Diablo II's breakpoints can be pretty fun to manipulate. The game runs at 25 FPS, and the new Resurrected remaster will also be sourced on the 25FPS timings of the original despite running at higher frame rates on consoles and PC (it can hit uncapped FPS at 8K resolution on PC). The underpinning core logic remains the same, though, allowing breakpoint builds.
Although the game ran at 25FPS, gamers could stack boosted upgrades like IAS (increased attack speed), FBR (faster block rate), FCR (faster cast rate), and others like FHR (faster hit recovery) to "break" the animation barrier; the characters animations could technically go past their limitations. This lead to some pretty godly builds, and breakpoints are kind of a science for high-level D2 play.
Luckily, the remaster will preserve the breakpoint system. D2 Resurrected's principal designer Rob Gallerani explains:
"There is a lot about the old game's feel. The original game, like a lot of older games, ran on frames and not time. And so if you imagine the game running like a bicycle wheel with the spokes, if something happened in between a spoke, it wouldn't really click over. So that's what the breakpoints are; breakpoints in the game are you've upped your stats so much that it would go faster and fall in between a frame so you don't get credit for it," Gallerani said in a recent Q&A stream.
"So there were builds made that would hit certain breakpoints. Now we have to preserve that. So our modern game still runs with all the spokes. All we're doing is we're adding a much smoother tire around the outside so we're throwing a lot more visual frames in.
"So the animations that you see can run very very smoothly, but these moments when the game is checking to see what happens are still in the exact same spot as they used to be."
news.blizzard.com
