Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Blood Elf Artcraft Update

With Warlords rolling merrily along, nearing the two-week mark, and 6.0 having come out a while ago now, there's one piece of the puzzle that has been missing - New Blood Elf Models. Well, Blizzard has just released an Artcraft showing off their work on the new models.


And yes, it's both genders.


Much like the Draenei, the Blood Elves, despite only coming out two years after the vanilla models, were a huge step up, and so I think what we're seeing is more subtle updates. One thing that I think we can expect though is a great deal more expressiveness in the facial animation. The pose and overall look definitely holds true to the originals, but they just look crisper.

We're not sure when these models will be implemented, but given that we've gotten this Artcraft, I'm fairly confident it will be by 6.1.

I imagine that the character design team's next work will be on new playable races or some such thing, but I do hope they come back and do another pass on the Cataclysm models at some point. While the Cata races look fantastic when they're not saying anything, their facial expressions are still locked into the old jaw-flap. Given that we're seeing non-pre-rendered cutscenes using the new models that seem to actually have their mouths synching up with what they're saying (more or less,) it'd be nice to get that same level of flexibility on the Cataclysm races.

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