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Glamour shots: Rift's visuals crew rock the IRC
Like it or not, a good first impression is often heavily influenced by looks. You could be the most intelligent, gentle, funny person in the world, but no date is going to give you a second chance if you show up to dinner wearing a [NAME OF POP CULTURE ICON YOU LIKE TO RAG ON] t-shirt. Likewise, the dev team at Rift: Planes of Telara is working hard not only to make the game as fun to play as possible, but to make it look fashionably awesome while doing so. Trion World's Scott White (technical art director) and Russ Cahalan (lead animator) fielded questions about Rift's visuals, animations and style in a recent IRC dev chat. The Q&A is chock-full of useful tidbits, such as info about the existence of a weather system, the wide range of emotes, weapon effects (think glowy and drippy!), particle effects, and stances. The duo also discussed the process of creating the animations and world visuals, including the enormous effort that went into making rifts some of the best eyecandy you'll see in an MMO. Cahalan cracked open the door to give players a peek into the range of weapon animations in Rift that will be present: "We don't have any animation sets that will have flexible weapons like chain swords, whips, or flails currently. The player animation sets are currently pushing close to 500 each, and those include 10 different sets per race/gender to cover the weapon categories we have in game. Those cover a pretty wide variety of weapons, and give a good amount of visual variety between players of different races. We do, however, have some weapons that contain motion. But those are generally VERY special weapons, and are highly desirable." You can read the full transcript at Telara Central.
He Said, She Said: Tauren Females
He Said , She Said is a new feature at WoW Insider, which looks at the game from masculine and feminine points of view. This week David Bowers and Amanda Dean take a look at what it takes to play a female Tauren. We all chose our characters for different reasons, potential class and racial abilities should be primary among them. Many people play only characters of their real-life gender, while others chose their character's gender based on appearance or role-playing needs. For whatever reasons, Tauren females are a vast minority. Amanda believes that in most cases it takes a real girl to roll one of these femmes, what do you think?Read on for our discussion. In a world of gamers and gamer girls, let's take some time to examine what makes us the same and what makes us different. Here at WoW Insider we're discussing all kinds of in game issues through the lens of gender. Check out our inaugural post, we welcome all of your comments, and be sure to send in your ideas for our discussion.
