A petition which gathered over 50,000 signatures from fans that didn’t like the colourful art styling’s of upcoming Diablo 3 has been dismissed by Blizzard.
Leader designer Jay Wilson admits that the decision to add colour to Diablo’s world was what the team ”struggled with the most”, and that ”there’s no going back now.”
”We’re very happy with how the art style is. The art team’s happy. The company’s happy. We really like this art style, and we’re not changing it,” said Wilson in an interview with MTV.
When Wilson hopped on the project two and a half years ago the game was a very different creature and much closer to what you’d expect from Diablo 2 - darker, desaturated with plenty of grey and brown tones. This didn’t translate so well when the team pushed Diablo 3 from 2D into 3D.
”When you have 30 creatures on screen — and four or five different types — target prioritization is a factor,” he said. ”You need to be able to tell those things apart fast, and you can’t do that when your world is gray and your creatures are gray.”
Wilson also touched on the criticisms with World of Warcraft’s influence over Diablo 3’s design and development. ”I think it’s impossible for us to not be influenced by our other creations,” he said. ”There’s a lot of back and forth between the two games, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
”We look at ‘World of Warcraft’ and the art style there is more cartoony than we wanted, but in terms of target identification and having a world that feels like you can move through it and spend lots of time in it, there’s a lot of elements to the art style that really work,” continued Wilson.
”We wanted an art style that really feels like Blizzard. And we pull new influences from a lot of areas. I think people over-emphasize the ‘World of Warcraft’ comparison. But are we influenced by ‘World of Warcraft’? Of course. As I think anyone who makes games nowadays, they have to be.”
Click here to read the full interview between Jay Wilson and MTV Multiplayer.
Source: CVG
