In this, the second installment of Upon Closer Inspection (which may be retitled if we can think of something less pretentious and catchier) we’re going to analyze a mysterious tower-like structure that’s been seen in several pieces of character concept art.  You can see a close-up of it to the right, from a piece of Barbarian artwork. It’s a tower, or at least some sort of cube-shaped castle, with what looks like steep stairways carved into the sides, up (or down?) which hundreds of people with torches are rushing.

That’s kind of odd, but what makes this bit of background art worthy of closer notice is the fact that it turns up in several different images. It’s seen in two pieces of Barbarian art, with a much larger view in one of them, and it’s in a piece of Monk artwork, drawn from an entirely different angle/perspective.

A background image that shows up that often seems a good bed to be more than just decoration. Will this tower show up in the game? Is it related to the plot? Could be…

Click through to read the rest, and see all of the tower images in a larger size.

SonsoftheStorm.com, a website run by and for Blizzard artists, has welcomed a new “son” and added a heaping helping of his awesome artwork. The artist goes by Glowei, and as you can see on his artist page, he’s done great work for all three (revealed) Blizzard game worlds, and has posted quite a bit of personal artwork as well.

There are five images in the Diablo section, and while none of them are “new” in terms of “never before seen,” we previously had only photos or low quality versions of all four pieces of Diablo 3 character art. The fifth piece is a lovely rendition of the Diablo 2 version of Big Red, which has been used for page headers on Blizzard’s site, but I hadn’t previously seen it full size and quality.

While you’re looking, do check out Glowei’s Starcraft and Warcraft images, and the personal stuff as well. I actually found those the most interest, since there’s such a variety of work to be seen. It’s almost a pity they’re so organized, since if these pictures were not clearly labeled as Personal, we could have had a lot of fun speculating about what they were hinting at for Diablo 3! Archer character? Hybrid Archer? Female Swordsman? New Necromancer? Female Necromancer? Asian Necromancer? Male Wizard?  Monster concept art?

Click the images to see the shots full sized. Thanks to KLS for the tip.

     

Brother Laz returns with a new installment of his Mad Prophecies. In this one he’s dialed down the snark and is speaking more seriously about skill trees, the user interface, and other features today’s gamer expects from a modern (so to speak) RPG. Since the “skill” required to succeed at a game like Diablo 2 is primarily knowing which builds to use, which items to use, and where best to find them, will there be any “skill” required in D3 with respecs, improved skill trees, etc?

Here’s the start of the column; click through to read the whole thing.

Mad Prophecies #4: Streamlining out the Skill

Finally a new column. Better late than never, I suppose.

During my long slumber between Mad Prophecies #3 and today, I discovered the new Moba games: Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. Aside from being PvP and therefore more entertaining than the depressing AI implemented by every action RPG so far, the constantly changing circumstances mean that there is no single best build for any given hero.

The action RPG genre suddenly seems quite old: the massive skill trees and item pools consisting mostly of useless options… the importance of numbers and bug awareness… the lack of interesting tactics against a weak computer enemy… Diablo 2 was revolutionary in its time, but this was the time of the wicked Pentium III gaming rig with an entire gigahertz of pulse-pounding clock speed. Today? Not so much. But neither is Starcraft or Dota at this point. Yet both games are being remade and successfully so. Can Diablo pull it off as well?

With the male wizard feedback in, it’s time for a new vote, and we’re staying with a character theme for this one too. Based on what you’ve seen of the characters thus far, which are you most interested in playing? If you had the game in your hands now, or at least a Blizzcon-style demo, who would you sink your time into?  Obviously we don’t know everything about the characters, and your opinions may change once the fifth character is revealed (at Blizzcon later this year?) or more info is released about the initial four, but for now, which way are you leaning?

Should you need some more info to make your choice, here you are: Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, Wizard, Fifth Character.

Last Vote Results

The controversy and disagreement over the look of the male Wizard was reflected in the vote, with divergent opinions. The five choices actually formed up into fairly neat groups. Nearly tied for the most votes were the second more like and second most dislike. Following them nearly tied for third were the love and hate options, with the middle ground of no opinion a distant 5th. The male Wizard doesn’t quite a “love him or hate him” character style, but he’s certainly got the “strongly like or dislike” reaction sewn up.

What do you think of the look of the Male Wizard?
• 2) It’s good, but could be improved. 243 votes, 28.79%
• 4) Ugh. I’ll be playing the female Wiz. 220 votes, 26.07%
• 5) Hate it. J-pop boy-band reject! 140 votes, 16.59%
• 1) I love the male Wizard look. 137 votes 16.23%
• 3) I’m indifferent. M’eh. 104 votes, 12.32%

Total Votes: 844

We all followed eagerly along earlier this year, when the Jace Hall Show sneakily premiered the female Monk concept artwork. Most of us promptly forgot the show existed after that point, but it seems that Jace Hall didn’t forget about us, since there’s a mystery piece of Diablo 3 artwork on this week’s show.

