Quote:This is what's getting me. It doesn't look anything like Warcraft to me at all. When I think of Warcraft I think bright, blocky, exaggerated - not smooth. None of those screenshots say the same thing to me. Two or three of the shots I can look at and think "maybe this looks like Scholomance." But it's still not quite the same, and Scholomance was the darkest location in all the Warcraft universe.
The outside shots don't particularly say dark or bright to me. It looks like Arreat Plateau (I'm sorry, Arreat Crater?) in the fall instead of winter. So that's not completely dark. I distinctly remember many people complaining about how singular Hellgate: London's art design was.
Overall it may be brighter than you want, but I see nothing particularly bright, and nothing cartoony. Try looking at Rogue Galaxy and then call this bright.
Meh, I agree with FoxBat. One of the things that impressed itself upon about Diablo II, looking back from my noobish days, was the weightiness of the mood the game imperceptibly set. Even now, there are still some places I don't like to solo - most of Kurast, the Prince's palace in Lut Gholein, the Catacombs. Can this game, as it is graphically, deliver that mood? It seems to me as a pantomime of the horror fantasy genre, not the archetype of that mood.
The gameplay does look amazing though, I am really looking forward to that. But in DII there was an initial hesitance to move further, to actually unveil the Demonic monsters because of the atmosphere. Now I can fully logically analyze them as mobs, fully cognizant that I am playing a game...and not living a story.
BTW: The lead artist designer for the DIII was intimately involved with WoW (I got this from the WWI interview, but I can't scrounge up anything through Google to be more precise).
In Hoc Signio Vinces.