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During Blizzard's 2008 Worldwide Invitation, they rocked the world with the announcement of the development of Diablo III. The fan base roared and bitched. Some liked the art style, some loathed it, but it was clear that fans of the series in general were pumped that there would be a follow-up to the legendary Diablo II (and it wouldn't be World of Diablo). So after the dust settled, how are things faring at Blizzard? We catch up with Diablo III Lead Designer and Game Director Jay Wilson to settle the matters of art direction, making everybody happy, the next Battle.Net, and more...
Crispy Gamer: I'm sure a million people have asked you this same question -- and I like the art style for the game -- but do you think the backlash is simply a case of it being hard to please everybody?
Jay Wilson: Yeah, I do think it's a case of that. The majority of the feedback that we've gotten on the art style has been really positive. Most of the people that come into this room ask the art style question. The first thing they say is, "I really like the new art style." [laughs] Most of the forums -- even most of the hardcore Diablo forums -- they are sick of people complaining about Diablo III's art style. But, yeah, we knew when we went with this art style that we were going to get some backlash from them. We went through two or three revisions on the art, throwing out all the art and starting fresh each time, because the game didn't look very good. We went for a darker, grittier, grayer environment. We found the environments became very monotonous. The creatures didn't stand out, and players didn't stand out compared to creatures. Diablo is very much a game about target identification -- that's a huge part of the gameplay.
If you look at Diablo II, it's a far more colorful game than people give it credit for -- especially in their creatures. What we found was a lot of the art design in Diablo II does not translate well into 3-D. An example that I like to use is if you take a comic book hero and put him into a movie and you translate their costume exactly, they look ridiculous because the art style is so much more simplistic in a 2-D drawing than when you up-res it and put it in 3-D. We try to make garish monsters on a more drab background, and it didn't come out most of the time because the lighting itself would gray everything down. So we found that we had to make the general background more vibrant.
The big thing that I would say is that there are people who just don't like colors, and they love the current trend of photorealistic gray/brown games which I personally don't care for. It's not like I dislike those, but it's so prevalent -- there's so many of them. It's getting where I can't tell them apart. I don't want to make a game that I can't tell apart from another game. I want a game that I work on to be original, and that's the way our team feels. They want everyone to see the art that they make and know that's a Blizzard game -- that it's something no one else would make.