I've played Diablo II (the old version from the turn of the century) on and off, mostly off, since its release. I have it set up with Crossover and it works perfectly there. Blizzard ran a special this weekend, a pre-Black Friday sale, so I picked up D2R for $14 even though I assumed my current Mac probably wouldn't be able to run it. But I decided to install it anyway to find out.
My Mac is a 2019 21.5" iMac with a 3.6GHz i3, 32gb of RAM, Radeon 555X with 2gb of VRAM, and I boot from an internal 2tb SSD. I mainly use it for work but I also play The Lord of the Rings Online which runs perfectly and with tolerable performance with Crossover. I have a couple of other games which, to be honest, I don't really play – although as noted, I do have the old Diablo II: Lord of Destruction installed and fire it up a few times a year.
D2R installed perfectly using the Crosstie. Bottle settings were everything disabled as set by the Crosstie, I didn't make any changes. The Crosstie actually installed the Battlenet application which is required to both install and play D2R. The Crosstie does not install D2R for you: You need to install it from the Battlenet application. After that was done, the game started right up.
My Mac has a 4k 4096x2304 display but I run it at the "retina" resolution of 2048x1152. I set D2R for Full Screen Mode (which apparently is a Full Screen Windowed mode since it adopts the system resolution with no in-game options to change the resolution) and then dropped everything to the absolute minimum graphics settings. I then created a new "online" character and ran some tests/played the game a little.
1- On my Mac the game runs really well but also very slowly. Even with all the graphics options turned down to the minimum my Mac struggled to deliver a playable experience. I even set the "Resolution Scaling" to 50% and while that helped it was still just sorta-kinda OK to play and made the graphics very jaggy; better to play with the jaggies than with the stutteries, though.
2- I experienced some screen lockups which required a force-quit of D2R. After disabling Antialiasing the screen lockups didn't recur. Even the lowest graphics preset includes Antialiasing, that needs to be disabled as a "custom" setting within the preset. This might be related to the default wined3d as I've noted issues between Antialiasing and wined3d with LOTRO and other games; I did not test extensively with DXVK to determine if it avoids this Antialiasing issue as it does with some other games I've tried.
3- I experimented with all the bottle options. Enabling DXVK made no apparent difference relative to the default wined3d (although maybe it would prevent the screen lockups with Antialiasing enabled, I did not test it long enough to find out).
4- You can toggle between "new graphics" and "legacy graphics" with a keybind, the default is the G key. Playing with "legacy graphics" makes the game look like old D2 but you still get all the new features such as the extra tabs in the Stash – the only difference is the graphics. The game plays extremely smooth on my Mac in "legacy graphics" mode, at least as well as old D2:LOD.
5- Once the game is installed and it has "connected to Battlenet" at least once, you don't have to bother with the Battlenet application every time you want to play the game if you're playing "offline" characters instead of "online" characters. You will need to create a Crossover launcher with the -launch parameter using the RUN COMMAND. If you do this, D2R will run without first running the Battlenet application but you will only be able to play "offline" characters when the game is launched this way. It's a time-saver for those playing "offline" characters since you don't have to wait for the Battlenet application to launch and you don't have to remember to quit the Battlenet application to save system resources while playing the game. And you definitely should quit the Battlenet application when you're not actively using it because it makes everything else run worse! Even the Mac version of the Battlenet application is a system hog so this is not some surprise. Note that you will need to run the game using Battlenet (via either of the two launchers created for you while installing the game) once every 30 days in order to be able to keep using the game in this offline/no-Battlenet mode.
6- Single-player/"offline" characters from the old game are easy to import into the new game: Simply copy the files into the new game's save location which is:
TheNameOfYourD2RBottle/drive_c/users/crossover/Saved Games/Diablo II Resurrected
That works only in one direction, you can't copy saved files from D2R into D2:LOD.
Even someone on an old potato Mac like mine can play D2R quite nicely using the "legacy graphics" toggle. The game is gorgeous if you don't mind playing in stuttery slide-show mode or have a modern Mac with an Apple CPU which can use D3DMetal. Even in "legacy graphics" mode you still get all the new features so if you are a Diablo fan the game is worth picking up especially during one of these deep discount sales.
