Taking all that into consideration, and considering the story in the previous games, we knew that updating that would be quite a task. We have a fantastic group of artists to work on it at Blizzard. We sat down and took the core values and redefined our artistic goals. We updated engine, we're in 3d now, but we decided to stay with the isometric view, since that was true to d1 universe. And the isometric view is a good decision for art staff. Makes it easier to make things come to life, and to work on the environments and gameplay. (Since they only need to be seen from one direction/angle.)

Getting back to our core philosophies at Bliz, one of them being stylization over realism. Stylization can sometimes be equated with cartoony or Disney art style. Not what we're going after with Diablo art style. We understand, looking back at D1 and D2 that the universe is very dark. It was created by demons and angels, and people in the world see such supernatural creatures on a daily basis. There's a level of grit and realism we want to bring to the game, but at the same time, it's important to take the player into a fantasy realm. To give the player something they've never seen before. If we just took pictures and stuck polygons on them, that's not us doing our job. We wanted to push the idea of bringing a unique, different look to the D3 universe, but not being too cartoony or deviating too far from what the previous games established.