This comes from diii.com as well and they report the news that is posted on MTV’s multiplayer where Jay Wilson goes over the modified screenshots that the petition-nuts have be spamming all over the place to show their bleak view of their Diablo 3 wet dreams…

D3 lead designer Jay Wilson sat down with the folks over at Mtv’s Multiplayer to go through some examples of player-modified D3 screenshots. Jay talks about how the effects were created, how they resemble earlier art design passes on D3, and what’s wrong with using that darker, grittier, desaturated style of art for the final game. It’s a fascinating read, and here’s one example, with Jay’s comment above the shot in question:

	Blizzard Quote:
	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.

One other interesting tidbit, when discussing this shot. Emphasis added:

	Blizzard Quote:
	Wilson: A lot of this change is adding noise to the screen. If [the characters] weren’t centered on the screen — like find the witch doctor. Especially think about him as a friend [in co-op play]. Standing over there, you can’t even tell the difference between him and the zombie. And that’s another player, and when you can’t tell the player apart from the creature, that’s horrible. You’ve got to think that there’s potentially up to seven other people in addition to yourself, and several dozen monsters. All that noise just translates into unplayable, especially when this starts moving. This texturing was actually very similar to one of our previous art styles. But when you started moving and the whole screen just kind of shimmers, you can’t really tell anything that’s going on.

Slip of the tongue, or confirmation of 8 players in the game? The designers said it would likely be just 4-5, for better gameplay/party size, during the WWI panels.

Blizzard Guru have a  nice post about the possibility that we are seeing a new class in one of the screenshots from Blizzard that seem to be hinting towards a druid-like class….what do you  think, are they right or wrong?

With the release of the new PC Powerplay preview of Diablo 3, rumours have begun to pop up on a few sites of a possible new class in one of the screenshots. While two of the classes are currently known, there are three that are being speculated on from Sorceresses, Bow Users, Druids, Necromancers as well as a myriad of other classes.

The first instance of what could have been a new class was seen in the Art Trailer from the website, which portrayed a female that could possibly be a druid or an NPC.

Looking at the laters PC Powerplay Review, the last page has a screenshot in the bottom left. Zoomed in he screenshot can be seen below.

Pointing out a few key things on this character being played, one can see the following.

The character appears to be wearing a cloak with a hood.
The character has two claws, one on each of the arms.
At 1 and 4 on the image below is what appears to be horns on the hood/helmet.
At 2 and 3 on the image below, there is possibility of small animal skulls seen.

Feel free to pop by our forums and speculate on this topic.

EDIT: Update: Some are speculating that this is Blizzard teasing us by having two monsters fight each other, and the image is of a dark occultist after the transformation:

http://us.media.blizzard.com/1901200114/_images/screenshots/ss4-hires.jpg

The official Diablo 3 website has updated their website with some new graphics. Its 3 new pieces of artwork, 2 new screenshots and one new wallpaper.

I finally caved in and added a gallery. There are a million galleries out there, but I figure it might not be a bad idea to add this feature here as well since its useful when showing off things graphicly and since everyone else have it…why not add it here as well?

I will start with the official images and then build from there I think. I have plans to make some wallpapers and then there will be a few images for the chronicles of course.

I am in final stages of the new layout and will hold on any redesign issues until that is done, but I will make some adjustments once the new layout is in place…I always do

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