Research Archive

These past few days I noticed a lot of international IPs visiting my site. I found it strange. It went on for two days, and only after looking into it did I find out that a blogger had cited my video and my site on Youtube. I am grateful to him for helping more people learn about my work.

So you are all real foreign use…

My mod has reworked essentially every Act IV map. The level topology was re-routed so Act IV's length matches the other acts, while also restoring what the designers originally intended.

Draft as shown; still tentative.

1. Enable Act IV's cut lighting system.

The current Act IV lighting is dropped. Act IV's sky becom…

Act IV has a hidden mechanic that was never exposed to players. Anyone curious has probably noticed that the roof of the Pandemonium Fortress is always oddly coloured, often with visible flicker and sudden jumps — that is the key clue that leads to this whole mechanism.

Diablo II once had affixes that granted stats base…

In Diablo II, the Guild Hall was a private territory stored permanently on Battle.net. Members could chat, trade and gather there, and by dropping gold into the "Steeg Stone" they could grow the initial cottage into a hall, and eventually a castle.

The system was cancelled before release; after Lord of Destruction it ha…

Battle.net in Diablo II was never meant to be only about quest games. Blizzard North had planned three parallel entry points: Quests, Arena and Guild Halls. The Arena came with its own maps, character templates, scoring rules and several match types — a complete standalone PvP / PvPvE mode, far more elaborate than play…

Here is a genuinely obscure piece of trivia: in the game, Health Shrines, Mana Shrines and Gem Shrines show up far more often than the rest.

That is because three cut shrines were replaced by them.

They are:

• Health Exchange 生命交換神殿
• Mana Exchange 法力交換神殿
• Shrine of Enirhs 颠倒神殿

What they were meant to do:

Health Exchange:

• Immediate…

The Reliquary is a mod dedicated to restoring the complete version of Diablo II that Blizzard North intended. It is not a heavily reimagined mod: the goal is to present and polish this classic in its most genuine, complete form.

Research into the game data has turned up a great deal: early design plans and features stil…

This is another documentation piece. diabloii.net was invited to visit Blizzard North in December 1999, where they got a look at the game in development and left behind precious records of the Arena and the Guild Halls. This article was translated by DeepSeek and proofread by me.

Read it with care as well: some of what …

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I. Battle.net Town

1. Chapter epigraphs — three lines that set the tone

This chapter opens with three epigraphs that pin down the core tension of the Battle.net chat room / town design:

"We weren't exactly sure how it would work, but basically we wanted to skip the chat room and make a real environment."

— Dave Brevik, …