A petition has gone up, with over 2,000 fans signing on to complain about Diablo 3’s art direction.The petitioners feel that the graphics are too bright making them cartoonish .They feel that WoW might have strong influence ruining the dark series of Diablo.

This is what Keith Lee, The Diablo III lead producer had to say for a brighter, more colorful Diablo. “One of the things that we considered when we were working on the visuals for ‘Diablo III’ is the fact that color is your friend. We feel that color actually helps to create a lot of highlights in the game so that there is contrast. A great analogy is like in ‘Lord of the Rings’ — not everything is dark. It allows you to see what a creepy dungeon can be like but if everything is dark it doesn’t allow you to have a lot of contrast.”

Diablo is meant to be a fairly dark, brutal game.That said we can have more brutal looking  dark things like the dungeon. The current ’style’ in games is to have this drab palette of brown, which apparently means ‘realistic’, if you’re a partially colour blind mole who’s never left a tunnel. Not everything has to consist of black, brown, and gray. The game takes place in the human world for the most part it seems which has a little something we call color.

So what do you think?

We have seen Starcraft 2, we recently saw Diablo 3 and we know that Wraith of the Lich King is on its way. Those three projects are good enough to keep a small army of developers busy for years, plus add to that Blizzard’s standard, make that almost a decade. But apparently Blizzard is working on one more secret game, which has a small dedicated team working on it. Destructoid.com says that :

At the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, vice president of Blizzard Rob Pardo confirmed that Blizzard is working on an unannounced title. The confirmation came from a video interview with OnlineWelten, in which Pardo fields multiple follow-up questions regarding the “unannounced MMO” job listing. When specifically asked if the job listing was for Diablo III, Pardo answered quite assertively.

“No, [Diablo 3] is obviously not, since Diablo is not an MMO. We have another development team…”

At this point the interviewer cuts off Pardo, and his response gets quite jarbled. But immediately following, Pardo confirms that there is still “another unknown project” in the works. The big question is, was Pardo referring to the MMO ad still, or was he talking about another game altogether?

This is big news……so what do you think, which game is in the making?

The game was just announced and fans are already finding flaws in the latest Diablo game. A few of the organized lot got together to start a petition to voice their concerns. I came across this post on Actiontrip.com:

It appears that Blizzard’s new art direction for Diablo III made certain fans of the franchise rather unhappy. They’ve decided to express their discontent with a petition that asks people to support the notion of a darker, more realistic art style, and not something that’s, as they put it, so similar to World of Warcraft. Here are some of their wishes:

• A darker, gothic, cryptic and creepier environment.
• A more realistic artistic direction, more independent from the Warcraft universe art direction.
• Darker dungeons without a blue/green environment, Diablo dungeons are dark and shadowy.

Well whatever the reason, this isn’t good news for Diablo 3, lets hope that this doesn’t push the game back to 2012.

Earlier in the day, we carried the news that Blizzard Entertainment, has finally announced the long-awaited third installment of the Diablo games series - Diablo 3.

Blizzard has opted for Havok physics - acceleratable on both Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, but now owned by Intel - over Physx, the physics platform from Nvidia.Brian Morrisroe, art director, had a few words to say at Blizzard’s Worldwide Invitational 2008 to explain a bit about Diablo III’s general visual and narrative design. Morrisroe stressed on the importance of art design as it relates to narrative and gameplay. As we all know the original Diablo style was inclined towards the horror genre. Morrisroe said, “We were remembering it as a much more dark grey, colorless game. But when we played through the two previous franchises were discovering a lot of vibrancy of the creatures and the environments and that’s something we wanted to expand upon in Diablo III.”

He further added, “We have a new updated engine, we’re in 3D but we decided not to do a full 3D roaming camera. It’s still an isometric game, it’s still very true to the Diablo universe. And when we started looking at that camera, what we could use a fixed isometric camera for as an art staff was probably the best decision we could made. It really makes our job easier to make the art and environments really come alive and just much more vibrant.” Diablo III is stylized (but not cartoonish), and it has retained fantasy environment but added a teaspoon of realism into it. It still has the isometric view of the previous two versions.

Well, with most of the internet guessing the announcement of Diablo III at their Worldwide Invitational in Paris, wishes have finally come true. Diablo III, the popular strategy-RPG series from Blizzard, takes place twenty years after the events of Diablo II and an evil has risen again, it is up to the heroes of Sanctuary to defend the world against the powers of the Burning Hells. However, Blizzard feels it is too early to announce the exact date of release. “We intend to take as much time developing Diablo III as is necessary to ensure the game meets our own high expectations and those of our players,” reads one entry on their FAQ.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgbUSsblCSQ

The question is, “Will Blizzard release the game on consoles, especially when Blizzard has been losing out on millions since they have not been releasing games on consoles?” You can check out Diablo 3 at the official website. Also, checkout the gameplay video below.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn00tHnNwn8&feature=related

The Diablo franchise is a benchmark in RPG gaming, this is one game that is still played by a horde of gamers even 10 years after release. Fans have been waiting for a Diablo 3 update forever and with blizzard teasing gamers for the past few days, many believe that the game may finally be announced.According to a report on Gamespot.com

After drawing out last year’s reveal of StarCraft II via a long series of cryptic teasers, Blizzard appears to be at it again. Once more, the Irvine, California-based developer is preceding one of its Worldwide Invitational events with a week of mysterious homepage art on its official Web site. Though Blizzard has declined to comment, speculation is rife that the $100-million-per-month company will use this Saturday’s WWI in Paris to reveal Diablo 3, the existence of which has been rumored for years.