GOG’s version goes a bit beyond the classic versions that were on sale on Blizzard.net. Beyond the broad promise that “this is the best version of this game you can buy on any PC platform,” GOG has made specific tweaks to the networking code for Warcraft I and fixed up the DirectX wrapper for Warcraft II to improve its scaling on modern monitor resolutions.
It’s quite a novel commitment, keeping non-revenue-generating games playable for buyers, even after a publisher no longer makes them available for sale. The Warcraft titles certainly won’t be the only games for which publisher enthusiasm lags behind GOG and its classic gamers.
As noted at the Preservation Program’s launch, for some titles, GOG does not have the rights to modify a game’s build, and only its original developers can do so. So if GOG can’t make it work in, say, DOSBox, extraordinary efforts may be required.
Warcraft II: Remastered lets you switch back and forth between classic and remastered graphics and promises to offer better support for widescreen monitors and more units selected at once.
Credit: Blizzard
Warcraft II: Remastered lets you switch back and forth between classic and remastered graphics and promises to offer better support for widescreen monitors and more units selected at once. Credit: Blizzard
Beyond being tied to Blizzard’s Battle.net service in perpetuity, there are other reasons Warcraft fans might want to hold onto the originals. Blizzard’s 2020 release of Warcraft III Reforged was widely panned as uneven, unfinished, and in some ways unfair, as it, too, removed the original Warcraft III from stores. Reforged was still in rough shape a year later, leading Ars’ list of 2020’s most disappointing games. A 2.0 update promised a total reboot, but fans remain torn on the new art styles and are somewhat wary.
Then again, you can now select more units in the first two Warcraft games’ remasters, and you get “numerous visual updates for the UI.”
Enlarge/ The final boss of the new WoW raid, who will now be beatable as a solo player in Story Mode.
Blizzard
After 20 years, it’s now possible for solo players to finish storylines in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft that previously required a group to do an intensive raid.
That’s thanks to “Story Mode,” a new raid difficulty that was added for the final wing of the first raid of the recently released The War Within expansion.
Over the years, developer Blizzard has expanded the difficulty options for raids to meet various players and communities where they’re at in terms of play styles. The top difficulty is Mythic, where the semi-pro hardcore guilds compete. Below that is Heroic, where serious, capital-G gamers coordinate with friends in weekly raid schedules to progress. Then there’s Normal, which still requires some coordination but isn’t nearly as challenging and can typically be completed by a pick-up group within a few tries.
The most accessible difficulty is Raid Finder, where you’re matched up with random players automatically to complete a vastly easier version of a raid. Now Story Mode has been added to the mix, and it’s even easier than Raid Finder.
How Story Mode works
In Story Mode, you fight only the raid’s final boss, which has been scaled back in stats and complexity so that it’s beatable for a single player or a very small group of friends. Challenging encounter mechanics have been removed, and the whole fight has been retooled to focus exclusively on the narrative aspects.
There are some rewards, but they’re not the same as those on more difficult raids; the goal was to avoid cheapening the experience for those who do want to go all the way.
So far, Story Mode is available exclusively for the newest raid, which is called Nerub-ar Palace. It hasn’t been made available for other encounters yet, but Blizzard has hinted that this could be the long-term goal.
Supporting new (well, actually, old) play styles
Throughout WoW‘s history, it’s been common for the conclusion of a major storyline to involve defeating the final boss of a raid or dungeon. In the earlier years, Raid Finder didn’t exist, so only a small percentage of players who were willing to take on hardcore raiding could see those narrative outcomes.
Raid Finder was added in the Cataclysm expansion, but that still required grouping with other players, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For some players, the social aspect of WoW is simply guild chat while doing solo activities at their own pace. Some people even play WoW without interacting directly with other players at all, treating others in the game as background crowds that add immersion to the experience.
In most areas, WoW has been better than most of its peers at supporting this kind of play. I played WoW socially early on, but I’ve played almost exclusively solo for the past several years. To see the endings of storylines I encountered while questing, I often turned to YouTube to see the cutscenes players got when they beat the raids.
