While Blizzard hasn’t officially acknowledged that they’re currently working away on the remake for Diablo II, evidence to the contrary is blatantly obvious. But, until they finally announce the remake, fans have the unofficial fan remake to look forward to, which now has an official launch date.
“The Curse of Tristram”, which has been in the works for several years now, has been given a final polish and is available now on Battle.net. “With the upcoming Diablo II: Resurrected announcement in a couple of days by Blizzard (rumour), we decided to polish and release an unfinished version of The Curse of Tristram on Battle.net this weekend,” stated modder Egod123 in a YouTube video. “This version is definitive and final and includes everything we made so far.”
The Curse of Tristram is a fan remake of Diablo II‘s Act 1 using the Starcraft 2 engine, which you can find in its Arcade. Featuring new items to farm, fresh economies to master, the fan remake can be played with up to four friends on Normal, Nightmare, and Hell difficulties. The dev team still holds weekly events to keep things fresh.
As for the reasoning behind releasing the remake when there’s still so much more of the game to do, Egod123 explains that it’s simply time to move on. Not only is the official remake expected, but the Starcraft 2 engine has become difficult to work with, given the amount of code required to bring Diablo II over to the engine. The team does plan to keep the project updated with bug fixes, but that’ll likely be it.
“It was an incredible adventure, and we’ve decided to move on and officially become indie devs by learning Unreal Engine 4 and 5 with all the experience acquired from this awesome project.”
Meanwhile, Diablo fans also have Diablo IV to look forward to, which is currently in development for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.