Looking at D2R really makes me wish someone would remake Fallout 1 and 2 in the same fashion. That would be a day one buy for me.
It makes me wonder why they haven't. Only explanation I can think of is that the rights to those titles in particular are in some sort of rights limbo, in much the same way the No One Lives Forever franchise is.
As far as I understand everything Fallout belongs to Beth. IIRC they even pushed update few years ago when classic Fallout games were pulled from GOG and then returned back which replaced Interpaly with Bethesda logo. I guess Beth had zero interest in older games as they were developing their own. But now since Microsoft owns Zenimax I just hope they would give it a AoE DE treatment. It's actually kinda funny. Half-Life remade on modern Source engine (Black Mesa), AoE II DE, and now watching D2R gameplay with new coat of paint makes it look so fresh. These 20 year old games with a bit of care and work play so good even to this day... Or maybe it's nostalgia kickin' in... Either way my attention has been piqued by D2R. I just wish it was available elsewhere as well, not only on Battle.net.
What's wrong with just using battle.net to grab it? You only have to have it running when playing the game.
Oh this battle.net online only crap brings back some nightmares. Back when D3 was launched, right a few days after, I was sent on an assignment in Africa. Needless to say I wasn't happy that D3 wouldn't work in offline mode as I knew what internet speeds I'd be on there. I really hope they won't do the same with this remake. I wasted many hours and in the end I just gave up and played it a couple months after the release when I got back home. I can't say how disappointed I was as I had been looking forward to it for a very long time. Of course, after playing the game, I was disappointed for other reasons
Don't like creating useless accounts (even throwaway ones) and installing useless software on my machine for just a single game. Just my preference
They said it has offline play. Perhaps there's some nuance there. I'm imagining there's no getting away from having to be online to at least acknowledge that it's a legit copy. (Or buy and download it in the first place)