The Last of Us Franchise - Because it's apparently a franchise now. This thread has been double-DMCA’d by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

[Malagor the dank omen]

Sony chose the worst time to release the PS5. This shit will majorly hurt Sony.

Maybe it will be the time for Sony to do something big and over the top. Like backwards compatibility.
But i know i'm being overwhelmingly optimistic with this, so instead they will most likely throw Naughty Dog under the bus and take their IPs... Except the TLOU IP, they know it's damaged beyond salvation.

 

[Balr0g]

I just watched Yathzees E3 2018 Video and the sony part was like this: "Sony seems to put a lot their eggs into one basket: Ghosts of Tsushima stealthing around a postapocalyptic landscape killing thugs, we have Last of us2, a game about stealthing around a post-apokalyptic landscape killing thugs and being a lesbian and we have Death Stranding ehm what are you About? It seems like stealthing in a post-apocalyptic landscape…" And if we compare those 3 Ghosts of Tsushima seems to be the most interesting one.

 

[Secret Asshole]

I do think this is pretty much the end of Naughty Dog and Druckmann. The point where the emperor has lost his clothes. But gamers buying shit is very likely too. If this affects Sony at all will be fun to see though.

I think Druckman's AAA career is fundamentally over for many reasons. For one, lets distill down the details of the plot and look at it for what it is: a boilerplate revenge story with few differences. 'X's father gets killed, X goes on a quest against Y who killed him for revenge, kills Y but Z then goes after X for killing Y.' This is TLOU2's entire plot arc and main focus. It took him 7 years to think that up. Something that simple doesn't take years, it takes three months at best (I'm talking about writing it, not making it). There are absolutely no excuses for a plot this simple to take that long to draw out, dialogue and create. TLOU 2 isn't about graphics or gameplay, its about story, right? So why do you take 7 years and produce one of the most fundamentally basic plots in literature? Absolutely unacceptable from a so-called story based experience. So this speaks to massive mismanagement on his part. He will be watched and rode exceedingly hard and I doubt he will ever be afforded much creative freedom if he works at places like these. I just honestly don't know who would hire him. Who would ever want a creative director who takes 7 years to complete a revenge story?

Second, his 'masterpiece' has become a walking joke. Its VERY rare to recover from this. Bioware mitigated the damage with ending DLC to whether it enough and 'No Man's Sky' basically hunkered down into a fortress-level state where they basically worked non-stop to get the game to a decent state. So to rectify that, you need skill and effort and some humility. Druckman has none of those. Its likely he'll constantly double down until the end of eternity until he's irrelevant.

Thirdly, he cannot hold onto any form of talent. Most of ND walked out on him. They had to replace animators with Hollywood animators because conditions were notoriously bad. He lost main staff. He no longer has any sort of a team to build around him, and nobody really loyal enough (the leak demonstrates that fully). He is just awful to his employees and ND is basically going to be avoided by anyone with talent, and Druckman himself will never hire anyone who doesn't 'Yes' his ideas to death. The legacy of the studio will be TLOU 2.

And I just don't think you get to walk away from embarrassing a major corporation this badly with no consequences. I mean, if he does, just imagine how weak Sony looks to the industry. It doesn't matter how it looks to Journalists (who are just viewed as employees at this point) or their audience, but their corporate competitors. You can basically just jump right on Druckman's 'We don't make games that are fun', which you can now attach as a whole to Sony's exclusives since it touted them so much and then pound it in their face so much until they're bleeding. Like fucking Nintendo and Microsoft would pay Sony to keep Druckman on as a creative director for all Playstation exclusives at this point.

If Sony does nothing, they're a weak corporation and that should be a major warning sign to any exclusives coming out, bar none. It means they don't bother doing quality control or overlooking any of their teams to see if something is getting out of hand. Meaning their exclusives are pointless. Like I said before, I don't think sales matter. This is a cost that goes beyond the game with this. If Sony just high-fives themselves if they get good sales and try to ignore the scandal, they're really inept.

