We wanted to build a really strong foundation before we started talking about the third and fourth floors on this building. If we misstepped on what the core game was, anything else we were doing would have been kind of meaningless. We definitely have lots of ideas, but right now we're waiting to make sure that we get the core game right. We'll have to see once the game goes live what we do about new runewords, new items, rebalancing, things like that.
Diablo 2: Resurrected is not an iteration on the franchise. It's the game we all remember, brought into the current era where we're no longer worried about someone else using the phone line while we play with friends.
When asked about modernizing the visuals of the game and some of the issues it created elsewhere in the game, Bukowski said the art team had a rule that kept 70% of the original feel with 30% leeway to make changes. There was a struggle to balance the darkness of the game with modern realism and global illumination. Bukowski explains:
There was one point in time where we went even further from a lighting standpoint. The graphics team really wanted to look at how to do some really sophisticated global illumination, for example. And it was clear that if we enabled that, light was going to bounce in too many places, and we were going to end up with a game where the visibility was going to be different from the original. And that's something we absolutely could not have.
