Diablo III Interview

The guys over at Diii.net were able to corner former Blizzard Norther Michael Huang and chat with him about his impressions of Diablo III.

Diii.net: What do you think of the look of D3? Is it similar in tone/mood/theme to the game you envisioned and worked on at Blizzard North? There has been quite a bit of debate about the graphics with some players complaining that it’s too bright cartoon/rainbow-colored.

Michael Huang: I think the game looks great. Using Havok for physics should give a more realistic experience to the environment. When I left Blizzard North, the D3 team was still in the prototype stage, so the game has taken some rather substantial graphical leaps in the years since. People’s memories of how dark and grim Diablo is largely dependent on their playing environment, and largely subjective. Someone who plays the game alone in a darkened room with the lights off late at night is going to have a different experience than someone who is playing the game with fluorescent lights on overhead on an airplane.

There’s a lot of criticism floating around right now about D3 looking or feeling cartoony; I think that’s just people needing something to complain about. If you look back at what people were saying when we were developing D2, you’ll see the same sort of of complaints. During development of D2, we were constantly asked whether D2 was going to be a 3D game, and we said no, because the technology in 1997 when we started game development wasn’t there yet; polygonal realtime 3D still had a lot of technical limitations, which meant we couldn’t achieve the look we wanted for the game. When the game released was in 2000, the first thing reviewers tended to mention was the 2D sprite based game, but it didn’t matter, because it looked as good (or better) than any 3D game on the market at the time.

One of the most visible differences in Diablo 3 is just how detailed everything is; the high-resolution screenshots really show off the work that the artists have put into modeling and texturing the game. I mean, you can even see the bellybutton of the Witch Doctor. We had bellybuttons on the textures for the Sorceress and the Barbarian in D2, but it’s definitely not something that you could make out at game scale; the technology just wasn’t there at the time.

Diablo 3 definitely shows off the power of realtime 3D rendering of the environment; in some of the screenshots, you can see the same area, but from a different perspective. One of the things that we had to do with Diablo 2 was strike a balance between things fantastical, while at the same time remaining realistic, all while working within the style constraints of Diablo 2. If you look at the Act 3 Jungle, those trees look very realistic, but they also look like they belong inside our game. If you took those trees and put them in Warcraft III, it doesn’t work; the style is too different. The outdoor foiliage of D3 feels very impressionistic to me, and while it’s different than what we did in D2, I think it looks very good. I think the indoor environments fit the Diablo universe; I love all the stuff that the artists add in there like the cobwebs and cracked stone and such; it really makes the place feel alive.

Since the Diablo series is largely a point and click game, it doesn’t make a lot of gameplay sense to make things hard to see or interact with, because there are few things more frustrating than being hit by things that are invisible or hunting around for something hard to see and target. One thing people need to take into account is that Diablo 3 is a true 3D game, while Diablo I and Diablo II were sprite-based — with 3D there’s a lot more possibilities in lighting available to the developers, and it really feels like they want to take advantage of the technology. If a character throws a red fireball, it should cast a red glow in the area — we have the technology now, and the graphics card can handle it, so why not?