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Too many developers and publishers abandon support of well-loved games — Sega plans to close down servers for Chromehounds in a few weeks and Gearbox is yet to fix Borderlands' game-crashing general protection fault error in the PC version. But just yesterday, Blizzard released a new patch for a nearly 10-year-old game — Diablo 2. Is there any reason to wonder how the company has held such goodwill among players?
From the patch notes:
– Players of Hell Difficulty Realm games are hereby warned once again, that a series of new and challenging tests await you! The answer lies within Diablo's Bosses, which span across the world from the Den of Evil to the Throne of Destruction…
– Fixed an item dupe bug.
– Video improvements for Intel Mac machines with OS 10.5 or greater.
– Uber Mephisto now checks for both Uber Baal and Uber Diablo to be killed before spawning summoned minions (Before he would only check for Uber Baal).
– The game will no longer stop and then restart the game music after the window loses and then regains focus.
– Fixed an issue where the game window would minimize when running in windowed mode when it lost focus.
– Fixed an issue where the game window wouldn't center properly when it was created.
– Respecialization is now possible! Completing the 'Den of Evil' quest will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in Hell difficulty.
– Increased the drop rate of high runes.
– Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users).
We'd all love to see more developers continue to support their games as Blizzard does. After all, older games are as much a part of our culture as newer ones. Who wasn't hoping the game-breaking bugs in Might and Magic 9 would be fixed, or that Microprose would have corrected the research tree bugs in X-Com: Terror from the Deep, which leave the game unwinnable? What about the horribly broken state in which Sierra On-Line left Outpost?
Hopefully developers have taken notice of what Blizzard has done and will follow suit with their own games. We can dream, can't we?