Especially appropriate with D2R just around the corner.
The way Mephisto was designed for this game looks nice but he looks extremely different from his appearance in Diablo. Really, HotS Mephisto looks more like a WoW villain.
A skin where he looks like his D2 form with an ice ball for his skull missile would be awesome.
https://static3.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Featured-Diablo-Mephisto-Facts.jpg
This looks 10 times worse
honestly it would probably confuse people like me who associate mephisto with floating triangle heads.
His HotS appearance is meant to be a composite of his Diablo II and Diablo III looks. I think it’s perfectly fine. Mephisto is the master of never looking the same way twice.
The developers answered this long ago and it was very much a purposeful choice to make him look the way he does.
Instead of having to keep and maintain separate assets for specific countries to pass the censorship and age ratting requirements of those countries, the developers decided to create assets to be as internationally compatible as possible. This has resulted in designs deviating from lore or classic appearances as seen in many countries with more lenient censorship and age ratting guidelines.
There are three design concepts that were most heavily affected by this. Tychus and Gazlowe lost their cigars to comply with stricter age ratting guide lines for some countries which are trying to discourage smoking among youth. Any human skeleton related hero such as Stiches, Kel Thuzard and Mephisto have had their skeletal parts significantly modified to be less human so as to comply with the censorship laws of some countries. Lastly most blood was removed, again to comply with strict age ratting requirements of some countries.
Well I guess this does make sense. Do you have a link to a post / interview etc?
Unfortunately not. However you might be able to find something by looking up Tychus/Gazlowe and why their cigars were removed. And the making of Kel Thuzard for HotS.
Actually there’s a reason why they made Mephisto the way he is, instead of staying true to his D2 design.
I believe the design philosophy of the dev team were;
More Details than WarCraft
Less Grungy than StarCraft
Less Gory than Diablo
All of these were to create an aesthetic that is cohesive to HotS because having multiple characters from a fantasy RPG, a science fiction space RTS, and a Gothic horror Dungeon Crawler can be aesthetically challenging when combined. The characters may not look like they belong in the game, so they had to remodel most of them.
Also censorship laws.
