It’s been a while since I wrote about something entirely frivolous so I thought I’d step into the eye of what is turning into a ridiculous storm of controversy - the reaction to the art direction of Diablo III.
One camp loves the new direction and finds it refreshing, original and polished. The other camp argues that it’s only one of those things and is, in fact, Diablo done in the style of World of Warcraft.
Firstly, anyone who argues against the latter is plainly not paying attention. The colour palatte, modelling methods, animation and textures all have a very distinctive Blizzard-fantasy esthetic. That to me, is a neutral statement regarding its quality - some people really like the Blizzard style.
I for one, do not like it in Diablo II. I find it verges on the cartoonish far more frequently than it should - it feels more in line with a saturday morning cartoon show, rather than an M-rated Gothic-fantasy horror RPG . A great deal of effort in Diablo II was placed in establishing atmosphere, place and a real sense of evil in the world around you. This seems like it’s disrupted severely by the design choices made by Blizzard creative staff.
This is hardly surprising, the Schaefer brothers (Creative leads for Diablo) are gone, as is the entire art staff. Chris Metzen and Samwise Didier (Blizzard’s creative leads) are not Diablo artists, and neither of them are particularly flexible illustrators. Each has a very definite style that either works or doesn’t for the material - StarCraft and WarCraft work, Diablo doesn’t. Further, the artists at Blizzard have honed a very particular art style - they’ve literally crafted an entire virtual world with dozens of creature types, scads of items, weapons and armour, mounts, buildings, doodads etc. One can’t expect them to suddenly latch on to a totally different style - especially if producing too much stuff that “doesn’t work” could cost them their jobs.
Good design cannot be rated in a vaccuum - execution should be compared to the message intent. If Blizzard intends to transform Diablo III into something it wasn’t before in terms of its styling, they have probably done the math and found people will like this direction more - Blizzard makes games that sell, if nothing else.
However, my hackles are raised when Blizzard employees claim that the look hasn’t changed - which is a patent lie. It has changed, drastically, to deny it is to deny that I have working vision. They’ve made some mutterings about not revealing content that might be more in keeping with expectations - the fact that this wasn’t what they released tells me it doesn’t exist yet and they’re scrambling to make it.
That’s irrelevant really, they’ve already locked themselves into a great deal of assets of a style inappropriate for Diablo as it was.
The fan reaction against the art direction has been, at best, painful. Too many young men who like loud music have posted on the internet various ill-phrased treatises that have diluted what is, I believe, legitimate concern over the repurposing of a beloved game-franchise.
I like cheese, quite a bit really - but liking cheese doesn’t mean that I want it with everything. The Azerothian art-style has a patina totally ill-equipped to deliver the moody foreboding and horror of Diablo. Blizzard denying that they’ve WoW-ed Diablo took them down many notches, it’s difficult to respect a company that insults my intelligence. Their partnership with Activision clearly came with that company’s PR indeptitude.