Diablo III is for real

[Xbizkitl]

It's one thing to have objections. It's quite another to state that elements of a game's art design, a game that you are not personally involved with in any way, pisses you off. As Arnulf said, that's like saying Blizzard has an obligation to suit your taste.

It's fine to not like the game (or merely aspects of it). It's fine to come with protests and arguments as to what Blizzard is doing wrong, why it should be changed, and even how it should be done instead -- as long as it's done rationally, and as long as you don't expect it to be changed merely because you disagree with the implementation. Ranting that a game's art design pisses you off is not particularly rational.

Of course Blizzard has some obligation to suit my tastes. I"M EVENTUALLY GOING TO BE PAYING FOR THE DAMNED GAME, THIS IS A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP. Complete nonsense to suggest that I don't matter.

But only some obligation. They have to satisfy the "community" in some broad sense; not all individuals' opinions are equal to one another - you have some hardcore gamers and casual fans.

I think most casual fans are AMBIVALENT about the mood of the game. Unfortunately, this characterizes your typical RPG fan - he drinks alot of cheap swill. When Diablo is no longer the flavor of the month, he graduates to RPG "x", characterized mostly by high fantasy replete with faerie and fantasy. I personally happen to think that the mood of Diablo is very unique in this market, and should be preserved as an antithesis to the general style.

Do the established series fans agree? I don't really know, but I do know that a good many of them are voicing their hesitations about the art direction. I think that in the calculus of satisfying your customer's needs, hardcore fans should be weighted more, because they act as evangelists which attract flitting casual gamers. They're the ones creating Singing Barbs, Spearazons, Trapasins (before it became cool), digging through the MPQ files to figure out weapon speeds and animations.

If I'm going to appeal to Blizzard, I'm going to do so through two fronts - first of all, appeal to the artistry of the design team: that is, argue that the lore of the Diablo series isn't well conveyed by the graphical vision of the team, and that continuing in the same vein would injure the legacy of the same game....

And as businessmen, arguing that if they alienate enough hardcore fans, not only would they be destroying the brand value of having separate IPs, but would be abandoning their market share in the dark fantasy/Gothic horor aspect of the market.

You can of course disagree with all of this, but using bad arguments like "selfish" or "nitty" is just...dumb.