I mean, people will buy this trash, of that I have no doubt. Imagine the scene, Christmas day. Brand New PS4/5. Comes with a complimentary TLOU 2 copy. They'll put it in and laugh as they shoot a dog whose own cries next to it as you mercilessly execute him. You will bash a beloved character's skull in with a golf-club in stunning 4k detail, to the point where you can see his deformed skull, the head of the golf club dripping with blood and brain matter. You will, as a solid 200 pound woman, brutally and mercilessly beat a 90 pound girl in visceral detail by glazing into the screen and hitting buttons break her face. To crush her windpipe. To smash her head into concrete so badly that her nose is deformed and her eye is a mass of blood. You'll slit a pregnant girl's throat. A wholesome family Christmas brought to by Videodrome! LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!

 

[CobraCommander]

Anybody know where I can find the leaked footage ?

 

[verissimus]

You expect gameplay in a game that tells such an interesting, high-quality story with so many interesting characters? Are you from the late 90 early 2000's or what?

Define "interesting" and "high-quality"....

 

[DumbDude42]

Second, his 'masterpiece' has become a walking joke. Its VERY rare to recover from this. Bioware mitigated the damage with ending DLC to whether it enough and 'No Man's Sky' basically hunkered down into a fortress-level state where they basically worked non-stop to get the game to a decent state. So to rectify that, you need skill and effort and some humility. Druckman has none of those. Its likely he'll constantly double down until the end of eternity until he's irrelevant.

no mans sky could be salvaged because its problem was a combination of marketing overreach (building hype about YOU CAN DO EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME) and lack of features (you couldn't actually do much of anything in the game at release), so by doing overtime and adding tons of features, they sort of fixed the issues and now the final product actually more or less lives up to what the initial marketing had promised.
you can't do this with tlou2 though. the problem isn't simply "not enough X" (which could be fixed by adding more X later) but that the core content the game delivers (story and writing mainly) fucking sucks. you can't fix that after the fact, you can't deploy a patch that replaces the shit story with a better one. this is unsalvagable. the best they could hope for is releasing some sort of sequel later down the line that retcons all this shit and delivers better content. maybe some "alternate timeline" shit, or a "soft reboot", or a prequel. but this game itself is fucked up beyond repair.

also this is way more of a fuckup than ME3. this is like if ME3 made you play as a reaper agent and personally murder shepard and all his crew members from ME1 and ME2 as revenge because he killed sovereign in the first game lol

 

[Secret Asshole]

no mans sky could be salvaged because its problem was a combination of marketing overreach (building hype about YOU CAN DO EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME) and lack of features (you couldn't actually do much of anything in the game at release), so by doing overtime and adding tons of features, they sort of fixed the issues and now the final product actually more or less lives up to what the initial marketing had promised.
you can't do this with tlou2 though. the problem isn't simply "not enough X" (which could be fixed by adding more X later) but that the core content the game delivers (story and writing mainly) fucking sucks. you can't fix that after the fact, you can't deploy a patch that replaces the shit story with a better one. this is unsalvagable. the best they could hope for is releasing some sort of sequel later down the line that retcons all this shit and delivers better content. maybe some "alternate timeline" shit, or a "soft reboot", or a prequel. but this game itself is fucked up beyond repair.

also this is way more of a fuckup than ME3. this is like if ME3 made you play as a reaper agent and personally murder shepard and all his crew members from ME1 and ME2.

Well, my point was that it was very rare to recover from a blunder like this. In TLOU 2's case, it's impossible as you said. There's not enough material to scavenge. You'd basically have to take the game, gut it and make a new one. Its just not possible after the fact. The only way to salvage the franchise is make TLOU 2 a dying hallucination by the doctor as he bleeds out on the floor and continue as if nothing happened. There's no other way to fix this franchise except to retcon the game out of existence.

TLOU was all about Joel and Ellie, not really ground-breaking gameplay or situations. You can't simply remove them. Its kind of difficult to imagine people getting emotionally invested in other characters. I imagine this caused massive internal conflict in the studio, because TLOU was basically an intense character study of 2 people. The problem, without the anchor of Joel and Ellie, I didn't really find the setting compelling. It was that study in that environment. The other ideas weren't fully fleshed out because you had more of this focus on Joel and Ellie. Their situations and their struggles. You put them into situations to see how they would react to them. How that bond would be forged or tested. To basically crush that is basically crushing the franchise. Some franchises aren't about world-building, but revolve around characters. TLOU was one such franchise. To disrespect both characters to such a degree basically ends the franchise and renders the first game pointless.

