Are you sure the in-game assets were created from hi-def versions rather than just being pixel art?
They said "It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They'd have to make them from scratch."
I can't think of any other way of interpreting it.
Re:OpenDiablo2
by unicornfinder on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @07:55AM
(#23626832)
To be fair it wouldn't surprise me - this sort of thing was pretty common back then. You'd create high def 3D models and then render 2D sprites etc from them.
That’s exactly what the article says.
Can you point to where? I can't find it, and a quick search for "resolution", "high", "quality", "def" turned up nothing. They say they lost the art assets but a bunch of pixel art tilemaps would fit that description, especially if they were composited down during the build process.
I think the only thing they really lost are the hi-def assets from which the lower-def ingame assets were created.