Despite the poor reception of Warcraft 3: Reforged in 2020, many gamers were still highly anticipating the release of Blizzard’s Diablo 2: Resurrected in September. The remaster features the same gameplay as the original and was supposed to provide only quality-of-life, visual, and audio upgrades. Unfortunately for many people, Diablo 2: Resurrected has been beset with server connection issues, crashes, and character deletions.
Although critics rated the game well overall, the user score on Metacritic tells a different story. Diablo 2: Resurrected began being review bombed almost immediately after launch, and the game currently sits at an average user rating of 4.5 across all platforms. Blizzard has been regularly releasing hotfixes and has even shut down servers for emergency maintenance, but in many cases players reported that the game's issues were subsequently worse.
Now, nearly three weeks after launch, the problems with Diablo 2: Resurrected persist, with the latest being that some players couldn’t even log into the game. The issue has now supposedly been resolved, according to Blizzard’s customer service Twitter account. However, an almost identical tweet was posted on October 10 as well, and clearly the login problems were not fixed then. Over the weekend, the game experienced repeated outages and required emergency maintenance, and now the Diablo subreddit and Blizzard's social media are filled with players frustrated at their inability to enjoy the game without constant obstacles.
When Diablo 2: Resurrected released, many players were not even able to play the game for several days because it would crash immediately upon launch due to an AVX issue, while others could get into the game but could not join lobbies. Another consistent issue prevented some Diablo 2: Resurrected players from accessing existing characters or creating new ones. After exiting the game, characters would disappear from the selection screen, and trying to recreate that character would result in a “character is already in a game” message. Others would log in, only to find that they had lost hours of progress. The temporary solution, according to Blizzard, was to not have online and offline characters with the same name.
Outside of these major problems, players were also frequently encountering bugs like abilities not working correctly, being unable to see or type in chat, and minimaps stacking on top of one another or not updating in new locations. And while some of the maintenance performed by Blizzard is live, meaning people can continue to play while it happens, it may result in disconnects and a generally unreliable gameplay experience.
Diablo 2: Resurrected is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.