Diablo 3 cartoony art style

[Dacien]

I havn't been keeping up much on D3 as i want it to mostly be a suprise to me... however can someone find a screenshot of D3 that will really show this "different" art style off well that you guys are talking about?

Here's one

Kinda looks like freaking Torchlight. That isn't a good thing, imo.

I have a solution Dacien. Play Torchlight.... then play diablo 3 again :P it wont look so cartoony anymore after playing torchlight ^^

Ha!

[Yzak]

I dunno what it is about the first town, but I have a 2.5GHz i5, GTS 360M 1GB GDDR5, and 6GB DDR3 Ram, and my FPS was choking in the upper 20's. I had AA off and most settings High, and running 1920X1080. I was surprised that my little rig couldn't handle it.

No offense intended, but your video card is just a little past it's prime. It's not so much the graphical demand, than it is the physics that are in the game.

On topic: I don't mind the graphics at all. As others have said it's Blizzard putting their art direction into it. What I have an issue with is more with people claiming the previous games were a lot darker. In which they were actually a lot brighter in some cases compared to D3 so far. >.>

edit

Forgot to mention that Light radius wouldn't work well on the D3 engine if I remember correctly.

[Vyce223]

Here's one

Kinda looks like freaking Torchlight. That isn't a good thing, imo.

Eep.... your right. I'm not exactly "happy" about this new direction it does seem quite cartoony.

Edit: Doesn't where the player is standing look ALOT like the durance of hate level 3 (for everyone who has farmed Mephisto over and over and over and over...)

[Dacien]

No offense intended, but your video card is just a little past it's prime. It's not so much the graphical demand, than it is the physics that are in the game.

You are right about that. But I was still surprised it wasn't enough.

[Doozerjun]

It definitely does have a more cartoon art style. I don't find it too bad but I still want to find rooms of bloody corpses on spikes like in Diablo 1.

[Flimsy]

I like the style, but then again I love WoW's style to.

[Anjerith]

It doesn't look cartoony in-game except for the fact that the characters are now easier to see thanks to higher resolutions and the fact that they are no longer sprites.

[Wilian]

There was a comparison screenshot going around with Diablo 2 with high resolution mod (A mod that only made the existing graphics scale properly with resolution, no added effects and sharpness beyond that) versus Diablo 3 side by side. And the scaled image of Diablo 2 looked 100x better in both detail and overall quality even in 2D than Diablo 3 did. It's sort of sad to see that the whole thing sort of "downscales" due to 3D :<

[Herecius]

I don't think it looks cartoony at all. I think it looks stylized, but certainly not cartoony. It's not hyper-realism, is all, but for some reason, anything that's not 'realism' gets labeled as cartoony.

[Callace]

No offense intended, but your video card is just a little past it's prime. It's not so much the graphical demand, than it is the physics that are in the game.

That and Blizzard's notorious lack of performance optimization.

---------- Post added 2012-05-03 at 06:56 PM ----------

I don't think it looks cartoony at all. I think it looks stylized, but certainly not cartoony. It's not hyper-realism, is all, but for some reason, anything that's not 'realism' gets labeled as cartoony.

I don't think it's cartoonish either, but it certainly is towing the line with the comic-book appeal.

[Felfury]

I have to disagree, I never felt the grimness of Diablo 2 as much as Diablo 3, going through the graveyard at the beginning with the exploding corpses and half cadavers felt more akin to horror than anything I experienced in D2.

[Callace]

I have to disagree, I never felt the grimness of Diablo 2 as much as Diablo 3, going through the graveyard at the beginning with the exploding corpses and half cadavers felt more akin to horror than anything I experienced in D2.

The content is a separate issue than the colors and shapes of the graphics.

[d3v]

It's definitely not as cartoony as Torchlight. There is a big noticeable difference between the 2, that I am certain off... Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me...

[Slaughty8]

Tbh not cartoony to me. I changed the gamma in D3 Open Beta in game options (U have to barely be able to see the image) and game was soo grim, dark, great climate. It may seem a little cartoony because of the distance between art style and evolution of the art vs diablo 2. Tbh I found Diablo 3 to have perfect art style and graphic for itself, nothing would fit it better. This foggy grayish graphic in the forest, dark cathedral, aww.

[Zaqwert]

The graphics in D3 are obviously "better" than D2, however there are 2 things which really make it look bad

1. Blur

Everything is overly blurred, there's no crispness or sharpness to anything, people have done lots of screenshots turning up the sharpness and it looks much, much better without all the over blurred nonsense.

