After posting about the
Diablo III announcement and clicking through GameSpy's
various Diablo III videos. I found myself loving the new interactive environments and hopped up game action. However, as I commented on the original post, a lot of Diablo III's graphic look left me scratching my head. Why the new World of Warcraft texture and model scheme?
Now, don't get me wrong, I liked Diablo and loved Diablo II. In fact I recently installed Diablo II a month ago and have made it to Act V with what little time I have, "Hardcore Mode" of course.
I am also a seasoned WoW player and while looking at the various Diablo III media it was looking more and more "WoW like" in terms of the graphic feel.
I know the game will most likely rock and make Blizzard
another billion dollars but why the "cartoony" change? Was it because most of the original development team that made Diablo II
left Blizzard? Was it due to having the same artists that worked on World of Warcraft, work on Diablo III?
Apparently, I was not the only one thinking this. With the help of the The "
series of tubes" that makes the internets, a group created an
online petition, which all stemmed from
this 245+ page thread on a Diablo fan site. As of writing this, the petition has reached 27,600+ signatures of people complaining about the graphic theme.
Now, of course Blizzard will most likely not change game's design this far into production but there is obviously a few angry fans here. Even the producer of Fallout 3
was upset.
Blizzard seemed to have noticed the growing resentment over the new look and quickly began working
the press to patch it up, quoting the Diablo III producer, "color is your friend".
Kotaku, a popular gamer website, responded with a rather humorous:
Below are a series of screen shots from Diablo III and some fan-altered screen shots showing what they would like it to look like:
There are also a few extra pictures below.
Personally, I like most of the fan-edited screen shots more than the originals as they use more of a Diablo II style of lighting. Everyone has their opinions and I shall leave this debate up to all of you, the people who matter, the fans.
