I came home from a weekend holiday to find a buttload of Diablo III info had been released.
Apparently some Blizzard fans are nonplussed, concerned that the series's art direction has taken a turn for the cartoonish. This online petition, which looks like it was composed by someone with a tenuous grip on written English, has gained some traction (nearly 5K signatures as of this writing!). Is Blizzard aiming for WoW's widespread appeal by toning down Diablo's gothier design or does someone need to call a whaaaambulance? Whatever the case, this petition is sure to go nowhere, as Diablo III has been in development for four years now. Making these changes would surely require a massive design overhall.
Some of the screenshots are darker...
than others.
But dude has a point. Even the darker imagery is still glowing, colorful, and crisp. Not exactly creepy. I have a distinct memory of being so filled with dread upon entering some sort of spider-filled crypt in Diablo II that I actually had to leave for a while to build up the courage to venture in. Hard to say from a screenshot, but I'm not getting the same vibe here.
I'm just thrilled that they chose to stick with a top-down perspective, unlike just about every other current-gen RPG. I will admit, though, Diablo definitely set itself apart with its chilling, demonic vibe. I'm seeing a lot of fantasy here, and not a whole lot of hellish imagery that would, say, provoke my fundamentalist mom to literally burn the game out in our backyard's fire pit. I learned how to play unapproved PC games in a window after that little incident.
Seriously though, where the bloody pentagrams and torches made from disembodied limbs at?