Blizzard’s games tend to have an impressive shelf life; with some still played despite being over a decade old. The company knows this and has announced new patches for Diablo II and Warcraft III.
Neither patch introduces anything new to the games, but are instead designed to introduce better compatibility with newer operating systems. Diablo II is 16 years old this year, and the 1.14a patch will fix stability issues with Windows 10 and a new installer for Mac OS X. Blizzard has also said that it is working on a future patch that will improve cheat detection and hack-prevention capabilities.
The contents of the 1.27 patch for Warcraft III (which is only 12 years old) is currently unknown. Interestingly, Blizzard’s announcement targeted the Chinese community. Robert Bridenbecker, the lead developer for Blizzard’s “classic games” group, addressed players with a YouTube video specifically subtitled in Chinese and said that the company is working on more patches for the future.
These announcements come several months after Blizzard posted a recruitment notice for developers to work on its old games. Most games are lucky to receive updates and fixes a couple of years after being released, and the fact that Blizzard is still working on games older than some of its playerbase is extremely impressive.
[Source: Battle.net, Back2Warcraft (YouTube)]
