DiabloFans

If I had time to be bored, I think I'd paint scantily clad women, hah. Unfortunately, I don't.

If I can find the time for it, I'd love to play these before Diablo 3 is released:

The Witcher 1 and 2
Mass Effect 2 (in addition to finishing up the first one)
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Bioshock
Dirt 3
Portal 2
Dungeon Siege 3
Dragon Age: Origins
Torchlight 2
Skyrim too, if we don't get Diablo 3 this year. This one has a rock solid second place on my list of most anticipated games.

If I'm lucky, I'll get to play at least one of these. Work and studies come first, and there's plenty of that.

I really like how the trap assassin plays in D2, and the Demon Hunter seems to be the one most similar to this as far as I can tell, so I'll probably go with that one as my first choice. The monk is a close second, followed by either the wizard or the barbarian. I'll probably roll a witch doctor too eventually, but the whole voodoo-style doesn't suit me, so he's last on my list for now.

PvP gets me stressed. I prefer playing games as a way to relax, so I'll probably stay away from it.

Quote from Umpa65

Why would you want to make it not that gory? Why not make it over the top?

A part of the reason stems from something I heard once about not trying to impress potential employers with gore. This painting is going in my portfolio, so it'd be a shame if it makes employers hesitant about hiring me. I guess it's not as bad as that though. The full painting doesn't really scream gore/violence in my opinion.

I've been working on a piece of Diablo 3 fan art recently, and as I'm getting closer to finishing it, I'm starting to wonder whether or not I've added too much gore. The Diablo universe is a gory place, so it's not like it's out of place. However, I don't want to make people uncomfortable (honestly, I don't think it's that bad, but I find it hard to tell sometimes). I'd also like to submit it to Blizzard's fan art gallery, and they don't have an age gate there, so it would be natural that they don't permit some of the more gory stuff.

What's your opinion on what is or isn't too much gore?

Here you'll find an example of what I'm referring to. It's a detail from the painting I'm working on. The painting is supposed to show the monk having used the Exploding Palm skill on a few monsters, and they're blowing up as a result. I suppose the explosions should be even bigger. We'll see...

I like the feature well enough that I don't mind that it's being brought up again.

I can understand that some of you were impatient and wanted to get to the good D3 stuff, but I enjoyed it. I like geek culture a lot, and it's nice to see people expressing how much they care about it as well.

The separation of PvE and PvP will probably upset some people, but I have to admit I love it. I do hope, though, that the PvP enthusiasts will get some more room to play around in. The arena I've seen so far seems a bit small. Especially if the character movement speed will be increased by any considerable amount.

I have to admit I laughed a little when I saw the hat, but I actually like it.

Oh okay, my bad.
And thanks, hah. I'm on conceptart.org, but I can't really call myself an active member. Haven't posted art there in over two years.

Thank you for the vote of confidence, equinox. ;D

Ugh, if only I wasn't so notoriously bad at putting my thoughts into words, I'd try to explain more thoroughly what I mean, heh. For now, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

You can hit the Large-button under the picture to enlarge it a little bit, but other than that, I don't think there is. Not yet anyway.

For those of you who haven't yet seen it, there's a new piece of Diablo artwork featuring the Tristram cathedral on the Sons of the Storm website, posted a couple of days ago. It doesn't seem to be on the official D3 website yet, and I couldn't find any mention of it here yet either, so I figured I'd throw you the link:

http://www.sonsofthestorm.com/viewer.php?artist=drawgoon&cat=diablo&art=8

When I said increased level of detail, I wasn't talking about just the textures.

Anyway, when talking about Sacred 2, you're not taking into account how much that game reuses textures compared to what D3 seems to be doing. Reusing textures, and by doing so reducing the number of draw calls the graphics card has to do, can reduce how taxing the graphics are by a fair bit. But as we can see in Sacred 2, it also makes the environment look a lot more bland and boring, whereas the environment in D3 seems to have a wider range of textures in each area, which gives it a more varied and interesting look. The extra draw calls then need to be made up for by, for instance, having lower resolution textures on certain objects.
This is where the choice of texture art style comes in. The artists working on D3 has chosen an art style that not only keeps the game from looking messy and unreadable, but also works decently on low resolution textures. It maintains a unified visual appearance on textures by making the differences between low resolution textures used on large and small surfaces seem less evident, which is a big deal, at least in my opinion. The difference between high and low resolution textures is also less obvious.
So the reasons for their choice of art style isn't as simple as going for the "sort-of-like-WoW" style because they like it. I'm sure that's some of the reason, but as you can see, there are practical reasons for it as well.

Keep in mind though that my reasoning here is based on educated guesses. I'm only speaking from what I've seen in the games, and not what I know to be true about their choices and reasoning.



Also, in reply to your second post, I can only say that I've been studying art for about seven years now, so I'd appreciate it if you give me some credit and don't simply disregard what I say as nonsense.
If you'd like to know more about color theory, read up on Johannes Itten.