DiabloFans

Quote from "OathofChaos" »

Obvious troll is obvious.

Seriously though, not all companies are evil, not all companies want to drain your wallet to suck the life out of the economy.

How many of you went to Blizzcon? Hmm? How many of you paid for the DirectTV package? Those are optional buys that are based on disposable income. Nobody's forcing you to buy anything from Blizzard. Think as a conscious consumer.

Now, that being said, I'm sure they have a rough deadline for when they want the new Diablo game released, but what sets Blizzard apart from EA, Take Two, Sony, Bethesda, and Microsoft Games is that they don't release a game until they are satisfied with it, release dates be damned. That's why Starcraft: Ghost became vaporware. They weren't satisfied where it was going (after having devoted a lot of financial and labor assets into the production of the game) and dropped the game. If they had any other mindset, we'd see a shitty version of the game out right now.

So please, take all of your "Evil Corperate America" propaganda elsewhere. Take Economics 101 to learn how businesses work, and please stop degrading these forums.

The developers at Blizzard may not be corrupt but Blizzard is certainly run and owned by a corporation that is no different from EA or any of those companies you listed. The developers don't have ultimate control over the release of the game. I'm sure as GAMERS, the Blizzard devs would love to see Diablo 3 out before Cataclysm, but it's the higher-ups that are calling the shots, and they need to keep WoW marketable since it has been the most economically successful franchise for the company. Even though the games all have separate teams, there are developers that work in between the teams, and resources that are divided differently. I'm sure once SC2 and Cataclysm are out, any leftover work on D3 will wrap up quickly because they can push all their resources into it. I certainly don't think it's the actual developers that couldn't release a completely polished game by holidays 2010, but the higher-ups didn't provide them the resources or the deadline for it.

About D2, ppl keep being very seletive. Theres no dark mod in the deserts, cannibal child with giant heads or icy caverns.

That's the most closed-minded thing I've read in months.

You've never been to a desert, have you? You've never felt the sweltering heat beating down on you. Have you ever smelled a decaying body's pungent scent wafting in 105 degree weather? Have you watched as insects crawl in to it and through the gore and flesh, as animals pick at the carrion, as it wastes away to mere bones? Have you see bones bleached white by the relentless sun, dry and desolate like the hope of survival in such a lifeless place?

That's actually from a book I've been reading, but I think it applies. There are different kinds of "darkness".

There's the emo darkness of the Cathedral dungeons, shadow covering the corners and hiding misshapen objects in the gloom, screams echoing from the distance and reverberating off the rock and flagstone. Nothing wrong with this, it has its time and place. But you can't apply it to a whole game. Diablo isn't about a dungeon, anymore- it's about a living, breathing world on the brink of chaos.

There's the darkness of the deep jungles. Vines and trees as far as the eye can see, your path lost in an instant. Animal and human carrion strewn on the river bed, eyes watching you silently from the depths of the eaves, waiting for your most vulnerable moment. Insects buzzing maddeningly as you struggle to find your way through the foot-deep mud and thick underbrush. And, in Diablo II's case, cannibal tribal men warped by evil, their cauldrons filled to the brim with blood and gore, their dungeons dark and rank, filled with bones and bodies- all tortured to the brink of madness.

The silence of the northern caverns. Darkness everywhere. What little light there is reflecting and refracting through the crystals, showing mirages of walls and ways of escape where there are none. Your body ligaments completely numb from frostbite, probably never to be used again. Lost in a maze of ice, the remains of Barbarian would-be heroes nailed to wooden stakes and crosses, male and female, bodies laying across the icy floor, stiff and frozen in pools of their own blood. Beasts roaring and ramming through the tunnels, your hero running for his or her life. (That is how it was supposed to be, but because of character imbalance, the game was too easy.)

Don't you ever say it wasn't dark enough. It was a different kind of darkness- darkness reflected in horror, despair, hopelessness...

Bottom line, you can't apply the same thing you do to a defiled dungeon some hundred feet in to the earth that you can to a world that has lived in peace for twenty years and is just on the brink of being invaded by the forces of Hell. The colors you saw in the living world were allegorical to the relative prosperity of the world in the wake of the death of the Three and their conjured evils- if you know anything about artwork, you should know about symbolism. The only way this argument of yours holds any value is in the green dungeon in the beginning of the demonstration, which I barely agree with.

I don't buy argument the light radius made it difficult to see all the targets and that some how made game play suck. I think that is a just an excuse so Blizzard doesn’t have to explain why they intentionally wanted to lighten it. It was said in one the interviews a few weeks back artists wanted their work more visible to showcase it; I think that is closer to the truth, and from their perspective I can understand that, but if it was that important to them they should have behind the scenes CD-ROM with all imagery, fans would love it.

Both D1 and D2 had many areas where you couldn’t see all the targets but you heard them or you saw glows coming from the room they were in. That added to the eeriness and made game play better. DOOM 3 used the same tactic (albeit first shooter) very effectively making it a scary game, but that's point it's an unlit dark room save the lone torch light around your character, you not supposed to all the targets, and it made it scarier because you weren't sure what all was in the room. I was bummed I could see the boss in the distance in the game play video, it would have been much foreboding to not know what it was until the fight. Things that go bump in the night are creepier than than things that you see go bump. Like Deckard Cain's guard yelled "What in the hells is that!?" it would have been more fitting if we didn't get see half of it walking in the lower levels before he yelled that; but rather only heard it.

Getting rid of the green ambient coloring light in favor of blue (I'm thinking somewhere between hex values 000099, 003366, or 000066) would give off a nice darker colder effect. The green they are using in the game play largely affects the mid-tone colors so I don't think you would lose any clarity of the characters attacking you.

By doing that and adding a light radius effect would not require darkening the backdrop very much, the overall effect would be a darker setting with a torch glow that should work fine. I refuse to believe they couldn’t make the light radius work in 3D, I don’t think they really tried. Of course this is my opinion but I have an art background and my IT career started in that area before moving on to nerdier technical work, so it’s hard for me believe all their reasons. 50,000 on a petition may not mean much, but it was enough to hit the news and get Blizzard to publically address it even though we fans largely got the bird.