Anyone want higher res in Diablo 2?

[Sanjuro Makabe]

Anyone think that blizzard should release a patch that allows higher resolutions for Diablo 2? I mean, the game is great!, and I understand that gameplay is good enough to make the player forget about the resolution problem. But don't you guys think that Diablo 2 should deserve a resolution higher than 640x480? 800x600 would be a little bit better, but it would be optimal to have 1024x768. We should all send an email requesting such a patch. Anyone think this is a good idea? Thx.

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Sanjuro Makabe

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[Nuno]

I think Diablo2 is using pre-rendered scenes, so if they were rendered at 640x480, there is no way to display it at an higher res (unless you like the "pixelated" effect)

[Paulr]

Yup,
That's the problem.
Diablo II is totally pre-rendered.
A patch wouldn't be enough to update the resolution.
It would require every single character and scene to be re-drawn.
They would literally have to release the whole game again.
Some reoprts from about 6 months ago (You know, just around the time D2 was supposed to be released last time) by some magazines said the game was running in 800x600.
They might just have meant BattleNet was running in this res (which it does) or maybe it did run at 800x600 at one time, but was becoming too big to fit on CD's.
My guess as to why 640x480 was choosen is the fact that most of the characters and scenes were drawn some 2 years ago.
Lets be honest nothing in this game really says 'I'm a game that was released in the year 2000'
Writing a game with only the Glide API in mind is a good indication of this.
It would have been too much work to re-draw them later.
Diablo in anything higher than 640x480 will never happen until Diablo III.
Hope fully third time around they wont make the same mistakes they made with D2.

[Jon P. Inghram]

No, NO NONONONONONO!!! I don't want anything more than 640x480! Why you ask? Because a full install is a little more than 1500 megs! If they added more detailed graphics I'd be forced to get a bigger harddrive. :-)

[ahartman]

You gotta be kidding me. A 1.5 gig game? Even with today's hard drives, that's just plain silly.

[Frankfurt]

It is true that the full install is 1.5 GB's, but there are other install sizes

Single Player only is 500 MB
add Multiplayer, it goes to 900 MB
then the full install is 1.5GB

I have the 1.5 GB install, i think its worth it so that you dont have to do any CD swapping

Frankfurt

[DosFreak]

DVD's would be 'worth it' so ya don't have to do any disc swapping.

[Sir Hitech]

Is the graphics in full release Diablo II better than the BattleNet Stress Test version? I hope so, or I am going to sit this one out. My first impression when I log on the beta game was: "Man, this graphic blows". It was all blocky and jagged, more like 320X240! 640X480 I can handle, becasue I played StarCraft for two years and I just enjoy it to the fullest. Perhaps maybe it didn't have the optimized video drivers?

[Sir Hitech]

Never mind! I got the answer from another thread.. I guess when a game comes out after a lengthy development, it just not going to state-of-the-art anymore. However, if it's as good as Starcraft in gameplaying, I will play it..

[ObiBen]

Diablo II rocks. Yeah, I wish the resolution would be at 800x600 - that's my optimal choice! Anyway, it's still fun! See you all on B.Net!

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Regards,

Ben

Config: Abit BE6-II r1, P3 500E@700, 128MB Toshiba PC133 RAM (CAS2), SB Live!, 3Com 3C905CTX 10/100, IBM 13.5 GXP IDE HD, Yamaha 4416S writer, Toshiba SM1212 DVD, Matrox G400MAX (Yeah!), Viewsonic PS790 and E771, Win98SE

[CactusJack]

Myself, I love the eye candy of 1024X768 (or better), but the gameplay is even more important. Hi-res crap is still crap, I just hope they spent all the time adding depth to the game, because the first Diablo was okay for gameplay, but really impressed with its graphics for the time. It seems as though Blizzard has turned it the other way for this release. Hope its gameplay is as innovative as its graphics were first time around.

[impact]

Okay, it is 640x480, but it's not that bad. The gameplay is very entertaining. Plus there are few cool effects like parallax scrolling that make the movement look realistic. The only problem is that the characters aren't as extremely detailed as they could be. But there's a lot of things that I wanted in Diablo I.

I like the game.

[Surfwienix]

what i found more ugly than the 640res is the colour depth of only 8 bits (256 colours) !!!

the life/mana spheres look uglier than in diablo I !!!

[impact]

That depends on your gamma settings. I had to upgrade from 5.55 drivers to 6.10 to get the gamma correction in DII working properly.