As you said, there is no fixing this. It is impossible. You 1) Can't do prequels, because you know nothing matters and 2) Sequels don't matter because you've lost trust and destroyed your audience. The only approach is to basically pretend this never happened. Never acknowledge it, overwrite it. Find the corpse of someone named Abby with Joel alive so you have players know this no longer exists.

But I really don't think that's going to happen. This franchise is fucking dead.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Druckman may have fucked himself for his plans to be moving on to movies/television.

Right now everything is in Limbo because the game hasn't released. So don't expect any major firings until that has happened. But he's most definitely not going to just move to another branch of the company after fucking another and leaving a mess to clean up. The plan to bury the game may have worked, because after Ghosts of Tsushima showed the gameplay video, pre-orders for it may have gone up as high as 500,000 to a million which would have filled the void of refunds they had to send out for TLOU2. It Overtook all other games as a best seller and not only that it's a brand new series so there's really a alot of positive press and fresh momentum that they're riding. Sony will only be doing the effort that's been contractually agreed upon until launch for Naughty Dog. Essentially they're on their own and TLOU2 will live and die by it's own merits.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I think Druckman's AAA career is fundamentally over for many reasons. For one, lets distill down the details of the plot and look at it for what it is: a boilerplate revenge story with few differences. 'X's father gets killed, X goes on a quest against Y who killed him for revenge, kills Y but Z then goes after X for killing Y.' This is TLOU2's entire plot arc and main focus. It took him 7 years to think that up. Something that simple doesn't take years, it takes three months at best (I'm talking about writing it, not making it). There are absolutely no excuses for a plot this simple to take that long to draw out, dialogue and create. TLOU 2 isn't about graphics or gameplay, its about story, right? So why do you take 7 years and produce one of the most fundamentally basic plots in literature? Absolutely unacceptable from a so-called story based experience. So this speaks to massive mismanagement on his part. He will be watched and rode exceedingly hard and I doubt he will ever be afforded much creative freedom if he works at places like these. I just honestly don't know who would hire him. Who would ever want a creative director who takes 7 years to complete a revenge story?

Second, his 'masterpiece' has become a walking joke. Its VERY rare to recover from this. Bioware mitigated the damage with ending DLC to whether it enough and 'No Man's Sky' basically hunkered down into a fortress-level state where they basically worked non-stop to get the game to a decent state. So to rectify that, you need skill and effort and some humility. Druckman has none of those. Its likely he'll constantly double down until the end of eternity until he's irrelevant.

Thirdly, he cannot hold onto any form of talent. Most of ND walked out on him. They had to replace animators with Hollywood animators because conditions were notoriously bad. He lost main staff. He no longer has any sort of a team to build around him, and nobody really loyal enough (the leak demonstrates that fully). He is just awful to his employees and ND is basically going to be avoided by anyone with talent, and Druckman himself will never hire anyone who doesn't 'Yes' his ideas to death. The legacy of the studio will be TLOU 2.

And I just don't think you get to walk away from embarrassing a major corporation this badly with no consequences. I mean, if he does, just imagine how weak Sony looks to the industry. It doesn't matter how it looks to Journalists (who are just viewed as employees at this point) or their audience, but their corporate competitors. You can basically just jump right on Druckman's 'We don't make games that are fun', which you can now attach as a whole to Sony's exclusives since it touted them so much and then pound it in their face so much until they're bleeding. Like fucking Nintendo and Microsoft would pay Sony to keep Druckman on as a creative director for all Playstation exclusives at this point.

If Sony does nothing, they're a weak corporation and that should be a major warning sign to any exclusives coming out, bar none. It means they don't bother doing quality control or overlooking any of their teams to see if something is getting out of hand. Meaning their exclusives are pointless. Like I said before, I don't think sales matter. This is a cost that goes beyond the game with this. If Sony just high-fives themselves if they get good sales and try to ignore the scandal, they're really inept.

I mean, people will buy this trash, of that I have no doubt. Imagine the scene, Christmas day. Brand New PS4/5. Comes with a complimentary TLOU 2 copy. They'll put it in and laugh as they shoot a dog whose own cries next to it as you mercilessly execute him. You will bash a beloved character's skull in with a golf-club in stunning 4k detail, to the point where you can see his deformed skull, the head of the golf club dripping with blood and brain matter. You will, as a solid 200 pound woman, brutally and mercilessly beat a 90 pound girl in visceral detail by glazing into the screen and hitting buttons break her face. To crush her windpipe. To smash her head into concrete so badly that her nose is deformed and her eye is a mass of blood. You'll slit a pregnant girl's throat. A wholesome family Christmas brought to by Videodrome! LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!

