Diablo 3 Nonsense

A while back Blizzard announced Diablo 3 by way of a series of splash pages, with their usual jovial shroud of misdirection. Blizzard has also trickled out a few handfuls of screen shots and a game-play movie... and that's were the trouble started. Shortly after this meager bounty of carefully selected D3 information was released, a community of ... how shall I say this gently ... fucking morons with pirated copies of Photoshop and way too god-damned much time on their fucking greasy hands started imagining new rules for how Diablo is supposed to look.

Now we get to listen to people whine: "It need to be grittier and darker", "It's too bright", "Why are there so many colors?", "It's not even Diablo anymore!"

I love the visual style of Diablo 3 -- at least, based on the insignificantly tiny snippet of imagery we've seen so far. I had my fill of games that looked like mud in a barrel stirred vigorously when I played the original Quake. The addition of things like colors and, heaven forbid, a rainbow, doesn't make it "not Diablo" -- it just makes it Diablo with more then a cramped 256 color pallet.

An aside to this bullshit, is that, as far as I can tell, no one has actually done any work to demonstrate their ideas of what the Diablo 3 artistic style should be. Instead, people have taken screenshots and fiddled with the color balance, added a little noise, maybe even messed with that lighting filter... I don't see any from-scratch mock-ups or original paintings. People are happy to bitch and moan, and to sign petitions (no, really), and complain endlessly, but I guess putting together a dungeon's worth of sample art is a bit too hard. Why don't we see an outpouring of community-made, fully-rigged and animated 3D models? Where are the meticulously grimy sample textures? The carefully crafted 3D tiles that snap together neatly to create the "properly gothic" labyrinths?

Perhaps all the "fans" really want is a little tweaking, a little filter-esque nudge, and that's why all this sample working isn't being furiously developed. If that's the case, I have a suggestion for Blizzard:

Just-in-time pixel shader plugin support.

Here's how it works: render the game to a texture, rather than the screen (it's certainly possible this is already being done, for other effects purposes). Let "the fans" plugin a pixel shader that the engine uses to render this texture to the screen (this rendering process is not, by itself, innovative, but I think the idea of letting jackasses plug their own pixel shader in might be fairly original). The great news is, you should be able to emulate most of the Photoshop-ish effects in a single pixel shader. I for one can't wait to see the repositories of "gothic filters" that creep up all over the net, with hundreds of little pixel shaders that make things just a bit darker, or a little blurry, or add lots of noise to the screen so it looks "more evil".

Here's my contribution (I think it's perfect for the people who think the game just isn't dark enough in general):

float4 d3FilterShader() : COLOR
{
    // Should be nice and dark now
    return float4(0, 0, 0, 255);
}

Put that in your elongated, pseudo-realistic, gothic, fantasy, halfing's-leaf pipe and shove it up your ass!