Diablo summoned onto GOG
Go to hell
Blizzard's seminal 1997 action-RPG Diablo has risen again, this time with a re-release on GOG. Diablo had so far only been sold in boxes, coming as actual physical items you need to touch rather than pure electricity coursing through your taps, and Blizzard stopped manufacturing it long ago so finding the game has been difficult/expensive/of dubious legality. Now here it is, up on GOG, in both a "vanilla" version with fixed Battle.net multiplayer and a fancified edition with resolution upscaling. Some classic Warcraft will follow too.
Diablo is the game which sold a million replacement mice and led to the discovery of a malady doctors call "clicker's elbow". It's a click-click-clacky fantasy action-RPG about going deeper and deeper into the dungeons beneath a doomed village, whacking monsters to get bigger weapons to whack monsters harder to ultimately kill some manner of satan who's up to no good.
I best remember Diablo as "the game which gave us Diablo II" but I know many still cherish it and it has been literal decades, so maybe a revisit will change my mind.
GOG's collab with Blizzard has seen them not only re-release Diablo in its ye olde 20fps form (with online Battle.net multiplayer fixed) but also whack together a fancified version. They say this is "tuned for today's gaming PCs, which includes out-of-the-box Windows 10 compatibility, a host of bug fixes and high-resolution support." In short, it should be less of a butt.
Diablo is available on GOG for £7.89/$9.99. Yes, Blizzard may have their own digital store with its own client, but this is only on GOG right now.
"We were bummed that these iconic games weren't available to our players, so we're very happy to work with the crew at GOG.com to rectify that," Blizzard VP Rob Bridenbecker said in today's announcement. "This has been a long time coming and we hope our players will be excited to jump back into these classic titles."
Blizzard mention they plan to release more of their olde games on GOG, including Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II. They're currently remastering Warcraft III, expecting to release it this year, having recently done the same to StarCraft.
As for Diablo IV, ah, it's taking its time.
