"The background could be fancy cushions, it may be piles of skulls, it might be sand dunes, but it is actually only a horizontal image," Rob Gallerani clarifies. "When you drop a sword, that's a 2D sprite. It's only a horizontal sprite and it sits on the top and you'll see it. As soon as we have a 3D sword resting on 3D skulls and tough things, we can't just have it be Diablo 2 Items there since it would clip through all those items. So we need to be certain it renders on a pass that's in addition to those things. There is a good deal of loose ends that all need to be accounted for if you are bringing a 2D sprite into a 3D world."

And it's that aspect, having the 2D world drive the 3D coating that ensures that the team preserves the match as is. Even with incorporating an impressive visual makeover, control support, along with a modern widescreen presentation that supports 4K TVs and ultrawide PC monitors, it's the same Diablo II that it has ever been.

"Everything has been positionally driven, statistics wise, or by that same 25 frames-per-second-logic cycle," Rob continues. "The simulation on top of it, divorced from that, we can have an uncapped frame-rate for animation and other things. That's why it's one-to-one, even though it's really just one and you're getting to see this other layer at the top."

Where does the process begin? If you were to take an existing 2D match and all of its resources and not just recreate the visuals in 3D but retain the core code and create that operate across multiple platforms and input methods -- there would naturally be a to-do list. If the game was twenty five years old, that to-do list likely includes finding anything and everything related to the game's development.

"We've got a manufacturer, Matthew Cederquist, along with also my fellow designer Andre Abrahamian, they went to Buy Diablo 2 Resurrected Items all of the physical warehouses appearing through filing cabinets," Rob Gallerani recalls. "People actually had filing cabinets at any point in their life. They would find folders on drives that were only called,'We should probably back this up at some point'. Old marketing and advertising materials. It wasn't simple, but it was very exciting."