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http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/8/sound-and-fury/
(For the record, I strongly disagree with the idea of a constant internet connection to play simply because of poor residental QOS that exists in the US -- but its not stopping me from buying it).
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As for items 1 and 3, your disputes are actually very objective. Sadly for your sake, I believe 90% of this approach is what we can expect from Blizzard for now. They really want their games to run on low-end machines more than any other developer, as far as I can tell, and WoW has only rewarded them for this approach. Thus, simpler geometry with an emphasis on abstraction via art-style. This is the underlying approach of WoW's art direction, although the color palette and themes are vastly different.
However, now we enter a territory of personal preference. To me, Diablo 3 screenshots read like oil-paintings of a style that my mind grants them a margin of error without any conscious effort on my part. But, it's become very apparent to me that some gamers prefer a lot of granularity to their textures, including bump-maps, and its just something I've never thought "read" well.
For me, I prefer more selective detail, because when everything is so well-detailed, everything competes for focus, and I find that the setting breaks down and looks disjointed in relation to each other, like a poorly composited movie scene. I'm sorry if that's not very clear, but given that its my personal preference it shouldn't matter a whole lot to you.
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For item 2, I believe (not certain) the spell effect colors are indicating their damage type or effect type. So, instead of going themed, they are going for information. If this is actually the case, I personally appreciate this approach, because I think most games obfuscate their mechanics so heavily it does the entire industry a disservice.
However, I totally understand what you mean from a thematic perspective. The wide range of colors makes it a less immersive experience. For me, it's one i'm personally willing to sacrifice for the sake of richer gameplay.
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Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write that out. I can respect your concerns a lot more now, but them seem heavily tied to Blizzard's underlying principles and I think you may have to look to other developers for the art direction you prefer (e.g. more realism, less abstraction, detail-heavy-textures, etc.)
Also, if one of your unspoken concerns is about all the acts having too much color in their settings, I'd suggest taking the time to cycle through the screenshot gallery on diablo3.com, there's a number of areas I would consider much darker and more gothic than anything Diablo 2 had in it.
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