Diablo 2 is already a game you could lose thousands of hours to, but what if you could truly lose yourself in the world via VR? Well, a modder found a way to translate the isometric ARPG to a first-person VR game.
Reddit user fantasticauthor2736 created the mod, using an existing 3D conversion mod, FlatVR and BodyWalk. While the mod itself hasn’t been published quite yet, there are a few videos of it in action, and while it doesn’t look like a fully polished VR game yet, it does seem like a cool way to play the game.
All of the videos posted so far, though, have been in the first couple zones of Diablo 2, and while they haven’t shown any particularly intense combat so far, it’s easy to see how it works in theory. You just point your motion controller at an enemy and shoot fireballs at them. Easy enough.
The modder was also able to redesign the UI a bit, too. They moved the inventory to the belt, but the rest of the UI has been moved to the left wrist, where you can see health, mana and the toolbar. And, if you want to pull up the map, it looks like you just summon it as an orb that you hold in your hand. That’s less ideal than the overlay map in the standard game, but I can imagine that’d make it hard to actually play in VR.
On the surface, it’s hard to imagine how this even works, but it builds on the mod D2R-3D by emmericp, which just gives Diablo 2 some more robust camera controls. You see, while most people will see Diablo 2 as a 2D isometric game, it’s actually all 3D. As emmericp explains in a YouTube video, all the assets necessary for a 3D view of Diablo 2 Resurrected are already in the game, it’s just a matter of rendering it from the right point of view. Just keep in mind, that in the process of doing this, you won’t be able to play the game without it crashing after about a minute.
To do that, he had to change the way projectiles were calculated, along with lighting and shadow effects to work properly when you’re zoomed in. But once all the math is out of the way, there are still some bugs, like item names floating high in the sky, and targeting simply not working with mouse and keyboard.
The biggest problem, though, is that the D2R-3D mod will flag Blizzard’s file integrity checker, which will crash the game after about a minute of playing it. He does explain that there is a workaround, but it involves using programs that could theoretically allow players to cheat, so he doesn’t detail those.
Fantasticauthor2736’s mod, then, takes the D2R-3D mod and then further converts it to a VR game, using FlatVR, and then uses BodyWalk to let you use your body’s movement to control your character’s movement. But, even when the mod is released, it will likely have the same restrictions as D2R-3D, in that it’ll likely crash the game after about a minute. After all, Diablo 2: Resurrected does require an online connection, and because these mods change the code in the game, there’s no way to get around a crash without downloading sketchy software.
Still, it’s one of the coolest Diablo 2 mods I’ve seen, and just makes me want a Diablo game that I can play on the Steam Frame. Diablo 2 has also been on the top of people’s minds as we move towards Diablo 5. Game Director Joe Shely has promised a return to more methodical gameplay made famous by Diablo 2, and Path of Exile’s Chris Wilson is hopeful that Blizzard’s next ARPG will take more inspiration from the second game, as well.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