2. Pastels

Every area has a pastel haze over it. In the beta every area of the game was either overly blue, overly green, overly pink, or overly orange. Depending on the tileset of hte area, it's like someone pumped in a bunch of pastel colored fog in that zone.

Without those two issues, Diablo 3 would look insanely awesome, they are what is making everyone think it's cartoony when it's not really cartoony, it's just too blurry and too colorful.

[Gulvar]

This portion from this WSJ article actually touched on something I couldn't put my finger on previously: "There were plenty burning buildings and ghastly corpses to pummel ferociously, sure. But they felt off somehow, as if I was walking through a place I recognized but not completely as I remembered. ...[There has been] a dramatic shift in its aesthetic away from the grim and ornate artistic tapestries of the last two games towards a more lush and colorful palette, reminiscent of the cartoonish vibrancy of the company’s enormously popular World of Warcraft."

Playing the open beta, I found myself thinking, "Why do I keep thinking Diablo 2 looked better? These graphics are stunning!" But it's the style, the cartoony style. I don't like it. What are your guys' thoughts?

That was the first thing I noticed. I described it to a friend as neat but not dark. The first Diablo had that dark feel to it which just made a good game great. Very few games have pulled that off in my opinion.

[joeyray]

D2 was already very bright and colorful. if anything D3 is closer to D1. D2 was a fucking disneyland for crying out loud (act4 especially).

anyway, i don't mind, i like the style.

[Kronik85]

Whole thing is essentially a Marmite issue, you like it or you don't. I played D1, I played D2 through my teenage years and I'm certainly going to play D3 and I'm a fan of the art style changing to be more in keeping with keeping it Blizzardish. I like to see artisitic direction more than I like to see cutting edge graphics, so WoW to me looks better than it's competitors despite having much lower tech. Equally it's not particularly pronounced in D3, the anatomy of each charecter certainly felt appropriate for each class and I didn't think the charecter models look particularly cartoony at all. Blizzards art team is good at drama and over exaggeration and I think that's probably is what is translating as cartoonish for alot of people. If people realised that rich colors and exaggerated architecture =//= cartoony then we would probably see this criticism less often.

The main problem I have with any of this critique is that it's not really the art style at all that people have a problem with, it's because the game has a rich pallette and you can actually see what's going on. From all the QQ I was expecting the lower levels of the cathedral to be much brighter than they actually were when I got to experience them on the open weekend. I don't have a problem being able to see what I'm killing, apparantly some people do. That's not a criticism but something me and the detracters just won't agree on, if I had a fetish for darkness then I might feel differently.

[Demoncrash]

It's old news, really. Bill Roper wrote an article criticizing the game's art direction 2 years ago. I think it's the result of Blizzard Entertainment attempting to create a "trademark" art-style between their three franchises (that and the fact that Blizzard North no longer exists to lend talent to their respective franchise). Really, all three series, Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft have a pretty similar art-direction right now. It may not be intentional, but it might have a lot to do with them pooling too much of the same talent and direction between offices.

Lol @ Bill Roper's criticism. Maybe he should take a look at his own work with Failgate London before he points a finger at someone else. Looking at just how horrible Hellgate was in pretty much every regard, i am glad they (Blizz North) never had the chance to work on D3 or they would have dragged the Diablo franchise down with them.


On the other hand, i do agree with you on all three franchises looking similar when it comes to art direction, and i think it's due to Blizz's motto of accessibility, as well as having the same teams working on projects. I am sure they can afford to hire the best in the business and put Crysis like graphics in any of their franchises, but they wont. They have always focused on gameplay and making their games available to a wide range of audience.


Personally, i've always enjoyed the cell shaded look, whether it's games like Dark Cloud 2, Rogue Galaxy or movies from Studio Ghibli. And While D3 is no where near that "cartooney", that kind of art style should never be looked down upon as being childish, unless some one is trying to overcompensate for their lack of maturity...

[TaurenNinja]

Diablo 2 and 3 are both a little bit colorful, but it's mostly the effects, to make them appear cooler and more powerful.
Diablo 1 was the only Diablo which was dark and gloomy, but the downside was that effects were quite lame.

I like the newer approach. Also, keep in mind that a game should be easily "readable", even in chaotic situations, PvP or things like that. Having easily distinguishable effects and enemies helps a lot with that, and you can't have that if everything would be too dark.

Especially when you play Hardcore (or at least max difficulty) and you get killed by something you didn't see coming because it's all dark, you would start hating it.

I wouldn't say either Diablo is cartoony, though. WoW, Borderlands, Torchlight -- that is cartoony, and I don't use that negatively -- it works out nicely for them, fits well and makes them look great and unique. But for Diablo's much more gothic feeling it simply wouldn't fit.