Diablo III is Not Diablo - Why Diablo 3 Isn't Diablo

A cathedral looms in the distance, the hellish red lights emanating from within making it stand out against the pitch black of the night. Terrible things have happened within, I step down into the darkness of the cathedral's caverns, its quiet but I know I am watched. Suddenly, I see movement in the shadows, and ready my blade. Suddenly, a horde of skeletons emerges from the darkness armed with various melee weapons, they charge at me. They surround and hack at me, I cannot win this fight so I hack my way through and flee as fast as I can, the skeletons close on my trail as I barely escape with my life.

That was the thrill of the first Diablo, a gothic fantasy game released in 1996 by Blizzard, which featured randomly generated dungeons and dungeon crawling gameplay in its most fundamental and effective form. The areas are dark and gloomy, the themes straight from horror coupled with an interesting storyline. These features made Diablo a smash hit for gamers, which was repeated and arguably improved with the release of Diablo II. However, Blizzard has recently announced the production of Diablo III, which has gathered quite a large amount of interest and generated an immense amount of hype. The game itself, by the trailers, looks great with areas of the environment being destructible and fast gameplay. The classes themselves are pretty interesting, such as the Barbarian which represents raw physical strength. The graphics, in terms of technology, are not cutting edge but they are adequate given that Blizzard likes to try for lower system specifications. Overall, the game seems like it will probably be pretty good.

After the above, the question then arises, why the negative article title? Well simple, while Diablo III looks like it might be a good game, it also looks heavily like World of Warcraft, not Diablo. It lacks the gritty, dark, evil dungeon crawling aesthetic, which made the Diablo games what they were; Diablo III just does not have it. Instead, Diablo III appears well lit and has a large color palette. The change of aesthetic and mood even went so far to prompt Bill Roper, who worked as a producer for the first two Diablo games, to say that whilst he did not hate how the game was coming along, it "just didn't really ring with Diablo" and that he "liked the darker grittier" aesthetic of the first two games in the series¹. Furthermore, the characters in Diablo III appear to have much clearer magical leaning, with sparks and lighting affects applied liberally to even the barbarian's melee attacks and the characters seeming more powerful and faster moving. This is problematic because part of the fun of the first Diablo was running away from the enemies with them on your heel, not blasting them to pieces in or jumping out of range in one move.

Overall, Diablo III simply does not look like or seem to play like a Diablo game. It has replaced the dark aesthetic of the first game with a significantly brighter, World of Warcraft-like aesthetic. Furthermore, it does not seem to play at all like the Diablo games and seems as though it will be a certain disappointment to fans of the older games.

References:

1. http://www.videogamer.com/news/diablo_3_what_bill_roper_thinks.html