Modders Made First-Person Diablo, and It Almost Works

Two videos posted within eleven days of each other have made the same argument, from opposite ends of the same franchise: Diablo never had to be a top-down game. The first is a first-person Diablo build of the original 1997 release. The second turns Diablo II Resurrected into a fully 3D game with a camera you can aim wherever you like.

Together they have drawn well over a million views. They were built by different people, with different methods, for different games, and they run into different walls. But they share one discovery, and it is the reason both work at all.

First-person Diablo, from inside the dungeon

The first project is the work of a modder posting as Drelvak, who published I Made Diablo First Person on 8 October. It has passed 155,000 views. The video description is direct about the method: the 1997 original, modded, running in first person, built on DevilutionX as its foundation.

That foundation matters more than it might sound. DevilutionX is an open-source rebuild of the Diablo engine, drawn from the Devilution decompilation published by the same community. The decompilation project alone has close to 9,000 stars on GitHub, and DevilutionX has nearly 9,800. Both exist so the game can run on modern systems, but they also hand modders the engine source rather than a locked binary.

That is what makes a first-person view possible in a game built entirely from 2D sprites. There is no geometry to move a camera through, only artwork drawn from a fixed angle. The video devotes a chapter to adapting those sprites, and another to staying as faithful as possible to the original.

Diablo II was always 3D, and nobody had to build it

The second project is stranger, because it required almost no new art at all. A developer posting as emmericp, on a channel called Not a Data Scientist, published I turned Diablo II into a 3D game on 27 September. It has passed 980,000 views, making it the larger of the two by a wide margin.

His explanation is the interesting part. Diablo II Resurrected is not a 2D game dressed up to look three-dimensional. Every asset needed for a 3D view already ships inside the game. The isometric camera is a rendering choice rather than a limitation of the underlying content, and the D2R-3D mod mainly changes where the camera sits.

Pressing F12 enables it. The mouse wheel zooms, and holding the middle button and dragging rotates the view. Doing it properly still meant reworking how projectiles are calculated, and rebuilding the lighting and shadow behavior so they hold up at close range, which the video walks through across two attempts, the first of which he describes as terrible.

The wall is Blizzard’s own file checker

This is where the two projects diverge sharply. The first-person Diablo build runs because DevilutionX is a separate engine. The Diablo II mod does not have that luxury, because it has to run inside the retail game.

The mod’s own documentation states the problem plainly: activating the standalone version triggers Diablo II’s integrity check, and the game crashes after about a minute. A workaround exists, but the developer has said it relies on tools that could theoretically be used to cheat, so he does not document it.

There is also a plugin build that ships as two separate pieces, one for the camera and one that extends render distance, with F12 enabling both and Shift+F12 enabling the camera alone. Even then the mod is not finished. Item names can float in the sky, and mouse and keyboard targeting does not work correctly from the new angle.

Someone then put it inside a headset

The camera mod turned out to be a stepping stone. A Reddit user posting as fantasticauthor2736 took D2R-3D and pushed it further into virtual reality, combining it with FlatVR and BodyWalk. IGN covered the result on 5 October under the headline that you probably cannot play it.

The adaptation goes beyond moving the camera. The inventory was relocated to the belt, health, mana and the skill bar were moved onto the left wrist, and the map can be summoned as an orb held in one hand. Enemies are engaged by pointing a motion controller and casting, which in practice means aiming fireballs at whatever is in front of you.

The caveats are the same ones as before, and IGN was direct about them. The mod has not been published, footage so far covers only the opening zones of the game, and no particularly intense combat has been demonstrated. It also inherits the crash, because it is still running inside the retail client with the file checker watching.

Why these projects keep appearing

The pattern behind both is not new, and it explains why this keeps happening to older games. Communities spend years decompiling and rebuilding engines, and the payoff is that the resulting source can be taken in directions the original developers never intended. DevilutionX is one such project, and it sits in the same tradition as the emulation work that keeps older hardware alive, including on phones.

Diablo II Resurrected is the opposite case, and the more surprising one. Its developers built a genuinely 3D game and then pointed the camera down, and it took seven years and a YouTube channel for someone to notice that the only thing standing between players and a ground-level view was a camera position.

What to watch

Blizzard has its own plans for the series, having announced a fifth mainline Diablo for spring 2029 at BlizzCon. Neither of these projects is competing with that. Both are aimed at games that are decades old.

The obvious question is whether Blizzard responds to the modding. It openly breaks an integrity check, which puts it in a different category from a source port like DevilutionX that never touches the retail client. Historically that has been the line between mods that survive and mods that get shut down.

The other question is whether the crash gets solved. Until it does, both of the Diablo II projects are demonstrations rather than ways to play, which is an uncomfortable place for something with nearly a million views. The first-person Diablo build has no such problem, and that may be why it is the one people can actually install today.