Changes

::One of my questions going into Blizzcon was about Diablo III’s tone and mood, and how much gruesome background art and blood would be present. Most players feel that Diablo I was much more of a horror game than Diablo II. Everyone who played the first title has a very clear memory of how scared they were when they first heard the Butcher give his “Ahh, Fresh Meat!” battle cry, and the dungeons, especially the Hell levels, were well-decorated by bloody, naked, dismembered bodies on stakes. Diablo II had plenty of blood and gore and horror elements too, (check out the tortured corpses and moats of blood in the Act 2 Sewers and Durance of Hate on your next [http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Mephisto Mephisto] run, and there are some nice gory wall decorations in [http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Nihlathak Nihlathak]’s dungeon as well), but it didn’t have the same sort of creepy, ominous, horror tone that D1 had.

::The D3 team has often said that they were going to recreate the mood and theme of D1 more than D2, and that they wanted to make D3 more of a horror game. I was dubious of this claim going into Blizzcon, but was pleasantly surprised by how horror-filled D3 is. The tone was set with gore and corpses in the very first scene. New players started off in a [http://www.diii.net/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=2169&cat=546 tiny encampment] with just two NPCs. One of them was a talkative soldier, but the other was a silent [[Mr. Meat Wagon|meat wagon driver]] who spent his time endlessly shuffling between a wagon stacked high with bodies, from which he kept pulling corpses that he carried over and dumped onto a burning pyre. The animation was great, and the bodies were very well drawn as well. They looked like corpses, bloody and murdered ones.