Bashiok: And lastly, we're moving on to something that's created a bit of a stir, was critiques of the art style for Diablo III. People feel that the tone isn't dark enough, it's too bright and colorful, there's a rainbow- what do you feel the team's feelings on the sort of critiques that we've received?
Jay Wilson: Ah, the art question. This one's pretty complex, um, so you know, I can first say that the response from the team has been, that really what we've heard is kind of an overwhelmingly positive response. We know that there are some people that are very concerned with the overall tone of the game and tone of the art, and, kind of what we wish we could do is take them through the last two and a half years of, you know, where we basically, created and dumped two complete art style directions. So, I'll kind of go through and explain all the reasons that we went into this decision.
So, the original two art styles that we did were probably more in line with what some of the sample shots that people put up online of what they were hoping the game would look like, and, you know, they were very dark, they were very monotone, a lot of grays, a lot of brown, not a lot of color. And the problem we had was that it just didn't produce a very good game for us. Diablo is game that you spend hundreds of hours in as opposed to, if you look at a lot of the current round of very realistic, very grim, gritty games, you know, a lot of those are five, six hour games. So, a gray-brown environment, gets old very quickly when you're playing it for, tens or twenty, you know, a hundred hours potentially. So really, environment change was a critical part of Diablo II. What made Diablo II so compelling was, the environments changed drastically very often. So, if your environments are all kind of grey-brown it doesn't work. So the other one was that we, it was actually not very easy to play the game; Diablo is a game where you fight a lot of monsters and not just a high number of monsters, but a lot of different types at once and you're facing, three, four, five different types of enemies at a time. So being able to identify those enemies was critical. And what we found was, again, when we made the enemies that very realistic dark, gritty look, like the environment, they all just kind of blended together, and again, it made the game not very fun.
So, at that point, after we had done this twice and gone, “wow, we really don't like the results here, we started going back to Diablo II in particular and looking at it, trying to figure out what Diablo II did, that worked so well. What we found was that a lot of the ideas that made Diablo II work well, just didn't translate well to 3D. We also found a very different game than a lot of us remember, even though a lot of us played the game still, like a lot of us are still big Diablo II players, we still have kind of this idealized vision of it where we really remember, like, Durance of Hate and act I dungeons and we kind of conveniently forget, you know, the act II desert and the really bright lava hell levels and the things like that that are filled with a lot of color. And we saw that and we were kind of surprised. We were like, “wow, look at how green the fields are in act I, look at how much color there is in this world.” We also were kind of surprised by the monsters, the monsters are really almost garish in Diablo II, they're very, very bright. And this makes them, you know, you'll have like a bright red fallen next to a bright blue, I think they're called blood hawks, somebody's going to lambast me for not getting the name right. And you've got a corrupt rogue who's bright white and then you've got these, you know, big, hulking windigos that are brown and, you've got all these different color palettes all at once, and they're all very, kind of out there and garish; the reason is so you can tell each one apart. You've got a big guy who's brown, you've got humanoid person who's white, you've got a squat humanoid who's red, you've got a bird figure who's blue, like each one has a different profile, each one has a different color and they all really stand out.
So, we tried that idea, and it didn't work. Once you took that idea of very bright, very garish monsters and put them into a 3D environment, it was almost like taking a comic book character from the pages of a comic book, and putting them in a movie- the suits don't translate, those primary colors don't work. And so, with the higher resolution, and things like that, so we had to explore other options. And essentially, that's what brought us to this current art style, where we really focused on, well, a couple things. One, we decided that we really didn't want to make- we did want to make a kind of a realistic-looking world, but we also decided that realistic just does not equal gray and brown. The real world's filled with all kinds of colors. We also decided that we didn't want to make, while we wanted to make a more realistic world, we didn't want to make a photo-realistic world. Again, a lot of games are doing that, it's not what Blizzard is about. We wanted to see if we could create a game that visually had an art style that was unique- that's stylized without being cartoony. So, I know that's kind of a lot of information, but it's probably our biggest struggle with Diablo, was Diablo III was trying to the art style right, and we're really proud of how it turned out and so, that's just kind of my effort to explain how we got to where we are.
Karune: So, getting back from WWI, what did you guys think of the whole thing, especially the Diablo 3 announcement?
Karune: Oh gosh yeah it was so crazy, I mean Nethaera, it was your first time in Paris as well right?
Karune: For sure. So what did you guys think about some of the other events that were going on at WWI afterwards? Dev Panels and you know some of the e-sports matches that were going on?
Karune: Do you remember the fire dancers? That was quite a sight to see as well.
Karune: If you guys haven't seen it already you guys have to go check it out on our video follow up to WWI on our
EU WWI website
. But you can probably actually pull it up on YouTube as well, I wouldn't be surprised.
Karune: How were those?
Bashiok: So, from my viewpoint, probably from a lot of people's viewpoint, the announcement was extremely positive. But it seems like a lot of the Diablo II players, or at least the hardcore Diablo II players want to see the necromancer come back or perhaps other classes coming back. Obviously, the barbarian's one of the ones you're bringing from Diablo II. What are your generally feelings on bringing classes back the previous games?
Bashiok: And lastly, we're moving on to something that's created a bit of a stir, was critiques of the art style for Diablo III. People feel that the tone isn't dark enough, it's too bright and colorful, there's a rainbow- what do you feel the team's feelings on the sort of critiques that we've received?
