I can’t remember the last time I saw an established developer, arguably the most successful developer in the world, point by point destroying fan whinings:
Jay Wilson, Designer of “Diablo III”: The key thing to remember here is that this has been Photoshopped. This isn’t created by the engine. Though it looks really cool, it’s almost impossible to do in a 3D engine because you can’t have lighting that smart and run on systems that are reasonable. If we could do that, we probably would in a few of the dungeons.
Now in terms of the actual texturing, this texturing, where they grayed out everything and it’s very flat and the monsters are all kind of a similar tone — that does not play well. It’s very boring to run through more than a couple of times, and it’s very difficult to tell creatures apart and pop them out of the environment. So those things don’t really work for us. A lot of the lighting stuff I think is very cool, but it’s also not very doable for us.
After that he goes into even more detail about each picture some random fans released and how bad they would be in reality.
Why? Why is Blizzard bothering to respond to photoshopped screen shots? Why are they arguing with fans, why are they bothering to stoop the level of some guy that saw the engine run and decided that just isn’t Diablo enough?
It’s silly for sure and maybe a really bad trend to start. Where do you draw the line? When people start critiquing your features on your product, you come out and defend them and say, "lrn 2 design, asshat!"?
Is this a symptom of their WoWness? Are they so used to having to defend themselves in the MMO forums that they are just following that pattern for everything? Can I start telling them how much Starcraft 2 is going to suck and get response back? Will it be, "n00b!"?
What Would Matt Do: I’m wondering what Blizzard would do. Well, what they will do next. Hopefully they will go back to ignoring ignoramuses that aren’t involved in actually making the product. Think of Bethesda all of a sudden started taking the NMA guys seriously… wtf.