.  While its legacy mode somehow feels and  

looks a bit worse than the original game  did, it is very interesting being able to  

see how faithful yet augmented the remastered  graphics are, side by side with the original.

The original game used a 2d engine that had  every frame of every animation, at every angle,  

rendered out as separate 2d sprites. My  understanding is that this was achieved by some  

complicated custom tooling where they rendered  out large spritesheets from 3d studio max.  

This was made even more complex by the presence of  attachments like helmets or weapons that had to be  

layered onto the characters or monsters correctly.  Properly re-creating this 25 year old pipeline and  

getting it to generate compatible spritesheets  would be a lot of work. A lot lot of work.

Allegedly when D2R launched in China,  it didn't include the legacy graphics  

option. This is likely because the  art required culturalisation changes  

and they were unable to easily apply  those changes to the old graphics.

This suspicion was basically confirmed when  Reign of the Warlock launched without legacy  

graphics support either. Updating the old  art, for the small percentage of users who  

occasionally flick to it, would be an immense  undertaking and probably not worth the effort  

from a commercial point of view. While  I would absolutely love to see how the  

Warlock would look with 2000-era graphics,  I don't blame them for removing the legacy  

graphics option. At least it's still available  in the original pre-Reign of the Warlock era  

of D2R. This is why separating the game into  eras makes sense. The current era is not held  

back by having to conform to the technical  requirements of the original 2d engine. So  

while I was disappointed by this omission,  I understand it, and am hopeful that it lets  

them really flex their muscles with more  graphical improvements in later updates.

Honestly, I found the announcement of Reign of  the Warlock quite surreal. Seeing a few features  

we designed for Path of Exile come full circle  back into Diablo II felt like a huge honour,  

regardless of where the inspiration was  actually from. It made me feel that I  

indirectly contributed a little  bit back to my favourite game.

If you enjoyed this video, please  like it and consider subscribing.  

It helps a lot. Thanks very  much, and see you next time!