Graphics

Graphics is a term that refers to a game's visual components. It's not a technical term, but is more of a colloquialism; fans might say, "That game has awesome graphics."

Diablo 2's graphics were 2D, sprite-based, and the title was Blizzard's last game to feature non-3D graphics. Diablo 3 is being produced in a new, proprietary engine, and is fully 3D, as is virtually every computer game these days.

Blizzard games, as a company policy, do not attempt to feature the best, newest, highest-performance, most cutting-edge graphics. The company favors stylized imagery and bold outlines and colors over photo-realism, and gameplay over any visuals. Blizzard also works to keep their products playable on sub-top of the line machines, thus widening their potential consumer base. It's been a successful strategy thus far, and is one they'll continue with Diablo 3.

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.

Too Many Special Effects?

Though Diablo 3 is not being designed to be the shiniest, most graphically-amazing game ever produced, it does have a lot of nice visual effects. The team wants it to be pretty, but the visuals must support the gameplay. There's been some debate about just how many explosions and visual starbursts there should be.

Diablo 3's Technical Art Director Julian Love spoke about this in an October 2009 interview.[1]

Diablo-Source: What are your thoughts on the special effects and death animations since all the feedback fans gave at Blizzcon?

Julian Love: Well, actually, the feedback I found that the fans gave mirrored our own internal feedback. It turns out that in order to get the Monk and a number of other features for Blizzcon we just slapped a lot things into a special effects kit that were not meant for how often they showed up in the game and made the Blizzcon build a little messier than we had intended it to be. However, the way we tend to go about doing this kind of thing is to make everything too big on purpose to make sure that we've gone far enough. Once we realize that we've done that, we go through a period where we sort of pull things back. It's kind of akin to mixing music where you sort of record everything in full volume and then you go to the mixer board and you tweak knobs until you tighten everything up and get back into reality. That's the mode we're in right now, tightening some things up.

Low-Res Character Models

One of the common "ugly graphics" complaints is that the character models aren't very high resolution. These are only seen in the character selection screen in-game, as well as on the official website, but it's a complaint that comes up fairly often. Bashiok addressed it in a forum post in August 2010. [2]

There’s no reason to pump up poly counts and texture res for a model you’re going to see from a fixed camera 30 feet up in the sky. At that distance the detail is lost, and so essentially we’d be building a model so it looks pretty on the website.

Which might actually be cool to do, we would love for the close-up characters on the website to look better than they do, but that’s allocating resources to what is essentially throw away material. So we haven’t deemed it worth the effort.

In general we also want to keep graphic requirements low so that a wide audience can enjoy the game, and also so we can have a lot of enemies on screen.

...We have scaling options too.

Ultimately I recommend you stop looking at the zoomed in version on the website and instead look at movies and screenshots of the game play.

Most fans seem to understand this philosophy, since as the developers point out, Diablo III is not a game with a first person view point. The view of the characters on the website is almost never seen in the game.

Character models for the Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, and Wizard as seen on the official site.

Resources

See the Art Controversy article for more details on the look and art design of Diablo 3, and the huge controversy that sprung up based on the initial art design of the game.

See every Diablo 3 screenshot in the Image Gallery.

See every piece of Diablo 3 concept art in the Image Gallery.