Vicar visions reportedly introduced in Blizzard to work on Diablo 2 remake

Following the announcement of Vicarious Visions’ merger with Blizzard Entertainment, a new report says the studio has been brought in to Blizzard to work on the Diablo franchise, including a planned Diablo 2 remake, as reported by Bloomberg, Vicarious Visions. , the studio behind games such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, has been working with Blizzard since last year, though the announcement of its merger was only made today. hui, January 22.

Until 2020, the Diablo 2 remake was to be developed by Blizzard Team 1, which is located at its Irvine, California campus and was the group of choice to rework classic games. Its latest title, Warcraft III: Reforged, was not received positively and currently has 59 reviews on aggregate review site Metacritic, which also happens to be Blizzard’s lowest score to date. IGN gave Warcraft III: Reforged a 7/10, claiming that “it’s an uninspiring remaster, but Warcraft 3 itself is still a great game almost two decades later.”

Have you played Diablo II?

YESNO

Internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg place the game’s failures on “poor planning, poor communication, and rushed publication due to financial pressure from management, among other factors.” One example given is that after the game was revealed in November 2018, it started taking pre-orders for 2019 before notifying most of the development team of the release window.

Blizzard and Team 1 obviously didn’t want to make the same mistakes with the highly anticipated Diablo 2 remaster, and after a “post-mortem,” Blizzard ended up removing the remaster from the team and putting the division behind Diablo IV at orders. Vicarious Visions would also be working on this project, which is or was known as Diablo II: Resurrected.

In October 2020, Blizzard reorganized the entire division known as Team 1 and team members were given the opportunity to interview for other positions within the company. Those who couldn’t find a job were ultimately fired, while others opted to move to independent studios like Frost Giant Inc. and DreamHaven Inc., the latter of which was started by the co-founder and former CEO of Blizzard, Mike Morhaime.