Jay Wilson Silences 55,701 Crybabies Regarding the Renewed Artistic Direction for D3

Every once in a while, I become concerned for the gaming subculture. Sometimes, like Icarus, they fly too close to the sun, and I think we all know what happens. If you’re Icarus, you fall into the Aegean Sea; if you’re a gamer complaining about one of the most anticipated and decorated titles (and companies), you get ousted in an interview with Jay Wilson. So the real question has always been: as consumers, are we qualified to make commentary and sign petitions that will potentially change the content in a game? Jay Wilson did an interview with MTV on August 7th dispelling rumors about Diablo 3 and the hocus pocus of Photoshop.

The first picture Jay was shown was a series of pictures–the first being a screenshot from the website, and the second being a fan-altered “what it should be” picture. The results are terrible; the lighting is the same as in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, which has caused a reasonable deterioration of my eyesight from all of the squinting. The textures look one-dimensional, and the once-articulated and beautiful (and visible) architecture is obscured. Jay Wilson agrees, even citing what program they used and why it isn’t viable for the Blizzard vision with Diablo 3:

“The key thing to remember here is that this has been Photoshopped. This isn’t created by the engine. Though it looks really cool, it’s almost impossible to do in a 3D engine because you can’t have lighting that smart and run on systems that are reasonable. If we could do that, we probably would in a few of the dungeons. In terms of the actual texturing—where they grayed out everything and it’s very flat with the monsters of a similar tone—that does not play well. It’s very boring to run through more than a couple of times, and it’s very difficult to tell creatures apart and pop them out of the environment. Those things don’t really work for us. A lot of the lighting stuff I think is very cool, but it’s also not very doable for us.”

My favorite is the shot of the barbarian fighting on the bridge, but fans had a serious problem with this shot because of the “R word” (rainbow). The environment, an outside shot (looking stunningly like Azshara from WoW), has the Barbarian hacking and slashing his way through a misty valley. The fan-altered shot that follows is a rain-heavy, flat atmosphere that is like any shot we’ve seen before in Diablo 2. Also, I find that there’s something especially creepy about hacking a bunch of zombies to pieces on what seems to be a perfectly normal day. What sinister plot could be at the end of the map that will disrupt the harmony? Wilson said this about the shot:

“More rain? It’s funny because if you watch later on in the [debut gameplay] video, we have more rain. It is much stronger than that. I’m sure they got rid of the rainbow. Yeah, rainbow—gone. I think our artist just put [the rainbow] in there because they knew that’d be controversial. And I’m sure they were like, ‘Well, we’ll see how far we can push it.’”

In the end, complaining fans have only served to reaffirm the design philosophies surrounding Diablo 3. The lush and vibrant artistic design is something the Diablo universe has been heading for some time. The second game is filled with lush visuals from Lut Gholein to Kurast, and this is an evolution of that world. I find it funny when gamers title screenshots “WoW Gayness” and then attempt to use it as a tool to reach game designers to have a serious discourse about the direction of Diablo 3. The only real “gayness” here is that 55,701 people are harping on the artistic direction of a twenty-minute gameplay video and a cache of about 30 screenshots, when the game’s content will undoubtedly be 100 hours or more. At the end of the article, Jay Wilson says, “So that’s one of the reasons why we really felt we had to do this. We had to move to an art style that had a lot more variety in it and was capable of a lot more.” I want more, and I’m surprised that multitude of people signing the petition don’t feel the same way.