The previous two games in the Diablo franchise were famous for their dark, brooding atmosphere. In the first Diablo, the game was played pretty much entirely in darkness. It was always night, and other times you were deep in the catacombs. After which it got slightly brighter, but only because you were in Hell and there was glowing lava everywhere. Diablo II did showcase a few more brightly-lit and very... Anomalous places, but the theme generally made you feel like you were actually in a time of darkness. You could be in a blazing hot desert, but the way you could get swarmed by mutated lightning-spewing scarab beetles made the game awesome in ways that dim lighting could never achieve.
So then, if we've seen how utterly cool Diablo II could be, even in brightly lit and mind-distorting areas, then why all the fuss about Diablo III? The gameplay video showed a total of TWO areas. One was a dungeon(which was really, really awesome) and the other was this beautiful forested area with rivers and grassy canyons and waterfalls. With zombies. It was really like a wonderland. And then this pristine, Rivendell-esque has hordes of zombies and skeletons rising out of the ground to smite our heroes into the soil. So that they can become zombies too. But the point is that it really seems to give a feel of an invasion of the undead. Which, is actually probably the effect that they were going for.
Because, see, I think that the actual timeline that the story is set in must be known before any comments can be made about "atmosphere". If it's a fresh, new attack of demons, you'd expect that your trees would still be green and buildings still shining ivory. Unless it's like in the previous two games, where you begin your journey sometime into the scourge, when Hell has already, literally, broken loose.
So people should just hold their horses and not accuse Blizzard of messing things up after seeing a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole game. Which will be made even smaller after the inevitable expansion pack(s). In any case, if they can render a forest and a mausoleum in such detail, I can't wait to see what the new Hell is going to look like.
Keeping with today's theme, I'm going to wonder about zombies and skeletons. In much medieval lore, zombies are reanimated corpses that hunger for living flesh. They've got nothing really keeping them together, and are essentially corpses being pulled by invisible strings. Skeletons, on the other hand, are the bones of fallen warriors, reanimated either by the repossession by a new spirit, or a magicky spell.
According to most accounts, zombies are slow, lumbering monsters that can be easily avoided by increasing the length of your stride slightly. Skeleton tend to be portrayed as fast moving, intelligent undead creatures, capable of wielding weapons and armour. By this contrast, skeletons are clearly the superior undead creature.
However, since zombies are not preserved in any way, their flesh would eventually rot off and they would fall to pieces. After some time, all there would be left are bones. And bones make skeletons! Assuming that there are always plenty of mages around to animate skeletons, all zombies would eventually be "upgraded", so to speak.
Oh and then there's that other issue with mummies. If mummies hardly decompose, then they'll never become skeletons.
Augh why am I even talking about this.
Anyway, I figure that skeletons would probably be the most difficult undead creature to fight, assuming that none of us have any knowledge on how to exorcise spirits inside bones. I mean, there isn't any flesh to attack. You can't poke a skeleton in the eye, or kick one in the crotch. You could do your best saber-lunge at a skeleton and all you'd get is your sword poking through an already hollow ribcage. No, the only way to destroy a skeleton would be to disintegrate it completely.
Which is why someone will need to build Planetary Annihilators. So that we can destroy skeletons, in case they ever start attacking us. By the way, that's also a good reason to learn how to drive. Because, you know, there might be a zombie apocalypse anytime during our lifetimes, and so it'd be good to learn how to use a motorised vehicle.
Of course, we'll be hoping that the zombies are the Diablo II types, and not the Resident Evil types. Really slow.
Very cool xkcd comic.
-Joe