Well, my point was that it was very rare to recover from a blunder like this. In TLOU 2's case, it's impossible as you said. There's not enough material to scavenge. You'd basically have to take the game, gut it and make a new one. Its just not possible after the fact. The only way to salvage the franchise is make TLOU 2 a dying hallucination by the doctor as he bleeds out on the floor and continue as if nothing happened. There's no other way to fix this franchise except to retcon the game out of existence.

TLOU was all about Joel and Ellie, not really ground-breaking gameplay or situations. You can't simply remove them. Its kind of difficult to imagine people getting emotionally invested in other characters. I imagine this caused massive internal conflict in the studio, because TLOU was basically an intense character study of 2 people. The problem, without the anchor of Joel and Ellie, I didn't really find the setting compelling. It was that study in that environment. The other ideas weren't fully fleshed out because you had more of this focus on Joel and Ellie. Their situations and their struggles. You put them into situations to see how they would react to them. How that bond would be forged or tested. To basically crush that is basically crushing the franchise. Some franchises aren't about world-building, but revolve around characters. TLOU was one such franchise. To disrespect both characters to such a degree basically ends the franchise and renders the first game pointless.

As you said, there is no fixing this. It is impossible. You 1) Can't do prequels, because you know nothing matters and 2) Sequels don't matter because you've lost trust and destroyed your audience. The only approach is to basically pretend this never happened. Never acknowledge it, overwrite it. Find the corpse of someone named Abby with Joel alive so you have players know this no longer exists.

But I really don't think that's going to happen. This franchise is fucking dead.

Could this be the Daikatana of the 2010s?

Yes.

Very yes.

"We don't do fun" is surely going to go down in history alongside "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" as seriously bad marketing. The parallels are striking - egotistical marketing pronouncements, constant bragging about how the game is going to subvert expectations and be super important and super innovative and super brilliant, then in the end the player ends up shooting at frogs with a gun that's likely to kill you / smashing in the skull of a teenager half your size as a final boss (delete as appropriate).

 

[Fareal]

Well, my point was that it was very rare to recover from a blunder like this. In TLOU 2's case, it's impossible as you said. There's not enough material to scavenge. You'd basically have to take the game, gut it and make a new one. Its just not possible after the fact. The only way to salvage the franchise is make TLOU 2 a dying hallucination by the doctor as he bleeds out on the floor and continue as if nothing happened. There's no other way to fix this franchise except to retcon the game out of existence.

TLOU was all about Joel and Ellie, not really ground-breaking gameplay or situations. You can't simply remove them. Its kind of difficult to imagine people getting emotionally invested in other characters. I imagine this caused massive internal conflict in the studio, because TLOU was basically an intense character study of 2 people. The problem, without the anchor of Joel and Ellie, I didn't really find the setting compelling. It was that study in that environment. The other ideas weren't fully fleshed out because you had more of this focus on Joel and Ellie. Their situations and their struggles. You put them into situations to see how they would react to them. How that bond would be forged or tested. To basically crush that is basically crushing the franchise. Some franchises aren't about world-building, but revolve around characters. TLOU was one such franchise. To disrespect both characters to such a degree basically ends the franchise and renders the first game pointless.

As you said, there is no fixing this. It is impossible. You 1) Can't do prequels, because you know nothing matters and 2) Sequels don't matter because you've lost trust and destroyed your audience. The only approach is to basically pretend this never happened. Never acknowledge it, overwrite it. Find the corpse of someone named Abby with Joel alive so you have players know this no longer exists.

But I really don't think that's going to happen. This franchise is fucking dead.

Everyone loves To Kill A Mockingbird. Everyone hates Go Set A Watchman. You can, even as the original author of a story arc, break the things (especially characterisation) so badly that people go “eh, I’ll just leave it, thanks”.

 

[madeinabyss31]

You expect gameplay in a game that tells such an interesting, high-quality story with so many interesting characters? Are you from the late 90 early 2000's or what?

Bahahahahahahahahaha

 

[Marissa Moira]

Could this be the Daikatana of the 2010s?

Yes.

Very yes.

