Diablo 3 - Art Direction Q & A @ Kotaku

Kotaku has an interview up with lead designer Jay Wilson on the controversy surrounding the art direction in Blizzard's Diablo III:

...What about the complaint, then, that Diablo III may be "too much like WoW" in style and vibe?
"There's a philosophy that goes across all of our games, and that philosophy stays true from game to game... so it probably draws some comparisons," Wilson said. "One philosophy is that our artists feel like if they're just using photorealism, not creating a unique look for the game, not stylizing so that it's uniquely Blizzard, then they're not doing their jobs."
Color choices, he said, promote telling units apart and telling players apart from monsters, philosophies that cross all of Blizzard's titles. "If you do follow those rules, there's going to be some similarities."

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I would like the complainers to just shut the hell up on this one. Like, seriously.

1. Graphics really aren't the most important part of the game. It's bad enough developers think photorealism is some sort of holy grail, more so than engaging gameplay; now gamers are going to start complaining about not just the quality of graphics, but the style?

2. God bless them, Blizzard has ALWAYS balanced performance and graphical style, with the extremely laudable (and profitable) result that their games both look good and play well on older hardware. People think WoW looks cartoony, but you can fire up WoW on a three year-old business laptop and it still plays smooth and looks like WoW. Do you think the cartoony-ness was entirely an artistic choice? Performance matters. Their games reach wider audiences because more computers can run them. Diablo 3 will continue that tradition.