Story Mode is also relevant for older content; Blizzard wisely introduced a new approach to leveling new characters where players can essentially pick a past expansion to level through. It’s tuned so that the players reach the level cap and are ready for current live content at more or less the same time they finish the final story in that expansion. But it’s only during special Timewalking events that those players got the opportunity to find other players to do the raids with, so they often didn’t get to finish the stories.
Story Mode solves both of those scenarios, and it’s a fundamental philosophy shift for how WoW approaches endgame content.
A lot of players enjoy WoW‘s positive community aspects but don’t like the pressure of having to perform for others in a high-stress situation. Raid Finder addressed some of their concerns, but since some people just play for the story, there was no good reason for Blizzard not to have done this ages ago.
Story Mode might even be enough to get lapsed players back who might have left because they didn’t have time for the demanding social schedules associated with raiding. It also doesn’t take away from hardcore players’ satisfaction or enjoyment if casual solos can see some version of the final encounter and cutscene of a story arc, especially since the rewards are so distinct.
Sometimes, casual and hardcore players can play the same game without ruining each other’s experience. That’s a fine line that Blizzard has struggled to walk sometimes, but Story Mode is one of a handful of cases where it’s a win for everyone.
You can now play the original Diablo (and its expansion, Hellfire) in virtually any web browser on any computer with generally excellent performance and operating-as-expected controls. It’s all thanks to an open source project published on GitHub called Diabloweb that’s now being circulated by game developers on X.
In the README file in the project’s GitHub repository, the project’s developer (d07RiV) notes that it is based on DevilutionX, another open source project that did a lot of legwork to make Diablo run well on modern operating systems.
“I’ve modified the code to remove all dependencies and exposed the minimal required interface with JS, allowing the game to be compiled into WebAssembly,” writes d07RiV. “Event handling (especially in the menus) had to be modified significantly to fit the JS model.”
It’s pretty easy to set up; you just visit the website, upload a file, and get going.
You have to upload a file because the project doesn’t include the Diablo game files—you’ll have to provide those in the form of the DIABDAT.MPQ file in the Diablo install directory.
There are three above-board ways to source this MPQ file. First, you can, of course, own a physical copy of the original game. Alternatively, you can purchase the game on GOG and install it, then pull the file from the installation directory.
There’s also a shareware release of Diablo, and you can pull the SPAWN.MPQ file from that, and it works just fine. That’s not the full game, though, so that’s more for if you just want to try it.
This is the Diabloweb site, which offers brief instructions and prompts on how to get started.
Samuel Axon
I downloaded the Diablo installer from GOG and ran it in a Windows VM on my Mac…
Here’s the file we’re looking for.
It was just a click on the website to upload that file and behold, Diablo in a browser.
Samuel Axon
I played the game for about half an hour using the MPQ from the GOG version without any issues on Firefox on a Mac. (There’s no Mac version of the GOG installer, though, so I had to run the installer in a virtual Windows machine to get at the file.) The game is obviously primitive compared to more recent entries in the series (or even Diablo II), but it is an addictive blast to play regardless.
Enlarge / Do you have a few hundred hours to hear the good news about our lord and savior, Diablo?
Blizzard
Longtime fans of Diablo II are deeply familiar with the extreme timesink that is the late-game grind for the very best loot. But when the creators of Diablo IV tried to re-create that style of grinding for the latest game in the series, they found that their players’ tastes had changed quite a bit in the intervening years.
“One of the assumptions was that people were going to be okay with the long grind for the Unique or an Uber Unique in particular, because in Diablo II, it can go years,” Fergusson said. “You can go three years before you find the Uber you’re looking for… and so we were like, okay, this is what people love about the progression of D2, that idea of that very long chase.”
Once the game launched, though, Fergusson said the development team was surprised to find players complaining of how long it took to get some items—our own review expressed concern about the “‘loot treadmill’ approach to the endgame” and “loot drops [that] seem tuned a bit low for my taste.”
“We found out very quickly that if you don’t give me my Uber in my [months-long] season, then I’m upset,” Fergusson said. “And so we’re like, oh, wow, okay.”
