Of course, I can show what I am talking about.
Against
I am not sure if this is not a skill, but it seems to be just a normal hit... Seriously? A shiny trail after the club? I couldn’t replicate that in D2...
Here’s another one:
Is this a physical skill or what? What’s with all those trails? Is there a secret light source in the character’s backpack? Holographic projector?
I couldn’t replicate the same effect in D2, all I got was a small circle of tiny dust clouds around the character.
Sorry for not posting many D2 screenshots, but my stupid notebook keyboard involves pressing three keys in opposite corners of the keyboard to take a screenshot. I’m not sure why, because the primary purpose of the screenshot button eludes me completely.
Against...
That looks an awful lot like a christmas tree to me. Even the pigmy witch doctors in D2 were so much more conservative.
In D2, you wave your swords, make walls of fire, get things explode into a bloody mess once in a while. In D3, you get a firework spectacle and a dance every time you fart. I wouldn’t call that gritty realism, there is inevitably going to be nonsensical stuff, but I think D3 is far beyond an overkill. Just too much spectacle, too much cartoon. Everytime I watch D3 gameplay videos, it is just a light show, there are shiny bubbles all over the place and half the things on screen leave trails, even things that shouldn’t — claws, arrows...
When I talk about artistic execution, the atmosphere of the games, I imagine Diablo 1 and 2 as game equivalents of Bosch’s paintings (which are completely surreal and mad), and Diablo 3 for me associates with something like Sailor moon or Pokemon (which is outright primitive)...
Although, I do not really understand the dumbed-down argument either. Especially for D2, consider all the gear mechanics, sets, gems, cube crafting. And especially the Grapes of Wrath add-on, with a far more elaborate cube scheme and tons of items. You can make like half a thousand different builds of “the ultimate death machine” and each one will be just as efficient as the other. I don’t know much about D3 gears/skills, but I don’t think it is going to really be a one-button game. Even if the devs say so in the videos, they underestimate hardcore gamers’ need for efficient keypressing, number crunching, and theorycraft. Every “simplification” in WoW has brought up tomes of discussions about how to build characters now that these changes are in effect, and which buttons to press first, how to time keystrokes right, and stuff like that.