Revision as of 20:19, 25 February 2010

Diablo III is being patterned after Diablo I, more than Diablo II. As such it's a horror-themed, gory, gruesome, frightening game. It's going to be creepy to play, at times, and the D3 Team hopes to make it a memorable, moody experience, with a pervasive sense of doom permeating the plot and dungeons.

How well they succeed at that remains to be seen, but early reports are promising, for fans who want a darker, more gruesome theme to the game than Diablo 2 managed.

Gruesome Imagery

Gruesome and gory images from Diablo 3 screenshots.

There is no shortage of bloody scenes and gruesome imagery in Diablo 3. One fan collected a bunch of representative images and worked them into a collage, just to prove it.

A major source of gruesome imagery in Diablo 3 comes from the critical hit graphics. When monsters die to a hit that trips for critical hit bonus impact, the result is usually spectacular, with the monster exploding in a style appropriate for the type of damage that did it in. Fire critical hits create flaming, melting chunks, physical damage detonates the corpse leaving ribs and blood everywhere, etc.

This can be seen in various screenshots, and it's quite impressive to witness when actually playing. Fans at Blizzcon 2009 reported occasionally knocking the skeleton out of a monster; the skeleton which would be sent sliding across the ground for dozens of meters, leaving along streak of blood the whole way. No, really.

There are quite a few screenshots and other images that have similar material in them. Enough that there's "gore" tag in the Image Gallery.

• Images tagged for "gore" in the Image Gallery.

Use Gore Sparingly

Blizzard has made no secret about the fact that they enjoy gruesome imagery and lots of blood and explosions in Diablo 3. Cartoonish gore and violence, but still violence. They think the trick to keeping it acceptable is in how they present the material.

Jay Wilson spoke on that in an interview from Blizzcon, August 2009. [1]

Wilson: Yes. We do get a couple of things that are questionable, but usually, it’s not so much gore-related … it’s that you can have gore that implies things that we as a Western society aren’t really comfortable with. Any kind of nudity, you can’t really have, especially when you couple it with violence. Those types of things don’t work well. You have to be really careful with things like torture. Those things are difficult. But to honest, in the development of the game, we tend not to think about it. We tend to build what we need to build and then wait for somebody to say, “That’s a step too far.” There are a few ways we edit ourselves, but usually not with gore, like sheer amounts of gore. It’s like, “You want to behead the guy? Go ahead, yes. You want to slice the guy apart? Go ahead.”

One example of one of the biggest ways we edited ourselves is … we have this cool system where we can hit a dude so hard that his skeleton flies out. It was awesome, really cool-looking. And we added several skills that did that; every time you hit somebody, their skeletons fly out. But I have to say, it got a little boring after a while! It became a little excessive. It took away the coolness of it. And so there, we felt like our overuse of it actually de-emphasized it, and we didn’t like that. We were like, “No, if we want to push the skeleton out of somebody, we want it to be a big deal.” I want to really like see it, and I want it to be a special event. And that’s probably the main way we’ve toned ourselves down, is to go back and say, let’s not go so overboard, that there’s nothing cool about the violence.

Content Restrictions and Mature Rating

One problem with making the game as gruesome and bloody as previous titles in the series is that the game is marketed and sold internationally. Many nations, especially in Europe, have strict ratings guidelines about how much violence, blood, and gruesome content can be shown in a game. This forces lots of action and horror games to censor themselves, in order to be released in those regions.

Jay Wilson spoke about this in an interview from Blizzcon, August 2009. [2]

Monk bursts a Lacuni.

Wired.com: Are you thinking it’s possible to turn off the blood completely? Or simply change the blood color?

Jay Wilson: Yeah, we’re going to have to be able to turn off blood, change the color and things like that, because you can’t have red blood in some regions, regions that we would very much like to sell the game in. So we definitely build everything, that every bit of gore, in a deposited manner so that at a future date, we can go through and change it all or turn it off. In terms of what kind options we give, we actually give within a particular version. We’ve haven’t nailed it down, but if you turn down the gore, you can actually change it to not have red blood. That seems to be really the sticking point for a lot of people because a lot of times we use blood as feedback. And so if we take that out, that actually hurts the gameplay. But we can change the note of that feedback so that it’s something that people are more okay with.