Changing with the players
To help calm those upset players, subsequent Diablo IV updates have made it easier to earn Resplendent Sparks, which those players can use to craft high-end Uber Unique items they’ve been unable to find from random item drops. Having that option to skip the randomized item search helped satisfy the desires of modern players, Fergusson said.
“It’s just a kind of recognition of how much players have changed in 20 years,” he said. “You know… that consumptive nature of a live service and that time is money and I don’t have much time, so let’s go, right? And so that idea of like, oh, you’re going to get a unique every six months.”
Enlarge/ Ah, the old-fashioned joy of finding an item with a wall of ability text.
That recognition of “how much players have changed” reflects how much the mere passage of time has changed the Diablo audience over the years. A 16-year-old who was sinking all their free time into Diablo II when it launched in 2000 is pushing 40 these days. That means the core, nostalgic audience for the series is now very likely to have a career, family, and/or other responsibilities eating into their playtime. There’s nothing like a few decades of aging to make the prospect of sinking hundreds of hours into a loot grind seem less appealing.
With Diablo III, Blizzard initially assumed that players with more money than time would simply bid up the game’s best items in the game’s real-money auction house, where players who had more time to grind would benefit from selling their rarest random finds. Instead, Blizzard soon acknowledged that the auction system “short-circuited [the] core reward loop” of the game, making it trivial to buy high-level loot that quickly made the entire late-game feel kind of irrelevant.
With Diablo IV, Blizzard seems to have struck a better balance for players who simply want a more reliable reward for any time investment they can make. With Resplendent Sparks, players willing to put in the in-game work can be confident that they’ll eventually get the top-level items they’re seeking. That consistency can be much more appealing for time-limited players than simply crossing your fingers for a low-odds virtual dice roll or opening your wallet to skip the gameplay grind process entirely.
The evolution of Diablo‘s item progression system is an important reminder of how the relative value of a player’s time can change as those players move between different stages of life. Who knows, maybe in 25 years Diablo VI will find success with ultra-rare item drops that soak up all the free time for a core audience of retirement-age players with nothing better to do than spend 500 hours grinding for a digital sword.
Enlarge/ Mere seconds before an epic livestreamed troll moment.
The Zod rune has a mythical place in Diablo II lore. The incredibly rare socketed item, which can make other in-game gear indestructible, has just a 1 in 2,987,183 chance of dropping from the game’s highest class of enemy, according to one calculation.
“Yo, that’s my highest speedrun rune—here we go,” Kano said calmly on-stream when the rune dropped, projecting a cool detachment that belied the import of the moment. “That’s the first-ever Zod I’ve found, by the way. Like, ever.”
Viewers seeing the moment live on Twitch chat were not nearly so detached. “That’s easily the rarest thing ever dropped in a speed run, lol,” Twitch user R__A__C__E stated, probably accurately. “I just opened the stream WHAT THE F hahahha” Twitch user creatingmadness added.
The chat’s mood changed mere moments later, though, when Kano left the dungeon, walked to an in-game vendor, and quickly sold the incredibly rare item. “Do not vendor that!!! Please for the love of all that is holy,” YouTube viewer Ragnar begged, to no avail. “YOU ASSHOLE,” Twitch user R__A__C__E added in all-caps outrage.
Kano just chuckled a bit to himself at the reactions he was getting from his viewers. “What, dude, it’s 35K, it’s good… it’s good money,” he deadpanned. Later in the same stream, he feigned ignorance over why the sale would even generate controversy. “Why would they be angry at me for selling a Zod, dude? It’s 35K gold. I don’t get it. What’s the problem? I think I should be more angry at people who keep a Zod rune, to be honest.”
Kano’s full stream. The Zod rune drops at around the 8: 15: 30 mark.
Elsewhere in the stream, though, Kano dropped the act and fully appreciated what had just happened. “I can’t believe it, like, that’s so sick,” he said. “Hello, it’s my first ever Zod rune, dude. Now, whenever people ask me the question ‘What’s the highest Rune you’ve ever seen in a speedrun?’ I can finally say it’s a Zod, man.”
