Diablo II HD

I will never forget the first time I came across the butcher in Diablo 1, and how it scared the absolute shit out of me as a kid. It was my first pirated game, a burnt copy of Diablo 1 I got from a neighbour down the road on a lime green CD ROM.

Because of how much fun this deceptively simple style of mouse breaking gameplay was, I made sure to ask for the Diablo II battlechest for my birthday the next year. D2 took everything good from D1 and amped it the fuck up. An absolutley amazing single player experience thay still holds up SO well today.

Except the resolution. Holy moly this game does not look good forced in 800x600 on a 1080p display. So I conducted yet another mad scientist experiment to bring it into the modern era and eschew the disgusting cash grab that is a buggy and unplayable mess titled Resurecrion.

This post has taken an extremley long time to get out the door, partially because the steps required SO GODDAMN MANY trials in order to narrow down exactly what is required to get this working. I would make a bit of progress then put it down for months hecause it would shit me to tears so much.

But the onus for getting this finally completed was the release of Diablo 4. There is something very, very wrong with the way a single player game has been morphed into a quasi MMO type experience. There is zero good reason for permament online to be a thing in a SINGLE PLAYER EXPERIENCE. There is no need for anti cheat to be running when I am playing against MYSELF. Fuck you, if I want to hook cheat engine up to revert my XP because I dont like my build, thats MY FUCKING BUSINESS.

I am sure there are positive things to say about D4. I dont know what they are and I dont care to find out. Especially since I can have what I can say is going to be a more fun experience by shooting fireballs across the damn map like some medieval sniper in a game that is nearly a quarter of a century old. Once again, I implore you to read my previous diatribe on why gaming was objectively better in the past.

“But my diablo 2 doesnt look like that!” you, my ficticious reader cries. No, out of the box it wont. Here is a simple series of steps to acheive this. Much like the Diablo on linux project, this entire series of steps has been documented either literallt nowhere on the entire interner or just nowhere I found. So ONCE AGAIN I have been forced to conduct these experiments manually my damn self.

HOW TO RUN DIABLO 2 IN 1080P

• install original d2, single player only

• run the d3d test and select directdraw

• then upgrade the installation to full

• then run lotd expansion

• then upgrade expansion to full

• upgrade using patch in iso folder (this is a 1.12 patch, the 1.13 will not run)

• attach expansion iso

• then install plugy

• download multires (https://www.moddb.com/games/diablo-2/downloads/d2multires-version-102), the version with 4 files from the dev, not the 2 file one from reddit

• put files from zip into d2 folder

• edit plugy.ini
• Find this line “ DllToLoad= “ and replace it with “ DllToLoad=D2MultiRes.dll “

• Also this line “ NBPlayersByDefault=1 “ and replace it with “ NBPlayersByDefault=0 “

• create a shortcut that points to the plugy exe and add the -w flag to the target. if do not do this and run the game directly full screen, for some reason it has insane screen tearing. like literally unplayable.

• run borderless gaming to remove the windowing

It is important to note that doing any of these in a different order will lead to different results. I do not know why we need to istall in the order specified, all I know is if you deviate, it will not work.

I have also heard the butcher is back in D4 as a random event. This rubs me the wrong way. In terms of lore, my hero went to hell and back (LITERALLY) to chop the butcher in D1, and was driven mad in the process which we learn in D2. Which was a natural evolution for the character; theres no retconning, he ingested the soulstone in the final clip of D1.

I think thats one of my other massive issues with franchises nowdays; retcons galore in order to rewrite the story to fit your new, shit narrative.

And they ALWAYS ARE shit narratives. Nothing has ever been made better by rewriting the history and making us the viewer/player/reader realise we have wasted our time consuming the storyline that is now inconsequential and meaningless. None of these rewritten stories can ever stand on their own two feet either. Tokyo Drift for instance, is a perfect microcosm that can and could exist on its own without being propped up by the sequels and rewrites. Fast 9, however, is nothing. It cannot exist in a vacuum, and as such is a shit narrative. Diablo 2 could easily exist without any of the Tristram callbacks. They are nice and give CLOSURE to the question of “what happened after i finished the game?” but are not strictly required for D2 to exist as a narrative piece. The dark wanderer could simply be a crypt raider who happened to steal the soulstone, and the story would carry on essentially the fucking same.

D4, needs propping up. It does not exist on its own and CANNOT, due to the insane retconning that occurred in 3. The entire lore has been changed so much that the dark wanderer is now king leorics son. No, you were only ever just a random traveller. And guess what? It scrubs and wipes the trials of D2 as well. Andarial and Lilith are both back. They were vanquished. Leave them dead and move the fuck on. Han didnt need to come back and these half naked demons didnt need to either.

You ever wonder why I spend so much time configuring old games? Look at the current state of media. We have movies released that are explicitly part of a trilogy in their own section of their own series (both the new spiderman and fast 10 ONLY exist to take us to the next film; they have no concrete conclusion of their own), day 0/day 1 patching; nothing is ever a complete end to end product that fucking WORKS like it used to be.

I am burnt the fuck out and just want to play a good game in fucking peace.