You can see the Diablo III poster sitting on a chair across the room from Jace, during the interview segment with Peter Alau. That segment is chopped up into multiple short bits throughout the show, and most of the time Jace’s chin or arm is in the way. However there’s finally a clear view halfway through the show.

It’s clearly a signed Diablo III poster; you can tell that the upper corners are bent back as it folds around the chair, and you can see the signatures in silver ink. What’s harder to make out is the image, but after some comparison to various shots in our Diablo 3 Character Art Gallery, I confirmed that it’s this Monk painting. The image is flipped horizontally and centered, so the big dark demon head is much less prominent. But you can discern the Monk’s dark hand silhouette, his glowing blue staff, and of course the color scheme is identical.

If you’re wondering, no, that poster has never been made publicly available. Clearly it’s something Blizzard did internally, and they’re giving signed copies out to various business partners. Like Peter Alau, Vice President of Business Development at Digital Extremes. Does want? Does want!

Click through for more comparison images. Thanks to a Fallen in Love comment from Mike Davoli for the tip.

Will there be enough female monsters in Diablo 3? Stillman peeks into the demons’ locker room showers and exposes the truth. It’s yet another revelation, people. Can you handle the truth? The first paragraph is below. Click through for the rest.

Fallen in Love

The Fallen have been around since Diablo I providing players with some very easy noob fodder. Most RPGs (and a few Disney movies) have these goblinoid type of creatures who are incredibly easy for starting heroes off on their killing sprees. Such monsters usually lack the magic to escape into a safe fairy plain like the little elves from folk lore they are partly based on. This makes it all the more easy for players to drunken their swords with impish blood. Ah, but how do they provide the numbers for entertaining the masses? Well, having such high populations, Fallen spend much of their time breeding as described in their lore. But the strange thing is, we never see any females. Ew.

It would be very easy to make this a rabble-rousing, inflammatory post, but I’ll try to stick to the facts. (After giving it the mandatory, Google-scoring, horror headline. *cough*)

Earlier this week, the corporate entity known as Activision/Blizzard fired the two studio heads of Infinity Ward, the game studio responsible for the mega-selling title Modern Warfare 2.  The stated reason was “insubordination,” which set everyone in the industry to wondering just how bad the insubordination could be, to warrant firing the heads of a studio whose most recent game has generated more than a billion dollars in sales since November.

Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings made the news the subject of his MMORPG column on Wednesday, and argued that publishers are a necessary, but deadly, evil in the game design process.

Publishers are evil and cannot be trusted. It’s just what they do. Once you sign on the dotted line, you have to assume that you are no longer a partner, but a resource awaiting the inevitable exploitation. Publishers don’t have the interests of developers at heart, nor of gamers – they simply exist to suck as much money into their pockets with the least amount of effort.

More information emerged during the week, chiefly in the countersuit by the two fired parties, and their tales of constant harassment, intimidation, and penny-pinching by Activision management make for painful reading.

Activision conducted the investigation in a manner to maximize the inconvenience and anxiety it would cause West and Zampella. On little notice, Activision insisted on conducting interviews over the President’s Day holiday weekend; West and Zampella were interrogated for over six hours in a windowless conference room; Activision investigators brought other Infinity Ward employees to tears in their questioning and accusations and threatened West and Zampella with “insubordination” if they attempted to console them; Activision’s outside counsel demanded that West and Zampella surrender their personal computers, phones, and communication devices to Activison for review by Activision’s outside counsel and, when West and Zampella asserted their legally protected privacy rights, Activisions counsel said that doing so constituted further acts of insubordination.

Reactions from gaming journalists and bloggers, many of whom are past/present/aspiring developers themselves, have been fairly unanimous. Everyone seems to be horrified by Activision’s actions; even when the writers admit that West and Zampella were pretty much problem children.. Editorials have been filed by Indie Game Producer Jake World, Matthew Colville, and Scott Jennings, amongst others. And since I already quoted from Jennings, and I read his blog, I’ll quote from him again.

