Revamped Male Draenei and Undead Are Now Alpha-Live

After a nice little art craft post about the male human, it looks like we're getting more models revealed. To be fair, we had seen the male undead briefly during Blizzcon, but we now also have the male Draenei.

And as one big ol' caveat: these are still works in progress. While I imagine the Orcs, for example, are mostly done (given that they were one of the first revamps rolled out and that they're so central to Warlords,) this is just our first glimpse of the new models for some of these races.

Images are from MMO-Champion

The Draenei is one of those newer, BC models, and while that's still 8 years ago now, I've always felt that the BC races looked noticeably better than the Vanilla ones, even if they only post-date them by 2 years. I would guess it's because making two new races is easier than eight new ones. Anyway, not much to say here, except that it's looking fine. Not sure, but they might have beefed up the legs a bit, but still, it mostly looks like a polish.

Given that we're not getting a radical visual redesign, I think this is a very satisfying touch-up of the male undead (wow, in the last 24 hours they've hit the races of my two Alliance co-mains and my Horde main.)

The thing I'm most excited to see, however, is what these look like in motion. Granted, it's not often that we look directly at our characters' faces, so all the speaking animation is going to be special circumstances only (or cut-scenes/machinima, which is actually pretty exciting to look forward to,) but I'm also excited to see running and fighting animation, which is certainly something we see a lot of.

And because I didn't do it last time, let's look at the count:

Previewed/Spotted Somewhere:

Human 2/2
Night Elf 1/2 (female)
Dwarf 2/2
Gnome 2/2
Draenei 2/2

Orc 2/2
Troll 0/2
Tauren 1/2 (male)
Undead 2/2
Blood Elf 0/2

So it looks like we've gotten nearly all the Alliance races that are due for an update. The Horde's still lagging behind, though. We have yet to see any of the new Trolls or Blood Elf models, nor the female tauren.

Still, one of the glass-half-full sides to the long wait for Warlords of Draenor is that it looks like the art team has had a lot of time to work on these models and get them up and running. Previously they said they were unlikely to have them all live by the time 6.0 came out, but it's looking more and more like they'll be able to do that.

They had even mentioned taking a second crack at Worgen and Goblins. Obviously, the Cata races are still looking pretty good - indeed, they were part of what inspired the revamp of the Vanilla/BC ones. But I would love to see the new facial rigging system they have used for the Cata guys. (Also, can you give Worgen more 2-handed strike animations? Too many silly flips - doesn't seem very wolflike, you know?)