Now you can play Diablo 2 in StarCraft 2’s Arcade

One of the things I find continuously fascinating about fandom is how far particular fans will go for the things they love.

This is an example.

I like to think I’m willing to do more than most, but the idea of sitting down with StarCraft 2 and painstakingly recreating Diablo 2 using its game editor is well outside my wheelhouse. Not so for egod123, who is actively engaged in exactly that labor, creating a mod called The Curse of Tristram. He’s been at it since 2014. Four years. He’s spent four years working to create a StarCraft 2 mod that will allow you to play Diablo 2 inside the newer engine.

I’m going to be up front — I really don’t see the need for this. If you want an updated Diablo game, we have one of those. But I get that some players just love Diablo 2 and hopefully this will allow them to go back and play it in a graphically updated way if that’s what they want. The fact that it’ll basically be a mod for StarCraft 2 (which is now free to play, and which itself often faces unkind comparisons to its predecessor in much the way that Diablo 3 does with Diablo 2) lends a bit of a twist to the whole proceeding for me. But he’s also working on  entirely new game modes for the classic action RPG, which as a reminder for us all came out in 2000. Egod123’s version will add something called world events that sound a little like the Adventure Mode from Diablo 3 to me, but which might be something else entirely.

Just the sheer amount of dedication is something worth seeing — there’s a video up announcing the PTR for the mod which shows some of the gameplay — and I have to admit it manages to look faithful to the original while also boasting StarCraft 2’s impressive graphics. I guess if Blizzard’s not going to do something like this (and considering we saw a remaster of StarCraft recently, I wouldn’t put it past them) then it was inevitable someone else would.

You can try The Curse of Tristram right now by firing up StarCraft 2 and venturing into the Arcade. The Curse of Tristram is currently in testing, but it’s worth checking out even in this not-quite-finished state.