A bit more about Hellfire. The reason it’s in alot of D2 mods is because it gives people extra monsters to put in their mods, and different environments. Some hated the expansion, like Brevik that programmed D1 and D2 because the theme didn’t match and also because the balancing simply wasn’t there, but some liked it.
There’s much less incentive to put Hellfire in a Grim Dawn mod because this mod is in 3D and many of the assets don’t actually come from D1 OR D2! Another big difference is that most D2 mods used beastiaries from both user created 2D animations and games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.
I recently figured out how to get Open GL with CNC DDraw instead of glide running on D2SE mods (put the files required in both the mod folder and under all the file versions D2SE has for each mod, as they are swapped to the main folder for gameplay, and you configure the files in the mod folder only). That allows for 4-5k resolutions in D2 scaled to whatever your monitor resolution is, and with a filter from CNC DDraw, it looks stunning. On my 1440p monitor I have 8x AA and 8x supersampling AA with 200% sharpen and 1% smoothness so it doesn’t get too sharp, and for me it’s the ultimate D2:R experience with the 2D graphics of the original (joking, it’s not D2:R).
Then I figured out how to add a larger inventory for Requiem of Sorrow to make it much more playable, and then I took the hireling data from inventory.txt and pasted it into inventory.txt from the inventory mod, and now the extra items on hirelings in the mod works as well (I used to play it with bugged hirelings before I figured that out).
As a result I’ve played several D2 mods. I started with Back to Hellfire that errors out in act 5 with the second to last quest, so wouldn’t recommend that (used fan made patches and everything, which are required or you’ll never get past act 1 with unhandled exceptions). It had Hellfire additions of course.
Second I played a newer modded version of Hades Underworld, as it’s one of the original big mods after LOD in around 2005. It’s problem is it’s too time intensive sorting through hundreds of dropped items from a single elite pack, otherwise it would come recommended as the gameplay is riotously fun. Sadly, I can’t recommend it.
Requiem of Sorrow is so far really doing it for me on /players 8 (it can go to 128 if you really want…) and in nightmare it’s insanely difficult with 8 player mode but very rewarding. It’s harder than Reign of Terror so it’s good for that specific itch, otherwise RoT is the best D2 mod out there, hellfire or not.
The original D2 graphics in such high resolutions are stunning, because many of the D2 assets are close enough to HD textures, that the resolution increase and filters dramatically improves visuals, though the lighting is still lacking dynamic effects. If you don’t use DSR with a graphics card, the filters to CNCDDraw are pretty ugly. When I remaster graphics in old games like Doom and Wolfenstein, I’ve moved up to 8k scaling, as that works the best (not needed for D2 as the assets are realtime rendered instead of through photoshop and the assets are higher resolution).
