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Diablo III Designer Defends New Look and Feel
In response to a fair amount of angry outcry at the new look and feel for Diablo III, designer Jay Wilson has critiqued some fan-altered screenshots and defended the new style. "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."
I can't understand the attraction to underlit gaming environments. Maybe it's supposed to be scarier? I just get annoyed when I can't see s***.
Ew. No. That was by far the worst part of Diablo before. Not being able to see a damn thing around me is not fun at all. At the very least, they need to make the "blackness" optional.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
As with any game with a fiercly loyal fan base, nothing blizzard can do other than repackaging Diablo 2 (and probably not even then), will make these people happy.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
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mostly what he refers to as impossible are some of the more elaborate shadows (e.g. dynamic ones from the enemies off of the spells being cast) and things like that.
This has to do with Blizzard. Ever since Warcraft 3 they have shifted their graphic design to a more cartoonish or anime style.
I think the basic idea is that if you can't see it, you can't see how bad it looks.
I'm going to have to go ahead and say regardless of anyones personal preference we have to give a lot of credit to the designer for taking the time to comment on their choices. Personally the only user created design change I like better is the last one...wow gayness.
I think it's more likely that they realize that these fan generated graphics are ugly, would probably look even worse in motion than they do in photoshopped screenshots, and wouldn't play very well because they're so muddled. But they're dealing with some obviously hardcore fans, and they're probably thrilled that there are people out there who care enough to go through all this trouble, so they don't really want to come out and call those fans untalented hack artists.
So rather than call their fanbase stupid, they call themselves stupid. At the end of the day, they'll release the game they want to make, and judging from Blizzard's track record it will be a well made game that will sell very well. These people who are spending hours photoshopping screenshots will switch to spending hours playing the game, and everyone will be happy.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Seems to me that the critics/photoshopppers just want a game that looks like it's constantly nighttime.
If they want a dark, difficult to see game, they can just adjust their monitor (brightness, saturation, etc). Let the rest of us see what we're doing.
People are always complaining about how colorful the current d3 images are. Did any of you ever play Diablo 2? Go join a hell difficulty game. Whenever you see champion/unique/superunique monsters, you almost always see an array of colors. Purples and Reds. Green auras. Even if you're running through the depths of a countess' tower, the screen is contrasted by dark colors and bright colors.
These bright colors make the game easier to play (oh that mob has one red enemy in it, that's the one I want to pop to get the better loot and more exp).
If some of the armchair game critics would go and reinstall d2, they would see that the new style is not all that different from the old! ... And now I'm back to key runs. Need to get a hellfire torch! Later!
In Doom III, where character level isn't much of an issue, the darkness adds to the gameplay.
It adds to the gameplay for about five minutes. Then it gets annoying.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Agreed. If I were playing a game that looked like the photoshopped screenshots there, I'd bump up the gamma until I could see.
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To me, darkness and the "fog of war" effect point to laziness more than anything else. Sure, it's probably supposed to produce "atmosphere", but to me it just looks like they were too lazy to draw out the entire scene in detail. I enjoy FPS games, but the really dark areas drive me crazy. I want to see an immersive detailed world, not something I have to get right up next to and point a flashlight at before I can see how detailed it is.
Like a previous poster, I tend to crank up the brightness and contrast when encountered with games that artificially darken things. Those that use heavy fog to produce the same effect just piss me off. Some of the earlier games did this probably because the engine just wasn't capable of rendering that much stuff at once, but these days it's just lazy.
In Diablo I, the player was going down down down and it got darker as you went. This is part of the game, and as such it made sense to get darker.
In Diablo II, there are only a few zones that have a large number of levels, namely the zones leading to bosses. Much of the rest of the game is outdoors and pretty brightly lit. In the expansion, it's a snowscape which is about as bright as you can get. There's no sense of delving down so it didn't get darker. Even the hell portion of the game was itself a large flat landscape. I guess the three prime evils like to be able to see in front of themselves too.
Depending on what this game is about, it may not make sense for every indoor area to be pitch the fuck black. I agree that it's a more challenging game if you don't see infinitely in front of you, and maybe they'll address it. I hope there's some variety in the environments and how you have to navigate them, as it will make a better game. Fans requiring all the locations to be muted and gloomy are thinking short sighted.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
A lot of the D3 fans don't want D3 to look like WOW.
Designer says "Interesting (not), but thanks for the publicity" ; )
I must say i agree with most of the designers points.
It still has to be easy on the eyes and gameplay, artistic perfection
is not the main point.
And, as others have pointed out, if it's too "happy" for you, adjust the gamma, not the game.
Comma coma, must rest...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Doom 3 is perfect if you played in a completly dark room where your eyes can adjust. In that kind of environment "different shades of black" actually works. Playing it in a light room however is painful unless you turn up gamma, which you can't do in the basic settings, instead requiring you to use the console. And if you do turn up gamma the visual quality of course goes down.
