Wallshadows wrote on May 12, 2011, 23:59:
Historically speaking, Diablo was never a franchise which pushed the graphics envelop. In fact, I would say that all Blizzard titles are made the same way to ensure a more vast player base can be established as opposed to alienating those who have older machines.
However, they are very good at tailoring the game engine to the atmosphere of the title which often produces some very exquisite designs. This is one of their strong points when it comes to delivering an underwhelming technical title but an overwhelming artistic title.
Anyone who is surprised and criticizer about how it looks is likely the same person who has never picked up a Blizzard title or one of those ADHD kids who can't get enough Gears of War or Call of Duty.
I'm so tired of the copout answer of "Blizzard makes games that run on a wide variety blah blah blah"
The thing is, most people I would imagine if they're a PC gamer, has a system that's newer than 2006 at this point, otherwise they're prolly a console user.
I loved Diablo1, still have IRL friends that I met via Battle.net from those days back in 98. I also enjoyed SC1 quite a bit. My issues with Blizzard and why I think they're prolly the most overrated dev in the industry, is due to 1. That they take so long between titles, hense the graphics generally looking like shit, IE: D3 SC2
and 2. That they take a good 10 years or so per game and still can't manage to innovate at all in all that time of a dev cycle, SC2 brought nothing new to that series aside from looking a tad better and cutting the campaign into a 180 dollar investment just to get the full story.
It's not like the actual gameplay of say a SC2 or another diablo game is any better than any other RTS or ARPG from any other company at this point. Yet people still feel the need to praise Blizzard as though they're God's gift to the industry. It actually kinda infuriates me.