Following the revelation of Diablo III in June at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event in Paris, France, a lot of fans complained about the game's new art direction. In fact, the sentiment became so prevalent that an online petition sprung up. The petition managed to garner over 50,000 signatures in a short period of time, which caused many to believe that Blizzard would go back to the drawing board.

This week, however, Diablo III's lead designer, Jay Wilson, posted a blog stating that his team is happy with the new art direction for Diablo III. According to Wilson, the game has progressed too far in its development for any major artistic changes to take place. Wilson had other reasons for his team's decision to adopt a new colorful art palette for the upcoming sequel. He believes that the traditionally dark and gothic art style of the first two Diablo titles would not look as good in the new game's fully three-dimensional environments. He also contends that said darker art style, when it does appear in 3D titles, tends to appear in shorter games like Gears of War.

Wilson also had a statement in regards to allegations that Diablo III had adopted an art style similar to World of Warcraft:

"I think it's impossible for us to not be influenced by our other creations... there’s a lot of back and forth between the two games, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We look at World of Warcraft and the art style there is more cartoony than we wanted, but in terms of target identification and having a world that feels like you can move through it and spend lots of time in it, there's a lot of elements to the art style that really work. We wanted an art style that really feels like Blizzard. And we pull new influences from a lot of areas. I think people over-emphasize the World of Warcraft comparison. But are we influenced by World of Warcraft? Of course. As I think anyone who makes games nowadays, they have to be."

• MTV Multiplayer

• Diablo 3 Art Petition