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Warlords of Draenor cinematics, machinima, and more with Terran Gregory
If you've played World of Warcraft since the beginning, you've doubtless witnessed a slow evolution of story development take place in the form of in game cinematics and increasingly complex and beautiful patch trailers. The majority of these trailers can be chalked up to In-game Cinematic Project Director Terran Gregory, who has been toiling away on bringing us the very best of in game machinima since Burning Crusade. In Warlords of Draenor, those in game cinematics take a giant leap forward, featured in nearly every zone of the new expansion -- and with new models galore, they've never looked better. As the launch of Warlords marches ever closer, we had the opportunity to finally sit down and have a spoiler-free chat with Terran about the cinematics of Warlords -- as well as his beginnings with Blizzard, and the progress of cinematics from mere machinima trailers to in game marvels of technical prowess.
How much should an expansion cost?
We've talked about this briefly in a recent Breakfast Topic, but that's not the same as actually standing up and taking a position on an issue, and I (specifically, I, Matthew Rossi, not all of WoW Insider) do have a position on this one - namely, that this expansion will likely contain as much if not more gameplay, art assets, and overall design work as any game coming out, and that frankly the last couple of expansions have been under what they should have cost. I didn't come to this decision in a vacuum, either - I come to it as someone who does not want to pay the price as established. I'm extremely penurious. almost outright parsimonious when it comes to money. I don't like spending it. So when I heard how much the expansion was going to cost (the day the pre-orders became available) I immediately balked at it. It's only ten bucks more to buy Titanfall, I said to myself, and that's a completely new game. And then I read this post by Kim Acuff (who often comments here at WoW Insider as Ember Dione) a developer on Skylanders, and I started to rethink my position on the relative cost of the expansion, how much it should cost, and the validity of the whole "as expensive as a new game" discussion. Because here's the fact - each WoW expansion has effectively been a new game.
About the Bloggers: moo Money
Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. Click here to read more About the Bloggers.What do you do for WoW Insider?I write the daily machinima posts for both WoW Insider, and its broader MMO sister site, Massively.What's your main right now?This won't make me very popular, but I actually don't really play WoW. I did for a while after it came out, but I'm not a very good grinder and it just got lonely.This is an outrage! How dare you write about WoW without playing it?That's actually a really good question. I got my start in machinima roughly two years ago when I was hired to promote it in Second Life, an oft-mocked virtual world. Through experimentation with machinima, as well as the education that I provided to others, I became known as one of the "It" people for machinima in SL. When Second Life Insider folded into Massively in November 2007, I volunteered to write the daily Cinemassively. After about 45 days straight of blogging them, WI asked me to do the same for WoW Moviewatch!Read on to find out more about the Notorious M.O.O. ...
