Courtesy of Blizzard, here’s a look at what the Tauren will look, move and act like in World of Warcraft’s new expansion-slash-graphical-update, Warlords of Draenor.
In a post on the game’s blog titled “Running of the Bulls”, several developers working on the updated character models for Warlords of Draenor came out to discuss the Male Tauren, whose new look was first revealed at Blizzard’s most recent Blizzcon — the difference being that now, instead of just stills, we get to look at some animations.
It’s readily apparent how much more detailed yet how familiar the new model on the right looks, but you need some emotes to really appreciate the difference.
From the swaying braids to the lip movements and facial expressions, it just looks so much more pleasing to the eye.
Lovely.
Check out the blog post for a writeup of the technical nitty-gritty behind these animations, and a few more videos which show off how the animators work.
Artcraft – Running of the Bulls [WoW Development Blog]
Comments
8 responses to “World Of Warcraft’s Shiny New HD Tauren In Motion”
I find it very weird how long it’s taking a company like Blizzard to make these models.
Blizzard are huge on iterative design. They go through tens or hundreds of iterations and only show the model to the rest of us when it’s close to finished. It’s a bit slower, but a good way of maintaining style and quality across multiple models.
That’s a good way of looking at it, well said.
Hmm, the new ones face does not seem as serious etc, not sure if I like.
looking at him all i can think is “The internet is for porn”
I’ve always thought Blizzard were always just a little bit behind a lot of other game companies in the graphics department. There’s just something about their art style that’s never grown with the industry. I know the WoW engine is incredibly old (2004-ish), but these models don’t scream “HD” to me. They scream “oh yeah, we should probably catch up a tad”.
One thing WoW has going for it is accessibility to a range of PC hardware setups due to how simple it is. To say their artstyle has never grown with the industry is a strength, as it never ‘had’ to grow. They cemented themselves with an art style that millions of people accept, even in the face of Asian MMOs with super-realistic and detailed character creation. The updates they are doing now is just adding increased expressiveness to the characters and more secondary animations (like the beards in these clips).
They always had the capability to making high detailed graphics. Their game cinematic department can attest to that. The only reason they are doing a spruce up now is because the detail gap between the old races from Vanilla WoW, and the newer races like the Pandaren, is pretty huge and the game is starting to look like two different halves.
Do people even play this game anymore?
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