It sounds like the long-rumoured remaster might actually be happening. According to a leaker with a reliable track record when it comes to Blizzard-related news, Activision has called on Vicarious Visions to handle development duties on the project. This is the same studio that put together the delightful back in 2017.

This new claim comes directly from French publication Actu Gaming (thanks, PC Gamer). The editor of Actu Gaming is the same person who drew our attention to Blizzcon 2019’s big announcements before they happened. Specifally, and . It’s fair to say they’ve established their credentials at this point.

Of course, while it would be to see a remaster, this news is kind of surprising. In an interview with GameSpot last year, Diablo creators Max Schaefer, Erich Schafer, and David Brevik revealed they lost the entire source code for . For those that are unsure of what this means, it would basically mean that remastering the game would involve starting from .

“Not just our code, but all of our assets,” Max Schaefer explained. “Irrevocably, fatally corrupted.”

“It’s all gone,” Erich added. “We were supposed to have a backup but neglected it. We spent a day or two in sheer panic. It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They’d have to make them from scratch.”

Realistically, then, it wouldn’t make any sense for Blizzard to ask a separate team to rebuild an entire game from nothing. Especially with an entire studio hard at work on , meaning anyone with an ounce of experience on the franchise would likely be devoted to the new game.

On the other hand, this a pretty reliable source. Could it be that Actu Gaming has gotten its wires crossed and that Vicarious Visions is working on separate remaster entirely? Perhaps. Could Activision have found some way to retrieve the source code of ? Probably not. We’ll just have to wait for official word before we get too excited.

For now then, it’s perhaps best to continue treating the remaster as a rumour. After all, we’ve got to look forward to in the meantime, and everything we’ve heard about the latest game so far sounds really rather promising.