I'll just share this again for anyone who may have missed it. It's the entire GDC presentation "The Art of Diablo III" in its entirety including slides.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015306/The-Art-of-Diablo
What I find hilarious, is that many of the arguments made regarding the look of Diablo 3, especially when compared to PoE, is that Blizzard is some how incapable of producing what people are considering technically superior graphical techniques. In fact, there isn't one decision regarding Diablo 3's graphical approach that wasn't an extremely calculated decision be it technical or artistic.
Have you ever looked at the list of those employed at Blizzard? It's a veritable who's who of the industry's best artists, programmers, animators, etc. Still think Blizzard is incapable of creating what you think is superior art or graphical techniques? If so, I think you may be thinking a little naively.
So the archer in PoE pulls an arrow and notches it while in D3 the demon hunter does not. Wow, Blizzard's art department must be full of a bunch of inadequate animators. Seriously? Do you think this is a huge priority for Blizzard in the bigger scope of things right now? Never mind that the Ranger in PoE has a static quiver that never moves while the demon hunter has a huge array of quivers located in different positions based on the armor worn. Never mind that in the second GIF of the PoE animation examples the Ranger actually has the arrow backwards in her hand and it instantly flips in the right direction. Think priority and scope here. I mean PoE isn't going to have both genders for each class. Is it because they are incapable? No, they just don't have the resources for it at the moment. Again, priority and scope.
Do you really think Blizzard is incapable of producing excessively noisy textures with an overblown specular map so that the normal maps look more pronounced? While you may see technical achievement, I see poor decisions and rookie mistakes. Visually, while the lighting in the caves with spec and normal maps make look cool, there is a lot of immaturity in regards to screen readability when everything is equally high detailed and viewed from a distance.
In the end I could really give two fucks which game your going to play, but jesus christ can we just end with all of the idiocy being stated as if it were some fact?
And yes, at this point...I'm mad bro!
-ps- This is the gif I was referring to. It came from the other D3 bashing thread.