To give darkness meaning, you need light. Black, white and shades of grey are boring. You need color, intricacy, etc. Beauty gives meaning to ugliness.

However, any resemblance to WoW style cartoonyness needs to be squashed.

The pictures of skills and some of the equipment I thought needed more work as they didn’t evoke or emanate the right feel or worse looked WoW cartoony to a degree. It wasn’t that they used colors but that the art as a whole wasn’t always coming from the right place. Subtle changes might salvage much of it.

I admit I haven’t looked through all of the pictures but I am not unhappy with what the game itself looks like. The gameplay looks more than fine. I don’t think they should go all darkity dark darko throughout as you need contrast. That said, if overall there aren’t enough nasty creepy features, than add some subtle elements. It’s the twisting of trees, the right choice of shading, the subtle underlayers in the music, the little details that combined lead to a cohesive whole.

I thought they lost too much darkness moving from D1 to D2 but a lot of that is as it should be as the environments were different. You were journeying to hell in the first one whereas you were in the surface world (made by man or nature and not hell forged) much of the time in the second. However I did miss restoring my health by drinking from a pool of blood. The game is MA and I’d rather they didn’t pander to the gaming sensibilities of the religious right too much toning down what should be there when representing the Sanctuary and the Realms it is positioned between.

I simply do not understand how people can say “From the tiny tiny bit of the game I’ve seen I can hereby confirm that the game is crap, is exactly like wow, (and my favorite) will not be fun”

Nice crystal ball, I wish I could predict the future like that…

I hope the next dungeon that Blizzard showcase for fans is the most gritty, dark environment in the game simply to shut the art haters up.

-Simon

Now I’m just going to conjecture. The darker levels do tend to be better and a lot more fun to play. Usually, the darker the dungeon, the badder the boss. Maybe that is why they decided not to show a dungeon that was dark. Then they would have to reveal a bada$$ boss. The boss in the second bit of the video was pretty bada$$ enough though. So imagine what you would have to face during the levels in hell! XD