Diablo 4’s Gothic Art Style Finally Reclaims The Series’ Identity
When Diablo 3 was first revealed in 2008 the internet lost its collective shit. Thousands of fans signed petitions and rallied against the game, demanding that Blizzard made a change. Why? Because Diablo 3, in a departure from its predecessors, looked like a “cartoon.”
Prior to Diablo 3, Blizzard’s action RPG series had a distinctly gothic visual palette. The stones that walled the dungeons of Diablo 1 and 2 were dark, and the shadows in their crevices even darker. The light generated by flickering flames or bolts of magical lightning illuminated a grim fantasy world with a realistic texture. Well, at least as realistic as PCs of the late 1990s could render. Diablo 3, though, looked like a horror fantasy comic book. Its world glowed with eerie, saturated colours. Its characters were built of exaggerated angles and oversized pauldrons. Its textures were hand-painted reimaginings of the natural world.
A battle between a wizard and skeletal warriors in Diablo 3.
“It's a stylized feel and in that sense, it's very sort of a Blizzard philosophy”, said lead producer Keith Lee in an interview with MTV back at the time. And that was Diablo 3’s problem – it was too Blizzard. Or, to be specific, it was too World of Warcraft. The two games undeniably spoke a similar visual language, and fans lamented that Blizzard’s colossally popular MMO behemoth was apparently eroding away the gothic menace of its stablemate. The studio’s two fantasy settings began to look like companions rather than distinct universes. But, despite the protest, Blizzard refused to shift its design goals. When Diablo 3 launched in 2012 it even featured a secret level filled with rainbows and unicorns, named Whimsyshire, as a way to poke fun at its detractors.
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