"We don't do fun" is surely going to go down in history alongside "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" as seriously bad marketing. The parallels are striking - egotistical marketing pronouncements, constant bragging about how the game is going to subvert expectations and be super important and super innovative and super brilliant, then in the end the player ends up shooting at frogs with a gun that's likely to kill you / smashing in the skull of a teenager half your size as a final boss (delete as appropriate).

We Don't Do fun is closer to "Don't you guys have phones?" than bad advertisements. It's when one of the devs put their foot in their mouth in public.

And there was apparently direct action by the parent company on that one it turns out, because Vicarious Visions is now doing Diablo 2 and not Blizzard.

 

[Optimus Prime]

And there was apparently direct action by the parent company on that one it turns out, because Vicarious Visions is now doing Diablo 2 and not Blizzard.

...wait what.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Everyone loves To Kill A Mockingbird. Everyone hates Go Set A Watchman. You can, even as the original author of a story arc, break the things (especially characterisation) so badly that people go “eh, I’ll just leave it, thanks”.

Someone has mentioned "Go Set a Watchman" in my presence, so I'm going out of control right now since it hits a lot of my buttons jusssttt right. So before I go off, let me set the background

Everyone in US High School has read "To Kill a Mockingbird", everybody nearly universally. A few years ago, "Go Set a Watchmen" was 'discovered' as a 'sequel' to her breakthrough novel. However, it was later revealed this was pure bullshit. It turns out it was actually a very early draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird", there's no forward, it reuses passages from 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and has identical story beats. By the time it was released, Harper Lee was very old and possibly very senile by this point. The publishing of "Go Set a Watchman" comes two months after the death of her care-giver and sister, IE: The perfect time to take advantage of an old woman. So it was basically put out to get money as controversy by VERY unscrupulous people. The novel doesn't actually exist, it isn't real (in story terms, that is). It is fraud masquerading itself as something different to drum up money by hitting the IdPol demo and controversy. It isn't a real sequel, and in actuality, it doesn't really exist at all. Harper Lee has stated many times she didn't want to publish another book, no editor she knew knew about it and it was only viewed as a draft, not as a separate entity. Which is why everyone close to her went 'wtf'. If you pick up 'Go Set a Watchmen', its basically the physical manifestation of fraud in your hands.

It was straight up generated from elder abuse. I hate everyone involved in publishing it, I think its fucking disgusting what was done and the marketing whores should be shot. Anyone who likes Go Set a Watchman is a pretentious faggot and almost certain to be wrong on every aspect of story writing. Its one of the books that I think should be removed from shelves and burned.

In short, fuck Go Set A Watchmen.

Could this be the Daikatana of the 2010s?

Yes.

Very yes.

"We don't do fun" is surely going to go down in history alongside "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" as seriously bad marketing. The parallels are striking - egotistical marketing pronouncements, constant bragging about how the game is going to subvert expectations and be super important and super innovative and super brilliant, then in the end the player ends up shooting at frogs with a gun that's likely to kill you / smashing in the skull of a teenager half your size as a final boss (delete as appropriate).

Don't get me wrong, I see the similarities. But there's a lot of differences. Firstly, you can basically look at Daikatana as the end of large, independent studios, which was replaced by the corpritized structure we have now. Its failure didn't just end Romero and Ion Storm, it changed the way games were done business wise. Indies are just now recovering from the damage Daikatana did, where larger indie studios are now coming together again. Secondly, Romero promised the world. The hype train from Daikatana was so legendary. As was its vapor-ware status. At the end of the day, nobody knew what the fuck this game was going to be, so anticipation reached a fever pitch. We mostly knew what TLOU 2 was gonna be, we were just waiting for the plot. Thirdly, in those days, John Romero was a God. He had a sports car, a model wife, shit like that. He was really the last of the big game devs. Daikatana's failure made a huge impact.

In comparison, Druckman is a sad nobody soyboy whose own fetish vanity project drove his parent company to embarrassment, killed his studio and his career. In short, he doesn't deserve to be remembered. He's too pathetic. Its what his ego wants.

The question is, will the very public failure of IdPol, ugly women and the like have any effect? This disaster is still in progress, so we can't say for certain if it will have a lasting impact. But we do know it will more than likely demolish Druckman and Naughty Dog.

