Diablo III - It's official

Oh come on! The influence is absolutely there. But yes, it's not WoWablo so much and not so terrible at all.

 

Upon intense pondering, I've started to think that the look of the game is designed to make a low poly count look good. Part of their goal to make sure all of their games run well on video cards 4 generations old. Diablo 1 and 2 basically had no restrictions on curved surfaces, etc, because they were 2D. 3D doesn't do that so well.

 

would it cost them so much to have a high dynamic range of LOD?

 

I sense that, within the options panel, there be checkboxes that disable such extras while the basic art and geometry remains.

 

IMO new art direction is just a business decision Blizzard had made. It is supposed to give the franchise a more mainstream appeal and ride on the WOW wave of success. It is that simple. Nobody arguing that the game will turn out bad, and internet petition may be stupid but what is wrong criticizing one aspect of the game which has been revealed to the public?

 

It's not just the polygon count, but also an apparent lack of complex shaders. It seems to be just a color map on most surfaces, but they do use a lot of them and it does look pretty good and unique IMHO.

 

I have this crazy urge to play Diablo2 again, but I don't own it anymore.

 

That argument makes no sense at all. Diablo 2 didn't just sell one or two millions companies it sold TONS OF UNITS. It's one of the best selling PC games of all time and I wouldn't be surprised at all if it still beats WoW in North America sales numbers or at least gives it a damn good run for the money. The style didn't need to be changed to achieve more success, hell I honestly don't think more success is actually possible in today's PC gaming market.

Yes, our opinions are utterly different. id has never had any grasp of art at all. They couldn't create something truly evil if the company depended on it. Doom 3 was a complete failure in that aspect to me.


The most commercial aspect of Diablo 3 is going to be its relatively low system requirements. That's how Blizzard has always done things though. The game will run decently and look decent to awesome on a ton of different configurations and on low to high end computers. That had likely way more to do with the apparent look than any influence for WoW.

 

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Well, sort of. I think the low hardware requirements is part of the reason why WoW ended up looking the way it did, and part of the reason they're carrying a hint of that style over to Diablo3. They found a nice colourful stylized look that can work on a broad range of hardware because they know pushing realism is the quickest way to steep hardware requirements. I'm sure the stylized look also appeals to a broad market.

Diablo3 looks really nice from the screens, and I think it will have enough of a dark tone to hold true to the original.

 

I'm not sure I want to buy it again. Not sure how much play I'd get out of it now.

 

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These guys may be dweebs for making that petition, but yeah some of their shots are neat.

 

That's pretty much given, but are they offering another form of control method beside a mouse?

Well if they'll allow the control to be modded sure. Not sure about free arcade stick, but I've seen WoW offered with WoW theme keyboard. So maybe they can do Diablo 3 theme arcade stick and bundle it with the game. I'll buy it if the game support it well.

 

http://www.thefrugalgamer.com/?fuse=873

You might want to try that then.

 

I hope WoW doesn't influence as much on the development of D3. Its already showing though. sigh.

Its great that they want to have the game appeal to the large audiences, but imho they should stick with what diablo truly was.

Hopefully the badass archangel Tyrael is back for more ass whooping!

 

You mean a blurry ugly 800x600 2D game?