Diablo 3 Hand-drawn? Probably Not.

Mark Wilson has penned a op-ed piece on Kotaku called "What King of Fighters Taught Me About Diablo 3, in which he advocates a hand-drawn solution to Diablo 3:

With these boundaries in mind, the solution of hand drawing (and sticking with sprites) seems perfect. Without the limitations of polygons--current screen resolutions combined with Blizzard's artistic talent could create a Diablo that we've only seen in our mind's eye, one that is essentially concept art imported directly into the game without the artistically-limiting technical compromises of 3D modeling. (In short, it'd look a lot like Diablo 2 with the gloves off.)

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that the first Diablo game is mostly pre-rendered in 3D. The artists at Blizzard North (called Condor back in those days) used 3D modeling programs to model the background AND the characters. Sprites were assembled using each frame that was rendered, and this is what is chiefly responsible for the 3D look of the Diablo games. The decision to go sprite-based again in Diablo II was strictly a technological one: polygons rendering and shading in realtime hadn't yet approached the level where the artists were satisfied with the look of the game, and the number of polygons one could handle on the screen couldn't come close to what Diablo II required.

It's interesting to look at the game all these years later, because even though were were sprite-based, a lot of people back then thought it was real-time 3D with a locked isometric perspective, and now the assumption seems to be that since it was a sprite-based game, Diablo must have been hand-drawn. There's a number of issues when it comes to hand-drawn art, and our computers and game systems have not been designed for it. There are no sprite-based graphics accelerators to help optimize the drawing of pre-rendered frames, and there's a finite limit to how quickly data can be brought in through the system.

For Diablo II, the sprite sizes were significantly bigger than anything in Diablo I, and there were portions of the game that could lag or pop due to the sheer number and size of loading the sprites into memory. (If you've ever been killed by Duriel at the end of Act II dungeon before you finished loading the area, you know what I'm talking about).

One of the issues I've had with King of Fighters' claim to be hand drawn is that they don't explicitly define what this means; does this mean actually putting pencil to paper and drawing out each individual frame, before they are scanned in, or does this mean that an artist is using a Wacom tablet with an animation program on the computer? Both can qualify as being hand drawn, it's just that one way is much more labor intensive than the other.

With all of that being said, is it possible for Diablo III to be hand drawn? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not -- first think about all the combinations of armor and weapons that a character in World of Warcraft has, now imagine hand drawing 30 frames for each of the following: getting hit, casting a spell, attacking, talking, and running and you've got just the basics -- that doesn't account for all the different directions the character could be facing, or any of the extra variations of getting hit or casting a spell you might want to include. Doing all that work by hand just to create a look doesn't make sense when you can emulate that look with much less work using 3D animation tools.