Blizzard are looking to hire a senior software engineer who will be tasked with getting older titles working on modern system set-ups. The three specific titles mentioned are Diablo II, StarCraft and Warcraft III.
“Evolving operating systems, hardware, and online services have made [these games] more difficult to be experienced by their loyal followers or reaching a new generation,” the job ad (spotted by Blue’s News) reads. “We’re restoring them to glory”.
Some clues as to the specifics of this ‘restoration’ can be found in Blizzard’s list of responsibilities for the role.
Getting the back catalogue running on modern operating systems (much like the games released through GOG) looks to be the first priority. The second bullet-point, “Create conditions for experiences that look as good as they play”, hints at some kind of graphical improvements (or at least some cleaning up so that the games look good in higher resolutions).
“Curation of features new and old” suggests Blizzard might be open to including some new features in these older titles, and it also looks like they want to “Combat hacking to improve multiplayer”.
No doubt we’ll be hearing more about precisely what is planned with these older titles, and the scope of the restoration effort, at a later date.
