Semantic Nonsense: Damage Confabulation

Damage CONtrol

This Saturday will mark Damage Control’s 5,000 posting. So let’s celebrate!

Come join us for an evening we hope we remember, all on Twitch!

Now, I’m not shirking my regular streaming responsibilities, and I will be doing a pregame show from 2 to 4 p.m. (ET) consisting of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (CD-ROM remake) and Press Your Luck 2010 Edition. These games have been chosen for this particular showcase due to our wanton use of sounds from these games.

Heck, I’ll even throw in a live review of a Kit Kat because why not go full meme?

Then, at 4, the whole staff will be coming together (so long as nobody gets waylaid) in a videoconference to talk shop, reminisce about our favorite entries, take questions from our followers, and mercilessly tease each other.

When the roundtable is done (whatever end time we schedule is certain to be wrong, so we’re just not gonna), The survivors will attempt a multiplayer session of Fortune Street. We’ll also be joined by MagnusSurtsson, who has collaborated with me on several Damage Control projects over the years, including our very first Let’s Play and also the short-lived Couch Co-Op podcast.

---

Vicarious Death and Diablo Rebirth

But enough about our con. Blizzard had their own just now.

Last week, Blizzcon pretty much confirmed my dread that Vicarious Visions was killed apropos of nothing. Activision dissolved the studio, and fed its staff to Blizzard to assist with the now-announced Diablo 2: Resurrected.

Considering the scope of that project, I am not certain Blizzard even needed the help. The to-do list for the update — with a lot of tasks accomplished before VV was cannibalized — wasn’t as deep as I expected.

• Provide support for resolutions up to 4K.
• Add in the same stash and auto gold pickup hacks that are in every mod
• Update multiplayer support to current Battle.net standards
• Create an awful lot of new 3D art assets
• Add in modern lighting effects and other graphical flourishes
• Implement the toggle between old and new graphics
• Port the game for the first time to consoles
• Some nice UI tweaks

All of these are tasks that the current teams (yes, plural) already on the project have experience with between working on Diablo III and the similarly upgraded to Starcraft: Remastered.

And even if they did need help to make the release deadline of later this year, they could have just come in as an assisting studio (as happens for nearly all AAA games anyway) instead of being killed and absorbed. It also suggests that the deadline was unrealistic if doing this was necessary to meet it. And we all know what happened the last time Blizzard wanted a remake with an unrealistic deadline. And by all accounts, the timetable for Diablo II: Resurrected is even tighter.

But perhaps it will not be in as dire straits as Warcraft 3: Reforged, as all the changes are being built on top of the original code base. While that should be good news for pure preservation, it also means we’re not likely to see fixes for established bugs and other systemic flaws.

I, for one, would have enjoyed further expansion on a game I had already played the heck out of. But I’m not sure I want to drop $40 for a bunch of enhancements that don’t really reach beyond “nice to have” when I can load up and play the original game from my Battle.Net account at any time for free.

---

Kit Kat of the week:

Tut tut! You’ll have to wait until Saturday.