This is the problem when doing any visually dark game. You have to consider how the game plays in a not so dark room.
My question would be (and I'm a complete idiot with vector graphics) why do they have no problem putting directional shadows behind characters but not the scenery? It seems to me that the candle light in that particular screenshot is being blocked by walls and ridges. Is this difficult with scenery? I'm guessing the levels are dynamically generated like in the first and second (a great aspect of the game, might I add), is this what causes difficulty with shadow play?
The reason is because creating dynamic shadows via shadow mapping or shadow volumes (which is what their technique looks like) is extremely expensive to calculate and then to draw (both techniques are often fill-rate limited, meaning the more that's in shadow, the longer it takes). Typically, designers have to define a subset of shadow-casting objects which are included in the calculation, and everything else is left out. Areas that are determined to be in shadow are then drawn dimmer than their surroundings. Scenery such as walls, mountains or hills doesn't usually cast these kinds of shadows because the effect can be reasonably approximated by simpler techniques (attenuation, directional lights, etc). Indeed, you'll often find that only certain lights cast shadows on certain objects, further simplifying the work.
I don't work at Blizzard, but I suspect the lack of universal shadowing has little to do with the random nature of the dungeons, and everything to do with high cost and limiting returns of truly "realistic" shadows.
Thus, the determination of what will cast shadows is typically done by the designers who have to determine what gets the most bang for the processor time.
Quake was brown because id had to create a realistically lightmapped 3D environment with a VGA color palette. I greatly enjoyed the first Quake and still believe that technical limitations can result in good, interesting design choices, but the fact that a game designed to run on Pentium CPUs and 1 MB graphics cards has continued to profoundly influence game graphics and people's expectations thereof is... well... sad. As for Diablo III, if people want to kick their feet and scream that it's too colorful, then Blizzard just needs to add a post-processing shader option to thump certain color ranges down a bit. See ATI's SmartShader or Far Cry's "graphics filters" for an example.
Because water is #000FF, grass is #00FF00 and rock is #808080... amirite?
And presumably if you have a CRT screen. Increasingly people these days have LCD screens, which can't do black at all. Playing in a dark room with an LCD -- even a good gaming LCD -- means having an immersion-wrecking glowing rectangle hovering in the air in front of you. It just doesn't work.
Kudos to Blizzard for actually trying to design a game that will look good on real people's PCs, instead of pandering to the crazy obsessions of a tiny minority.
I think the losers should come outside from mommy and daddy's basement and see what sunlight looks like.
While I know the urge to show why these fans' visions simply do not work is strong, I have to ask, why bother? What's to be gained? They won't change their minds. Educating them to the reasons for decisions that are made won't change the fact that they want to bitch and moan about something - ANYTHING. Also, they want to show off. They want to play in Photoshop with the images and have their friends ooh and aah about how much better their versions look when the reality is that a vast, vast, vast majority of people feel that Blizzard makes simply stunning games. I won't even get into the fact that the fan-altered versions look like crap and are way too dark because that's beside the point - I just don't understand why he spent any time or effort responding to this sort of thing. Nothing will change for having done it other than giving the fans versions an extra 15 minutes of fame...
If it becomes necessary to alter my environment, buy a new monitor, and use the developer console to see the game as the designers envisioned, the designers need a new vision.
A visually dark game makes little sense when you happen to be a person with extremely good night vision, because you have an expectation to be able to fucking see what you're doing.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
So, graphics are more important to you than gameplay? That's a rather shallow attitude.
I suggest you take a little trip to South Korea, where their national sport is a 10 year old 2D Blizzard game that runs at 640x480.
I have to disagree. In AvP2, when I was playing as a marine in the single-player mode, and there was a xenomorph somewhere out there in dimly red-lit building, the effect was incredibly spooky. In that particular game, the dim red lighting really made the mood.
To be fair, graphics build atmosphere and 'feel'. His criticism felt like he found find the new atmosphere and feel disappointing compared to D2. I think that's a fair point. Really, its going to be the same with SC2. Some people are going to be turned off by the new 'feel' to it. Part of that will be gameplay changes, others will be the result of new graphics.
Graphics do more than 'look pretty'. They can effect gameplay, immersion, and feel. All this stuff about 'put gameplay/AI/story/characters before graphics' may be legit, but that doesn't mean that graphics are no longer a fair point of contention.
People might remember a game called Hellgate London. A game where they decided that killing zombies in a dark subway would never get old. I think we all know how that wonderful that game turned out to be. The last paragraphs of the linked article, where Wilson talks about Diablo 2, and how it changes every 15 minutes was actually really enlightening on to why that game (Hellgate) was such trash in comparison. You never got anywhere. A person could leave you for an hour, come back, and you'd still be in the same damn subway, doing the same damn thing.
