4th July 2008, 6:19 PM
Quote:It's absolutely incredible how upset people are getting about the art style in Diablo III, just blows my mind. Are they going to keep at it for the next two years? Nevermind that the trailer showed glimpses of the series' trademark ultraviolence and artwork has shown areas of darkness and death aplenty.
I think their reaction is perfectly reasonable. I want my Diablo and Warcraft (and Starcraft) separate too! Starcraft II was bad enough -- my first thought when I saw the game videos was "this looks more like WCIII than SC, maybe..." -- but this is worse.
As I said, Samwise's art is great, but so is variety, and having all of your games having almost exactly the same art design and style isn't variety, particularly when before the serieses had more differences.
That said, some of the things they could do to improve things are very simple, and they likely will do -- replacing those most obviously "Warcraft" elements like those pillars and statues for instance, making the character armor designs and stuff look a bit less like WoW designs, etc... and I don't think the "too much color" thing is really a problem. As many of those edited shots look worse as look better, though a few do definitely look better edited for more darkness. I'd say just increase the darkness, though, don't remove all the blue and green...
Anyway, maybe the reaction is strong, but it's not entirely off base.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:"Cartoony" always seemed off to me. I mean the old games weren't very realistic, and it's not like we're talking Disney here. It's still a serious style.
I will say this though. I personally have another issue with a lot of American character design, in the form of "muscles on muscles" and "permanent angry scowl". I don't mind that they show the occasional barbarian warrior screaming at you. However, when EVERY picture of EVERY character class in the manual is a muscled guy looking angry, well I don't like that.
Why can't they have SOME of them look angry but occasionally show a warrior just sitting beneath a tree next to a sword in the ground looking contemplative? It's not like if they ever show a character not being dead-set focused on the grim task at hand the game can't be taken seriously any more.
I absolutely agree, but unfortunately, Blizzard knows that most Americans do not. Americans overall expect that over-muscular look, and complain when they don't get it... the best example would be the original, less muscular Blood Elf design for World of Warcraft. Blizzard was criticized for it so much that they redesigned the Blood Elf to be more muscular looking.
The original design looked better, of course.