By [ad_1]
Diablo 2: Resurrected is quite good, as you’d expect—it’s a redo of one of the greatest action-RPGs of all time, after all. But its launch hasn’t been entirely smooth, as players have struggled with disappearing characters, being locked out of their games, or a simple refusal of the game to start at all.
Blizzard rolled out what it expected to be a permanent fix for the disappearing characters problem last week, while the support team worked to unlock trapped characters, a process that seems to have taken longer than the “few hours” originally expected. The issue appears to be largely wrapped up now, based on the falloff of complaints in this thread.
However, a separate AVX issue, also reported last week, will take a little longer to fix. AVX—Advanced Vector Extensions, to their friends—are extensions of the x86 instruction set architecture that debuted in early 2011 on Intel Sandy Bridge chips, and later that year on AMD’s Bulldozer. Wikipedia has a crash-course explanation if you’re interested, although even that is punishingly technical, but the relevant point is that AVX has been around for a long time now, and is not especially complicated or exotic. It’s also apparently resulted in some confusion over what hardware can and cannot run Diablo 2: Resurrected.
The minimum supported CPU in the Diablo 2: Resurrected system requirements is listed as an Intel Core i3-3250 or AMD FX-4350, both of which support the AVX instruction set. Naturally, some players on lower-end hardware decided to take a run at it anyway, which really isn’t unreasonable given that the remastered game uses the same “underlying game engine” from 20 years ago. And it worked—for a while.
“While CPUs without AVX are below our minimum spec, we want to try to ensure as many people as possible can play,” community manager PezRadar explained. “Setups without AVX were working in Beta. In optimizing the game, we inadvertently included the need for AVX for launch. QA is going to spend another few days of testing across all of these scenarios and setups in an effort to ensure we are not impacting existing players.”
The good news is that the development team thinks it has a potential fix for the issue, but it “goes beyond AVX specifically,” PezRadar said, and that means it’s going to take awhile to ensure that it doesn’t end up making things worse: “The fix could potentially affect all users, even those outside of not having AVX support, so we are wanting to make sure we do proper testing.”
The testing is expected to take a few days—Blizzard will update the thread when it has more information. For players who don’t want to wait for a fix that’s not guaranteed to help them, PezRadar recommended requesting a refund and then trying again after it’s been updated.
[ad_2]
