Decline Auction House Online: The Game (Diablo 3) is a MASSIVE decline

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All those guys are probably artists and shit that have jack squat to do with the actual game at this point. All the game's balance problems can probably be ascribed to one angry fat dude in his cubicle, and he wouldn't be fixing it if he had more time on his hands.

Mm, technically speaking there are a lot of dead bodies, bits of corpses etc. in Diablo 3. But every single one of these environments come across as generic fantasy Evil Hell Lands. Also, there's something like one area in the entire game where any of the dead bodies are women. Compare The Halls of Agony - featuring braziers full of decapitated heads, body parts strewn about, stinking charnel pits et al - to the various Monastery dungeons in Diablo 2, where there are the naked bodies of tortured and violently dismembered rogues all over the place. Obviously a lot's been said about the terrible writing, which certainly doesn't help with the horror vibe, but in the end I think it comes down to the blocky, cartoonish graphics. I was browsing the Path of Exile vids, and whilst the assets are of somewhat mixed quality, they reminded me a lot more of the smoother, semi-realistic direction of Diablo 2.

I'd say that Diablo 3 has graphics that gives more of a hand-painted (maybe something along the lines of a oil-painting) vibe, especially act 2, rather than cartoonish and blocky (it is certainly not blocky).

Playing on 1920x1080 with everything on max, and many of the assets (particularly the character and enemy models) look blocky as hell to me. Will try poasting some screenies of the worst areas later today.

so is diablo 3 a massive decline yet

Bitz of Act II definitely make the best use of that art style (much like a tech demo of some snazzy tesselation effects ) which as I noted a few pages back I quite like in and of itself, but it's not very...Diabolic. And yes, even Act II looks blocky blown up to full screen

Never played path of exile but looks much better than d3 :E

Diablo 3. No WIN button needed anymore.

proceed to prolapse

That's a 53 character in normal though. A lvl 53 characters kills everything in normal, merely by standing close to it. Still, hilarious to watch!

I seem to remember OP characters in Sacred literally one-shotting all low-level starting mobs merely by being on the same screen as them.

Thats incline compared to diablo 2 where they didn't even have to hit you :p

This one is even funnier! Love the sounds he makes right before he whirwinds down the stairs to his death

make with the games journalism already jerk

Belial fight seems like designed by completely different team of people. It also feels like taken out from some console game. I have the feeling that it is a leftover from some earlier iterations of the game which left in for some odd reason (probably sloppiness or lack of time).

IMAGE RAPE INC

Okay, here are some screenshots of sample areas of Acts I, III and IV that I took in 15 mintues, with all settings on max. Be aware that the pics from I and III should be the strongest areas of the game when it comes to Diablo-like art direction, since they're both based on existing environments from the two previous games. You would have to try really hard to fuck up the goddamn Cathedral levels, right?

New Tristram:



Cathedral Crypts





Generic ruins/wilderness



Act III is basically one big homage to Lord of Destruction. Which explains why it looks like Wrath of the Lich King.





Act IV aka The Burning Crusade




That pretty much perfectly matches my earlier description of the graphics

sacred 3 here has a little less fidelity than I expected

compared to number 2, I think they definitely made it moodier though, which is an interesting change

http://slimyalta.net/uploads/posts/2011-03/1301518399_5.jpg
http://www.playstationwallpapers.co...2-fallen-angel_60998_sacred2fallenangel-6.jpg

I see what they mean by painterly they also mean 'low performance requirement'

thankfully punishing framerate drops similar to cutting edge titles are simulated by the exquisite bandwidth capability of blizzard servers

remember difficult games are still being made, play diablo 3 during peak hour on hardcore

I will take crazy effects and tons of enemies on screen at 60 fps if it means a little blurriness when you look closely at stuff, instead of a sharper look but distracting framerate drops. Ideally it should be the users' choice of course, but I can also see why Blizzard would want to keep that download smaller - 15 GB of assets is already quite a lot.

yeah, I think they put in a lot more work there than on the item attribute system

Titan Quest still looks better than Diablo 3 and it was released 6 years ago.

Teh funneh thing is, Starcraft 2 wasn't low-performance at all. Well maybe at lower settings sure, but at max it's a goddamn beast. Compare it on low (or the old beta screens) to max and the latter looks a lot closer to SC1. Diablo 3 they basically said "fuck it" and went the comically exaggerated warcraft 3 route with a half-implemented watercolour painting effect (that mostly affects the general scenery, not the npc models).

Wasn't there an uproar in the SC community that basically forced Blizzard into overhauling the graphics?

I didn't really follow it, all I know is that SC2 looked like Warcraft 3-in-Space four months before it was released, but looked completely different when I finally played it (albeit with an unpleasant spin via Thors et al).

Anyway, the point is that it still looks very WC3-esque on lower settings. But if you have the computer for it, the Terrans looks more or less like as they did in SC.

Yes. SC2 graphics aren't anything to brag about anyway, but the old cartoony style was excrement.