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→Blizzard's Graphics Philosophy
Many MMORPGs released since [[World of Warcraft]] have had objectively "better" graphics, but fans don't buy games because every blade of grass is rendered individually. They buy them because they have a nice look and play well, and WoW's graphics, though years old and never that technically advanced to begin with, remain popular and visually pleasing to most gamers.
==Realism vs. Style==
One of Blizzard's design goals is to create distinctive outlines and strong color schemes. Their goal is not to push the highest polygon counts or to make their games look the most "realistic." This is easily seen in the graphics for their games, which are always visually-pleasing and colorful, but can definitely be described as "cartoonish" or "stylized." Again, this is the goal; none of the characters or monsters in World of Warcraft look like real people, and they're not meant to. Blizzard's art style can be analogized to how people look in a Pixar film; recognizable, but exaggerated and stylized, rather than realistic.
This approach is in part responsible for the lasting popularity of most Blizzard titles. Millions of fans continue playing five and ten year old Blizzard games, while new games come and go. Gameplay has a lot to do with this, but graphics matter as well. Realistic graphics look amazing when they are new, but after a year or two there are always games with much better effects, making last year's state of the art look dated. Blizzard has never chased that brass ring, intentionally striving for style over higher polygon counts.
This approach pleases most fans, but there are always some people who equate "realism" with "better graphics," and who look at WoW or D3 and complain that they have "ugly graphics." What such people seem to mean is, "not realistic enough," since the comparison is always to some new game with a higher polygon count.
That's a valid point of view, but it's not really an argument; tastes vary, and it's not as if Blizzard is trying to make Diablo III look like Crysis (or whatever the next game with super-realistic graphics will be). Diablo III looks how Blizzard wants it to look, with an art style influenced by their design goals, and by a design philosophy that the game should be playable at a good frame rate on less than state-of-the-art computers. This is therefore a fairly pointless and frustrating argument, since non-fans are attacking the game for not being something it wasn't designed to be.
In September 2010 [http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/great-art-vs.-screenshots-a-case-study/ Diii.net posted an article] that tried to bridge this divide with an analogy about the realism of works of art. Everyone has different taste in artwork, but hardly anyone judges paintings by which ones look most like real life. If they did then everyone would prefer photographs to paintings, and while some people do like photos best, most people like art, of all different types, more than photos. It's unclear if the people who say that Diablo III has "ugly graphics" have some essential difference in their visual preferences that makes them dislike most art while always preferring photography, but it's not an impossible analogy.
=Too Many Special Effects?=
