Bill Roper on Diablo 3 - hellforge

Every other Diablo news site posted this, so I thought we should have it here too (thanks to the other sites as I noticed it on them).


Bill Roper, one of the Chief Architects behind Blizzard North (who made Diablo 2), has posted his views on Diablo 3. For those that don't know Bill, when Blizzard North closed, he went on to open the now dead Flagship Studios (which released a game that was not successful to say the least), and now works for Cryptic on the new Champions Online game (Superhero MMO).


While some may find what Bill says is spiteful, I can't help to agree with him on one thing, which is that the art direction is not what we would have seen the old team make, as the art style is different. No one can argue that it's not different. This isn't a talk of whether it's too dark or too light again, but rather the actual art direction, which seems to not be as gothic as the first game was. For those that will argue that we've only seen a small part, we've seen Tristram in Blizz Con, and the Tristram in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 had a much more Gothic feel to the game at least in it's out doors parts.


Now to whether the new art direction is better or worse, that's a very opinionated decision and a lot of people will have differing views. However I can see where Bill comes from when he says to him it doesn't feel right, whether or not I agree with him. (For the record I do agree).


Here are a couple of excerpts from the interview:



"One of the things I always enjoyed about that separation between Blizzard and Blizzard North was that the Diablo games had a very distinct art style. They had different art directors, they had different people working on it, they had a different sensibility about them. Diablo was I think grittier and darker and a little more leaning towards the photo realistic. Whereas the Craft games that were being built down in Irvine were bigger and broader in scope, brighter colours, just different pallets and different presentation. Both of those were very strong from that visual standpoint, for example."


...

"I think that one of the things that we always tried to get across was that Diablo was Gothic fantasy and I think there was just a need that was put in there from the visuals that I didn't necessarily get. I got it from the architecture and to a degree from the character design but not the feeling of the world. I can't say that I dislike it. I didn't look at it and go, oh my God that's horrible. But I looked at it and went, it's not really... to me as a player it just didn't really ring with Diablo."