Developers vs Fan Boys

Diablo III was announced recently with some fancy game play movies showing off new class types and monsters. The fans have gone wild, well, most fans. A vocal minority has complained that the game is overly 'cartoony'. To show what they meant, these fan boys released Photoshopped images showing the changes they want to be made to Diablo III.



The trouble with fan boys is that they think they know best. They have played a large number of games which gives them a certain insight. They have played their game of choice into the ground, memorized its lore, and fantasized about its sequel. A good start, but they are missing some crucial elements.

To help highlight what they are missing, MTV's Multiplayer took the screenshots to Blizzard to elicit a response from the developers. Jay Wilson goes shot by shot and quite reasonably explains why the fan boys' art is unusable. It's a good read, but I'll hit the main points here:

1) Hardware limitations. A few shots he liked how the lighting is done, but ultimately it just isn't possible on today's hardware.

2) Play Tested. They actually started with a darker, grittier version of the game, but after having it play tested, the gamers' complained that they couldn't tell one monster from another. They asked for brighter environments.

3) This last one's so good I'm just going to quote Jay Wilson directly:

It’s a very simple game, and [you need to ] constantly vary what you throw at the player — big look changes in the environment, creature changes with different behavior. And not just behavior; we spent a lot of time trying to make creatures show up and die more interestingly. Because those are all the things that keep you going. Each one of those things is a reward. When you pull all the color out of the environment and you make it too homogeneous across the game, essentially what you’re doing is you’re pulling away the player’s reward of feeling like they’ve progressed because the area they’re in now looks like the area they were in 30 to 45 minutes ago.

Preach on brother, preach on...