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Warlords of Draenor: Adriacraft hunts down new male tauren model
Our friends over at Adriacraft have been busy mining away at data from the Warlords of Draenor alpha, and discovered something interesting -- the new tauren male model. While we saw a brief glimpse of the model at BlizzCon, it was just a flat model, lacking expression or animation. The images from Adriacraft look to be from the character selection screen, and the model has its familiar stance and expression. Adriacraft has other shots from the character selection screen as well, including both male and female dwarves, male and female gnomes, and the male orc model. A tweet from Senior Art Director Chris Robinson indicated that the tauren male and his animations will be featured in an upcoming edition of Artcraft -- so players wondering what the model looks like with some emotion on its face may not have to wait too long to see it. For more screenshots and images of the new models, take a look at our gallery.
Draenei and blood elf models now on list of planned updates
Draenei and blood elf players, it's time to get excited. According to a tweet made by Senior Art Director Chris Robinson, both sets of models are now also on the update list. While the Warlords of Draenor website has yet to mention this change, Robinson stated that the page simply needed to be updated to reflect the news. At BlizzCon, it was originally stated that the initial model updates would be for vanilla models only, and that blood elves and draenei would be addressed at some point after the new models were released for Warlords. While this is amazing news, please note that this isn't an indicator or confirmation that all the new models will be available when Warlords is released. However, according to another Twitter post by Robinson, a new character reveal with an updated model is on the way. The character reveal will likely be posted on the official Warlords of Draenor website sometime soon. With the amount of progress already made with new models, I'm pretty excited to see what they're going to reveal this time around -- maybe new human or night elf models? We'll have to wait and see.
BlizzCon 2013: First look at Warlords of Draenor, Alliance-side
With the hotly-anticipated announcement of World of Warcraft's next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, comes the almost-as-equally hotly anticipated opportunity to get a glimpse of what's in store for us at the BlizzCon WoW demo station. I had a chance to run the first part of a new dungeon -- Bloodmaul Slag Mines -- with Matticus and a crew of other con-goers, but after that, I took the opportunity to play with some character creation and explore a little bit. Three of the playable races have new models available on the BlizzCon demo: orcs, dwarves, and gnomes. I picked a female dwarf mage, and spent a bit of time customizing her. While there don't seem to be any new hair style or color options (at least not yet), the new models blow me away. I really cannot overemphasize how impressive they are. I'm most struck by how true they feel. I have worried that with the character model upgrade, the toons that I've played for years and come to know and love would suddenly feel like different characters entirely. As it turned out, there was no need to fret. The models are exactly what I'd hoped they'd be: upgrades. They feel just like the characters we've grown to love, only with more polygons, more nuance, and more expression. Bravo, Blizzard, truly.
BlizzCon 2013: New character models in "Warlords of Draenor"
UPDATE: A lot of new pictures and animations were featured in the "Art of World of Warcraft" panel. I've updated the gallery with lots of screenshots of the new male orc, female gnome, male gnome, male dwarf, and quick glimpses of the female dwarf and male tauren! Blizzard also announced today that they are initially updating the character models of all the original races, and the dranei and blood elves. The worgen, goblin, and pandaren models will not be updated at the time. One of the most hotly-anticipated features in WoW has always been new character models for reasons that are probably obvious to all those of you not playing a pandaren. Not only have new models been confirmed for Warlords of Draenor, but samples of the new male orc, dwarf, and gnome models are now available on the new expansion pack's site. There's not a lot up yet, but you'll get a glimpse of their idle animations and screenshots of some emotes, and all of them look amazing. We've put together a gallery of pictures from the "World of Warcraft: What's Next" panel with Blizzard's own screenshots. According to Rob Pardo, the new models won't all be released at once, so it may be a while before we know what all of them will look like. However, they're also coming with a battery of new animations, and we caught a small sample of those for you too. I'm feeling a little full-circleish, seeing as I wrote the post confirming Blizzard's work on new character models at BlizzCon 2011. I hope my female tauren can keep her green eyes.
