Sounds like Diablo II Remastered is losing local connections

Sounds like people are mad about this! It sounds like if you have someone over at your house you will not be able to make a direct local connection with them, despite the fact that it was a promised feature earlier this year:

"You can still connect locally through TCP IP if you want to!" Fergusson said. "That was there in D2. It'll be there in D2R. We've really focused on making sure that if there's something about the core experience you loved, we're bringing that over. But we do get a lot of benefits from being on a more secure platform."

Just browsing around it sure seems like people are pissed about this, but I have to imagine that's more just because of a broken promise than actual functionality being lost. I can't imagine there will be a ton of LAN parties without an external connection to Battle.net to set up private lobbies, but still - it's a feature that was being promised and has now been removed, which is bad. And I can't really buy their explanation of it as a "security risk" aside from maybe allowing some hacking/modding, but I'm no network engineer.

The more I think about Diablo II the less I think I'm super interested in playing a remaster of it? It's one of my all-time favorite games but I think replaying it would either leave me doing Meph runs all night again or just sully some perfectly fine memories of the summer I lost to the game. But we'll find out soon, I guess.

I don't think I can support Blizzard/Activision in any way right now regardless of how good this remaster is.

I don't even understand why Blizzard keeps making these kind of unforced errors. If there's a 1% possibility that you can't / it doesn't make sense for a game in 2021 to have the exact same features as the OG game from 98, why would you make such claims to the outside world? Is this some risk-calculation where it's more profitable to be able to say 'it'll be the game as you remember it!' when you have millions of eyeballs on your product, that it doesn't matter if you have to backtrack on a feature in front of 100k eyeballs later?

I'm sure that there are risks involved by making players directly connect through TCP IP, but hasn't that always been the nature of a direct connection between players? If you don't want to have that kind of connection between players online, then why does it take until late in the remaster process to realize that you don't want to support that feature any longer?

I think the real reason people are speculating on them removing TCP IP is that it basically allows for people to play multiplayer if they've pirated the game and this is just Blizzard's way of making sure pirates can only play Singleplayer since Multiplayer is always-online.

Yeah, that too, I guess! I unsubbed from WoW and I think they'll have to do a lot of house cleaning before I can buy something from them again. Oh well, there's always Path of Exile!