That sort of fascist hardball isn’t done by people with a moral compass. And given the lack of ethics that sort of conduct broadcasts, it makes it easier for me to believe West and Zampella’s core argument – that Activision’s hostile takeover of Infinity Ward (and that’s what it is, with an efficiency that would make the expropriators of Yukos Oil blush) was motivated simply by a desire to not pay the makers of Modern Warfare the money they were owed. Apparently, Activision decided it was cheaper to destroy the studio and entangle its founders in legal tar. Something they anticipated in their 10-K SEC filing:

Jennings goes on to point fingers upstream, to Bobby Kotick, the non-gaming, notoriously-bottom-line focused CEO of Activision/Blizzard.  Which begs the question I asked in the title of this post. Could this happen to Blizzard? Could Activision lawyers swoop in and fire all the development heads and company founders, replace them with corporate weasels, and proceed to churn out uninspired annual sequels to our favorite games?

Gaming fans certainly hope not, and there’s been no public indication of strife or strained relations between Blizzard’s head guys and Activision’s. At the time of the merger that created [[ATVI]], there were numerous statements about how Blizzard’s internal operations would not be affected. And all the evidence supports that; after all, Blizzard has gone on delaying game releases just the same as ever; behavior that you’d think Bobby Kotick would have put an end to, if he had any way to do so.

That said, I don’t believe the details of exactly who now owns the various Blizzard IPs has been made public. Activision surely must have obtained some share in them as part of the purchase, and there must be some performance requirements included in the deal. After all, if WoW declined and Blizzard didn’t make any other hits for a few years, Activision wouldn’t keep writing big paychecks indefinitely. So then, if Blizzard continues making highly-profitable games, all will be well. Of course that’s probably what the Infinity Ward guys thought when they sold 15m copies of Modern Warfare 2 in 3 months. And look where they are now? (Drinking and no longer employed.)

Bashiok fielded a question about random monster encounters and turned his reply into one more focused on scripted events. But he was informative while doing so!

	Blizzard Quote:
	I’d like to see much more of that. Bashiok: Cool. We like them too. Just because of the nature of having those types of scripted scenes in random environments it’s going to be more of a flavor thing. We wouldn’t want to get anywhere near replacing random monster spawns in randomized environments with scripted scenes. But having cultists chanting, zombies eating a corpse, monsters terrorizing townspeople, etc. all that stuff definitely helps the world feel more alive. Ugh. That was written… just terribly. Or Bashion will there ?, this is till the answer we need. I know that there will be single monsters crawling on walls, but that wont make a REAL different to the actualy game structure. Bashiok: I think I can safely and accurately say that the amount of scripting will be appropriate to the area and story being presented. Which gives you no real information. My favorite type of post! MIYAAHAHAHAHA! ... I do think we’ve shown some pretty in-depth examples of the scripting possibilities, but it’s possible most people haven’t seen them as they were within playable demos. There are some videos available that show some of it off though.

We’ve got a whole page of scripted events described in the wiki. What I noticed, from my playtime at the last 2 Blizzcons, is that there were many more “random” scripted events in the Blizzcon 2008 build, than there were last year. From that I concluded that the quests were more developed in 2009, and so almost all of the scripted events, like the sleeping fallen, or the encounter with the gigantic Sand Thresher, or the Lacuni invasion, were going to be part of quests in the final game. Which is fine, and fun. It’s just a change from the more chaotic nature of “random scripted events all over the place” we saw in Blizcon 2008, and in the WWI 2008 gameplay movie. (Siegebreaker grabbing the NPC through the wall, Thousand Pounder‘s summoning, the Goat camp ambush, etc.)

Since we’ve actually got a wiki page defining a Diablo drought, it’s only right that we highlight this post, thanking Bashiok and the rest of the team for all the recent updates.

	Blizzard Quote:
	You have really been spoiling us with blue posts lately. And with the character models and other tidbits every other week or so its like back when D3 was fist announced. Thanks for all the attention as of late, it is appreciated Bashiok: You’ll take it back as soon as we hit another six month dry spell… Fair-weather friends! The lot of ya!

I’ll second the poster’s appreciation. That said, and this is serious, not just me being a smart ass; why release female monk and new screens and female barbarian and blizzcast and male monk and dozens of blue posts all in a few weeks, after nothing for months, with months of little-to-nothing likely looming in the long wait before this years’ Blizzcon?

Spread out the goodies; put up a new screenshot each week, rather than 6 at once, every other month. Post a new character animation once a month, instead of 3 in 3 weeks after none for a year. Etc. As every successful blogger knows, people will line up for spam on a daily basis and complain endlessly over steak once a week. Metaphorically speaking…

Not strictly D3-related, but it IS related to all other Blizzard games:

It seems the latest NVIDIA drivers are poison to anyone playing 3D games (which would be most NVIDIA card owners), malfunctioning in terms of fan speed, causing overheating, loss of FPS and theoretically a burned graphics card. Head over to StarCraft: IncGamers for the full story.