No, I'm not talking about Diablo 3.

No, I'm talking about one of the most iconic games out there, and one that I personally spent a lot of time with: Diablo 2. Version 1.14a has been a long time coming, and one wouldn't expect a game that released in June 29th, 2000 to get an update. But lo and behold, Classic (a Blizzard Developer) posted that they were releasing version 1.14a for Diablo 2 earlier in the day.

Honestly, I just wanted a reason to reference the Cow Level from Diablo 2. So here's a picture of it!

The updates has a couple of things in it. First of all, the update tackles the new problems introduced by modern operating systems, as users attempting to play on the OSX platform found that they really were having a rough time. Well, there's a new installer for that OS included in this patch, along with a focus on eliminating system/OS related glitches. In addition, unnamed improvements to the cheat detection system (along with hack prevention) were added. Classic says: "There's still work to be done, but we're making improvements every day. There is still a large Diablo II community to play and slay with us." It also sounds like that they are working to improve it in the future, specifically focusing on the modern platforms issue.

While it's not on the manual page via the Blizzard support page, it will be there in due time. And the servers for Diablo 2 went offline at 2 PM PDT for the patch, and it's expected to take 4 hours, although some users were not aware of that and took to the Blizzard General discussion forums. Many of them probably didn't expect a patch for a game that old. Sometimes, a company will surprise you.

Quick Take

Honestly, I applaud Blizzard for this. I think it's well past the time to expect updates for a game that released 15+ years ago, and it's the whole reason I grabbed this story. It's just something you don't see that often from the bigger companies in the industry. So well done Blizzard. You get a gold star.