My guess is that this is more of the crumbling of the pillar of IdPol in entertainment and will probably be pointed to as an example of its inevitable failure in the medium. I don't think this is enough to be a major catalyst to blow up that foundation, but the cracks are showing and the pillar is crumbling more and more.

 

[Marissa Moira]

...wait what.

Diablo 2 Remaster Reportedly Being Developed by Vicarious Visions

According to a new report, the long-rumored Diablo 2 remaster is being handled by Vicarious Visions - the studio behind the recent Crash Bandicoot remasters.

www.playstationlifestyle.net

Blizzard fucked up so much that Activision decided to let another studio develop for the IP since they had a lot success with Crash Bandicoot. Which also probably means the rumors of Blizzard lacking any real talent and having the skilled people being replaced by diversity hires being very true. Before Warcraft 3 reforged came out stories were coming out about how blizzard essentially became an adult day care center and can't make games under their own man-power anymore because nobody knew what the fuck they were doig.

This D2 remaster includes a console port supposedly. Diablo 1 was ported to consoles and D2 remains the only diablo game to not get a console port as of yet.

 

[Optimus Prime]

My guess is that this is more of the crumbling of the pillar of IdPol in entertainment and will probably be pointed to as an example of its inevitable failure in the medium. I don't think this is enough to be a major catalyst to blow up that foundation, but the cracks are showing and the pillar is crumbling more and more.

I am absolutely loving the collapse of IdPol in mainstream media. It certainly is more entertaining than the bullshit fuckers like Cuckman seem to think need to exist (because as we all know with these types, its never about the profit - its 100% virtue signalling)

Diablo 2 Remaster Reportedly Being Developed by Vicarious Visions

According to a new report, the long-rumored Diablo 2 remaster is being handled by Vicarious Visions - the studio behind the recent Crash Bandicoot remasters.

www.playstationlifestyle.net

Blizzard fucked up so much that Activision decided to let another studio develop for the IP since they had a lot success with Crash Bandicoot.

This includes a console port supposedly. Diablo 1 was ported to consoles and D2 remains the only diablo game to not get a console port as of yet.

Fuck. Yes.

D2 was my fucking jam back in the day. Having Vicarious Visions on it sounds amazing.

 

[blablabla]

nobody cares what some fucking youtuber thinks about this stupid game, post more naughty dog idiocy or gtfo

 

[Trashfire Garbagefuck]

daikatana's gameboy color version was a halfway decent zelda clone. druckman just needs to find an old gbc devkit and this whole thing could be salvaged.

 

[AnOminous]

This isn't just a game fuck-up, a developer fuck-up, its a corporate fuck up on a massive scale we rarely get to see.

However, on the occasions we do, Sony is often involved.

 

[UnclePhil]

Maybe it will be the time for Sony to do something big and over the top. Like backwards compatibility.

At this point I just want a PlayStation with an HDMI port that spins my old discs, and upscales them to look decent on the newer TV. It would save money on the tax for repurchasing digital downloads. I don't give too many shits about AAA console exclusives anymore except maybe what Nintendo offers. Nintendo is fluid movement and fun and warm feelings. Sony is walking slow behind someone at inconsistent 25fps and slaughtering pets and your favorite characters.

I'm getting older, and I shouldn't care, but I sincerely hope TLOU2 is a big enough disaster that they never do this again. OTOH, it is fun following the drama.

Diablo 2 Remaster Reportedly Being Developed by Vicarious Visions

According to a new report, the long-rumored Diablo 2 remaster is being handled by Vicarious Visions - the studio behind the recent Crash Bandicoot remasters.

www.playstationlifestyle.net

Blizzard fucked up so much that Activision decided to let another studio develop for the IP since they had a lot success with Crash Bandicoot. Which also probably means the rumors of Blizzard lacking any real talent and having the skilled people being replaced by diversity hires being very true. Before Warcraft 3 reforged came out stories were coming out about how blizzard essentially became an adult day care center and can't make games under their own man-power anymore because nobody knew what the fuck they were doig.

This D2 remaster includes a console port supposedly. Diablo 1 was ported to consoles and D2 remains the only diablo game to not get a console port as of yet.

I had no idea there was a D2 remaster in the works and someone other than Blizzard was handling it. This is really good news. I've wanted to make a Barbarian and retread memory lane for the longest time, but the CD key on my Diablo II collection is illegible. Isn't that a bitch? I didn't lose the CD key. The ink faded. Completely locked out of it now.