One of this year’s strangest and most welcome spectacles was Blizzard surprise-launching a new expansion for Diablo 2. Well, technically, Reign of the Warlock is an expansion for the game’s painstakingly faithful remaster, Diablo 2: Resurrected. But it’s still the first new content for a classic game in 25 years. Fans were astonished and delighted.
But with a game like Diablo 2, and an audience like Diablo 2‘s, you can’t just drop some new content and walk away. There’s always work to be done. Today, Blizzard launches Ladder Season 14 for Resurrected and a patch making numerous balance changes to the new Warlock class. (In one instance, the developers have even decided to unfix a durability bug on the Echoing Strike skill because it “supported the intended fantasy of the skill.”)
To mark the occasion, Blizzard exclusively shared some player engagement stats with gamexplore. In its first month (from Feb. 11 through March 11), Reign of the Warlock was played for a total of 93.4 million hours, and players created around 1.92 million new Warlocks. (I’d love to know how many people bought the expansion and just created Barbarians; I bet it was more than zero.) Not bad for a game from the year 2000.
“I personally am extremely excited,” lead game producer Matthew Cederquist told gamexplore in a video call. “I think the team overall sort of knew that the passionate players were there, but seeing that scale within it was pretty thrilling,” he said. “Tons and tons of folks still play that 25-plus-year-old game.”
You might remember Cederquist from the Reign of the Warlock reveal on the Diablo 30th Anniversary Spotlight stream. He’s a guy in a baseball cap with an infectiously enthusiastic manner (everything is “overwhelmingly amazing” and “phenomenal”) and a strong Boston accent. A former World of Warcraft dev who moved on to roles stewarding Blizzard’s classic games, he’s now responsible for the whole Diablo legacy portfolio, including Diablo and Diablo 3 as well as Diablo 2.
But Cederquist wasn’t happy just being a steward. “I always knew that I wanted to do something more with Diablo 2, because there’s so many fans that were just screaming at the top of the mountain to give them something,” he said. He pitched an expansion for Diablo 2 to Blizzard’s leadership as a PR boost for the whole studio — “We can pull the sentiment lever, not just for Diablo but for Blizzard as a company,” he remembers arguing — and his team developed the Warlock class alongside the Diablo 4 team.
He was delighted to shadow-drop the expansion as a “surprise and delight” moment and see “people’s jaws drop for the team. We had it on the TVs here at work when we were doing it and it was just, like, ‘Are you kidding me?'” Cederquist maintains a fanboyish sense of unreality about it all. “Having it come from my brain to reality is out of this world.”
This being the Diablo community, though, the honeymoon was short-lived — in a good way, Cederquist assured me. “It was nice because players moved extremely quickly from, I can’t believe Diablo 2 has a new class, oh my God, to actually doing what players do best, which is digging into the game, testing builds, arguing about synergies, making build guides, and then preparing for the new ladder that came out with it.”
Cederquist attributes Diablo 2‘s longevity to original developer Blizzard North catching “lightning in a bottle,” but also to the game’s orneriness, which in a more modern design would have been smoothed away. Not every item in the game is amazing: “You find something, it plops on the ground, it has a green beam, guess what? It could be really bad,” Cederquist said. Diablo 2 “has a lot of engineering and design rough edges that make it special. It has friction, right?”
The success of Reign of the Warlock depended on honoring that design spirit. The team often found themselves winding back Warlock skills or itemization that didn’t feel authentic. “In this game, you could find an item that has stats that you know were made in 1999 and you’re like, ‘How is this real?’ So we kind of had to incorporate that into our itemization to say, don’t design the most polished experience,” Cederquist said. “One of the highest compliments, honestly, that I could hear or the team could hear, is this feels like it could have been hidden in D2 all along. It feels like the same exact thing from 1999.”
I asked if Blizzard would consider making more major additions to Diablo 2. Cederquist was circumspect, of course: “Let’s enjoy the moment, take some feedback, understand if there was anything to do, let’s enjoy Ladder Season 14,” he said. “We don’t have anything right now to talk about.”
Given how mindful he was of not straying too far from the original game’s spirit, where would he draw the line? Would Blizzard ever consider adding new story content? Again, Cederquist was cautious, but he left the door open a crack — a surprisingly wide crack.
“The way that I see it is a new hero, a new class is a new toy to play with. The sandbox has relatively been built for you, and we provide you with a new toy. Now, if there were to be anything in the future, for me personally, it would be maybe to add on to that sandbox. New toy for new sandbox to play in feels phenomenal to me. So that’s what I’m thinking in my brain,” he said.
You never know. It wouldn’t be the first unlikely thing to come from Cederquist’s brain to reality.
Diablo 2’s Warlock puts something truly new in a really old game
You can quibble about the cost of the expansion, but this is a unique achievement
