[ch0wn]

Reading option one made me quite anxious. Having to backport a virtually infinite number of bugfixes and support for new hardware features from over 12 years of constant development sounds like a perfect way to burn out developers. I'm glad they went for the clearly more sustainable option of adopting the old data to their new client infrastructure.

[mattmanser]

It will mean people will find loads of things that won't be the same though.

Take balance. I'd be willing to bet they've done loads of bug fixes on unintended consequences of spells. So the Frostbolt of the new system might actually do a different amount of damage and slow than the Frostbolt of 1.12, once the data's been transformed.

So all the classes will probably be slightly different to how they were in 1.12 and combos that worked back then might no longer work now. Some classes might now be OP that weren't and vice-versa. Monsters that were weak might suddenly become strong, and monsters that were hard might suddenly become really easy.

Not that I'm saying it's the wrong solution, I think it's realistically the best one available to them. But it will probably result in a different gameplay experience rather than, say, just updating the visuals. How different won't be clear till later.

[4ndr3vv]

Don't think so. From what the article says, the majority of game defining data will remain the same, albeit modified to fit the new schema. Frostbolt will still be the same power, etc. The changes are to the global game infrastructure and how it interprets these data, so there will be some stuff that used to work that likely won't work now (eg wall walking) and things that were possible (speed hacking, water walking) that won't be possible now.