I really wish people would learn from the Blizzard ways of doing thing and learn 2 things. People want a product that functions correctly and simply, and people want a product that is complete. Most people would rather get a sandwich in an hour than get a piece of lettuce and some ketchup right now.
This has to do with Blizzard. Ever since Warcraft 3 they have shifted their graphic design to a more cartoonish or anime style.
I agree. Lost Vikings had it right, with it's ultra-gritty, gothic realism. Let's see a return to the good old days of Blizzard like that!
I think screenshot with the pseudo graffiti font that reads, "wow gayness" pretty much reflects the stupidity and immaturity motivating these guys. I guess in their minds everything needs to be "hardcore".
All I have to say is thank goodness the fans aren't designing the game. I much prefer Blizzard's more colorful, softer feel.
The last thing I need is every little gritty detail being so prominent preventing important details like enemies, items and my own character from standing out. I also don't want Diablo 3 turning into yet another drab, monotone game like most other games out there.
Those fan-altered images look like every screenshot developers release for PS3 games desperate to impress everyone with graphics when they often don't have much else to go on.
I'm surprised that with the popularity of WoW and the Wii that so many gamers apparently are still clamoring for more gritty, realistic, and in my opinion, boring and uninspired, art. No wonder most developers keep churning out crap.
I'm honestly surprised every single one of his posts doesn't get modded down as -1 Troll because of it.
One thing that is often overlooked or forgotten is that these still shots don't do the game justice, because a game running at 24+ fps will always look better than a still frame from said game (reason why in many cases, still shots from games are usually doctored to smooth out the jaggies) and anyone who watches the D3 Demo and think the game looks "kiddie" and "Wowish" and isn't in good spirit of the original Diablo games either hasn't played them recent enough or needs to have their eyes checked. The game looks amazing, and plenty sinister without looking like Isometric Doom 3.
That's odd, I wasn't aware that the gradual build up in the number of players pointed to a hardcore blizzard fanbase. I always thought it meant that word of mouth spread as people heard from their friends about how good it was. Huh. Silly me.
And what do you call those pygmy fetish dudes?
the only reason to fear them is because they outnumber you 20 to 1
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I think what you're talking about is making sure that objects occlude light originating from the other side.
This is usually done via radiosity calculations performed on the map in a process akin to compiling a program: all the shadows are painted onto the map before the game even ships. Those details never change through the course of the game, which is a huge win from an efficiency standpoint. This is typically referred to as static lighting.
For everything else, the game engine has to more or less fake a radiosity implementation in some way as to create convincing lighting, shadows occlusions, etc. This is what is under discussion here. Any such solution will never be as good as the static radiosity pass for the map, and will take a huge chunk out of your CPU/GPU/RAM budget in the process. Either you back a simple non-obtrusive hack (a blurry black circle under your avatar that is a 'shadow') or you go the full monty and impose stiff rendering restrictions somehow (cut the poly count for all models in half). Anything in the middle will be dismissed as slipshod craftsmanship (e.g. "shadows" in Quake 2).
So in short: 100% dymamic lighting is not feasible for a game like Diablo since there's too much happening at any given point. You're not going to see 100-monster brawls *and* fully accurate lighting and shading at the same time for years to come. The Diablo fanbois will have to wait until realtime ray-tracing hits the desktop.
That assumes a static light source, which is not the case here. For a moving light source, shadow volumes and/or shadow maps have to be regenerated each time the light moves (which is often each frame). Sure, your sun angle may not move and therefore you can pre-calculate all that, but those shadows aren't what impress--it's the dramatic shadowing cast by big spells, torches, or sparks flying off weapons that get the kiddies going.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Agreed that the graphics do set the scene.
I think people are mixing up Graphics Engine with "Look & Feel". Graphics Engines are a dime a dozen these days, so we don't even need to talk about them. The look & feel, gameplay & storyline are what really matters these days.
To me, it's almost single player WoW. I think most of us MMO fans who DID play Diablo I & II, and played WoW are kind of sick of it.
While the graphics are a bit "over the top" in the photoshopped shots, we can see what they are getting at.
Where's the dark almost scary feel to Diablo? Why does it look like Andy Worhol designed to textures? About their only saving grace will be gameplay, and to my knowledge, Blizzard aren't focused on gameplay anymore. Their aim is creation of addiciton - in a way the idea of carrot infront of the donkey is their business model nower days.
I do remember when Blizzard really did focus on gameplay, unfortunately they're ignoring gameplay and reconfiguring a known addicition system (bright flashy colours, continual expansions, ultra-low item drop rates).
Then again, maybe we've all moved past the hack & slash days of Diablo II and Blizzard knows this.
By that logic, WarCraft 3 would have been better than StarCraft. And it wasn't.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So you've just multiplied both the development effort and the testing effort required.
Actually that's an excellent reason not to do it.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.