D3 graphics are NOT catoonish. What's all the gripe?

[etslayer]

Hi all, I would just like to say that I have been a lurker on this site during all my years of playing Diablo 2 (I began on battle.net in 2002), but I have only now created this account because of the D3 commotion. If any of you were my friend on D2, let me know so we can party up on D3 >)

I have noticed how many people are outraged about the graphics. I really don't think there is a good reason for this. People are saying the game looks cartoony. What is cartoony about it? It looks NOTHING like WoW. WoW looks like a fantasy paradise with bubbley characters. But in the D3 gameplay demo, the outdoor area consisted of decrepit trees, a hazy mist and muted greens and browns. This is anything but "cartoony" or WoW-like.

I agree that the graphics could use some work in some areas. Frankley, I HATE the glowing weapons. They are cheesy. This they absoluteley must tone down as far as I am conserned. But generally speaking, since when does graphics determine the quality of gameplay? After a couple months of playing D1 and D2 did any of you really care about the dark environment anymore, or were you just concerned about item hunting other aspects of the gameplay like I was? I would assume the latter considering that most of you guys who are complaining about the brightness in D3 probably used map-hack in D2 which got rid of the fog and brightened everything. You guys didn't mind that, so why do you care that D3 is a little bit brighter?

I think we should take all this energy that we are investing in pressuring the devs to change the graphics, (which they have already stated is what they were going for in their attempt to make a "dark environment without dark colors"), and invest it in trying to get them to change that ****TY inventory screen. I am far more conserned about this massive mistake on the part of the devs in adopbting a generic, WoW/GW/standard inventory screen with little thumbnails to represent your items. Some have argued that in D3 you can see the item on your char and even zoom in on your char to see the items. However, this is not enough for me. When I find my first unique, I want to see it in my inventory in all it's glory and all the stats displayed like in the previous diablo games.

Also, I think the graphics resemble Starcraft2 much more than WoW. I thought the demo gave off sort of a futuristic vibe with the healing orbs and glowing weapons and glowing shields on the skeletons. I would like for them to tone this down.

But all in all, I think the graphics are far superior to WoW, and that the comparisons are completely unjustified. Let's focus more on helping the devs improve on the gameplay, which is far more important than the graphics which are pretty nice to begin with.

[ThulRasha]

It is the good old nostalgia. People remember things that never happened the way they actually remember it. They remember D1 being very dark and gloomy and want D3 to be the same as that. Yet when actually seeing a D1 screenshot again they will know their mistake.

Looking at these D3 screenshots is all you can do now. When you are actually playing the game you will be happy that those skeletons have those easily visible shields. That way you can pick out the casters in the middle of them that do not have those shields.

[yalthar]

Also don't forget that the game is far from finished at this point. I'm quite impressed with what I've seen so far. This is going to be grim and bloody - so what if it's going to be easier to see all of the carnage:)

[tuxor]

http://www-users.mat.uni.torun.pl/~rembol/eng/diablo1.jpg

Not dark and gloomy for sure, and that's just exploding with color :rolleyes:

[lukefojut]

Actually, I'm going to disagree and say that I don't think there's any problem with weapon glows etc. It was one of my biggest regrets in DII that awesome runewords and Uniques looked incredibly mundane once they were equipped.

[sectoid]

http://i29.tinypic.com/256zd03.jpg

Tell me, how is this... not cartoony, Marius?

Pun intended :D

edit: I do not mind colors and brightness on the outside world. I do mind too much green and brightness inside dungeons. But those are minor issues. What we refer to as cartoony and wowish is what I pictured above. There are a lot of things and ideas carried over from wow and most of them are good. However, the art style is NOT.

[5zigen]

edit: I do not mind colors and brightness on the outside world. I do mind too much green and brightness inside dungeons. But those are minor issues. What we refer to as cartoony and wowish is what I pictured above. There are a lot of things and ideas carried over from wow and most of them are good. However, the art style is NOT.

Zoom out ant it wont be a big deal.

High poly models are a bad bad idea.

Though the shoulders should be a little smaller.

[BobCox2]

I like D1 for Dark and gloomy.
Sections of it are nice - I saw Rainbows too.

[Swiffer]

http://www-users.mat.uni.torun.pl/~rembol/eng/diablo1.jpg

Not dark and gloomy for sure, and that's just exploding with color :rolleyes:

The only time you ever came above ground in Diablo 1 was to refill your inventory with mana pots, so your hardly going to carry the same "dark dungeon" feel onto the surface world (and surprise surprise, Diablo 2 didn't carry that same feel when you hit the surface)

Additionally, if computers were as powerful back then as they are now, i highly doubt Diablo would have been so dark and limited in its use of color.

Rose colored glasses make everything a little darker than it actually was ;)

[yo-yo~delta]

I'm just guessing, but it looks like D1 may have been limited to 256 colors anyway. Not much to go on there.

Another important detail is the 3D graphics do make things more cartoony than 2D. This is because graphics cards (especially the mainstream every-day user variety) still can't handle very high realistic detail that was easily possibly on 2D art. Shadow definition was pre-drawn on each of the faces of rotation for each 2D model, where now it has to be rendered (to a degree) in real-time; due to their goal of accommodating many graphics cards, the 2D will have higher definition than the 3D. I've always found 3D graphics to be more cartoony in appearance.

[RyTEK]

I suppose this game will be critiqued to the nth degree by everyone and their mother - having said that, I just hope Blizzard sticks to their original design and doesn't cave to this "everything must be dark and 1 of 6 different shades of brown" and "these characters are cartoonish".

If you ask me, these "next gen" graphics that everyone is drooling over today is simply a brown filter placed over an original scene with the noise and burn levels of the screen maxed out (think Gears of War, Half-Life). ZeroPunctuation over at the Escapist Magazine has some good dialogue on this issue (just google zeropunctuation). My point is NOT that these games have bad graphics - rather that I could have listed 500 more games using the same texture filtering for the final graphics output (draw image, apply brown filter, darken, max noise level, finished). Speaking to the cartoonish aspect, this game is about 500,000 polygons-per-screen removed from WoW. Let's not have a top-down Crysis game people.

I simply hope that the Design team stays true to their original design - and at this point, this means great character models with a very nice color palette.