Diablo 2: Resurrected recently concluded its first technical alpha and as expected, players were quickly able to discover a glitch to duplicate their items. That however will change once the final release happens.
Speaking with PCGamesN in a recent interview, principal designer Rob Gallerani pointed out that the technical alpha was mainly an offline experience. Hence, players were saving their characters offline and not on the Battle.net servers, which opens up a lot of room for those character files to be tweaked.
“When your character is saved offline, there’s a lot players can do to that save,” said Gallerani. “Right now, we’re focusing most of our efforts on the Battle.net saved characters and preventing duping there because it ruins the economy for lots of players.
There’s no Soulbound, there’s no personal loot. And on top of that, unfortunately, a common way that people dupe items is by crashing servers, so we want to make the best experience for all players.”
The Diablo franchise has seen players finding new ways to duplicate their items since the beginning. Diablo 2: Resurrected featuring item trading hence gives players all the more reason to duplicate powerful items for trade without the risk of losing something valuable. This “Item Duping” process however ruins the balance of the game and developer Vicarious Visions is fully aware.
Diablo 2: Resurrected will be integrated with Battle.net servers at release, making it easier for the developer to stop players from loading any save files that have been changed offline. Gallerani though added that players can still find other ways to reach their item-duping goals and as such, Vicarious Visions will be “actively monitoring” the situation.
Something worth noting is that the high-quality remaster will allow players to import their old Diablo 2 save files as well. Whether they will clash with the new anti-item duping firewalls remains to be seen.
Diablo 2: Resurrected will be releasing somewhere in late 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