Wired.com: You’ll obviously have to edit content for regions like Germany and Australia, but what about China? Is that a more difficult case?

Jay Wilson: Definitely for regions like Germany and Australia, we will have to change blood if we’re going to sell there. And that’s fine. Those are the standards for those regions, and we don’t really have a problem with catering to what they need and what they want. But China’s going to be hard for us. Because a lot of the restrictions there are really… we may not be able to do them. It may not be possible. With our relationship with NetEase, we recently got new information about what China really wants, and it’s a lengthy list. It’s really hard for us to cater to. We’ll try. There’s no reason we wouldn’t want to go there, but there is a certain point where we’d have to redo so much of the game that it’s not viable anymore.

Fan Feedback

The first and longest appraisal of how well Diablo 3 kept to the gruesome theme established in the earlier games in the series came from Flux, a longtime fan of Diablo 1's horror vibe, who wrote extensively about the mood and gore in a report from Blizzcon 2008. [3]

Blood, Guts, and an M-Rating

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 Mephisto run, and there are some nice gory wall decorations in Nihlathak’s dungeon as well), but it didn’t have the same sort of creepy, ominous, horror tone that D1 had.

Diablo II gore.

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 tiny encampment with just two NPCs. One of them was a talkative soldier, but the other was a silent 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.

The mood continued as soon as a player moved out into the ruins of Tristram. The scenery was dark and oppressive, and no, the screenshots don’t at all do it justice. The floating, partially transparent mist looks so much better in the game than in the screenshots, where it just makes things look smudged and blurry. The black, gnarled trees, clusters of crows that flew away when the player got close enough to trigger them, dozens of ruined, blasted houses you could run through, bodies lying here and there, and small bunches of zombies to rout gave the area a great, creepy, doomed mood.

Playing in the Blizzcon press room with crowds of journalists around, bright lights overhead, the only game sound through tinny headphones, and my attention mostly on gathering information, rather than enjoying myself, I didn’t feel any tension or atmosphere. I still enjoyed the visuals and theme, and found myself wishing I could play it at home, in a dark room with some candles burning, and the sound up high. It would be shivery. It will be shivery. I just hope Blizzard doesn’t have to tone down the gore and gruesome visuals too much, for the ratings boards.

The D3 Meat Wagon

There were a number of nice set pieces elsewhere in Tristram that added to the mood. A human hand is seen at one point, clawing at the earth, before being yanked down into a dark cellar from which come horrible screams and a fountain of blood. Ghosts wander the streets, sobbing quietly and pathetically. Zombies are seen gnawing on corpses, and their moans and groans are very horror movie appropriate. The gruesome mood isn’t continued into the dungeon, but the design and graphics of the dungeon areas were very effective. They weren’t trying to be scary, but the monsters are so well animated and formed that they are threatening and very real. You want to destroy them, and even though the zombies you find early on are basically just walking experience pots, they’re loathsome and a little bit scary. I was again reminded of Diablo I, where even the weakest starting monsters were somewhat threatening, emotionally, if not from a survival standpoint.

The death animations of the monsters are well done, and they’re very visceral and bloody. Normal deaths are quite messy, with body parts breaking off in gratuitous fashion and blood spilling, but the real fun comes from critical hit deaths. When monsters die from critical hit damage, (which happens quite often), they get an extra special death animation. They literally explode, in appropriate fashion for the type of damage that did them in. You’ll see frost on the shattered pieces, or lightning flickering along with an extra nova blast, or flames charring the chunks of meat, or gouts of blood from the corpse explosion like critical hits with physical damage. I was frequently impressed with how much blood spilled onto the floor during battles, and the ensanguinated stone and scattered arms, legs, heads, chunks of rib cage, and various internal organs left lying around after a big fight was just awesome. (In the game I mean. Not real life. Do not want FBI visit!)

On the whole I was quite pleasantly surprised by the gruesome nature of D3. Much more than I’d expected, and more reminiscent of the mood of D1 than D2.

Screenshots seem to back up this appraisal, though we'll have to see more first hand descriptions of the game to know how well the D3 Team carries this approach through the entire game.