The chunky blue Draenaei are the latest World of Warcraft race to go under the spotlight in one of Blizzard’s blog posts showing off the graphical updates coming up in next expansion Warlords of Draenor.
Not quite as impressive as some of the other upgraded models perhaps, but still nice and shiny. It’s pretty strange, as someone who hasn’t played WoW since the year it came out, to see the improvement in these new models. Wonder if the Deadmines look any different these days?
The male Draenei model discussed in the blog post was added back in 2007’s Burning Crusade expansion pack. ”The original was one of the better character models in the game,” writes art director Chris Robinson, ”so it didn’t require a ton of translation’”but with higher-resolution textures and more polygons to work with, we were able to bump up his fidelity quite a bit, as well as improve how we convey emotion through a new animation rig.”
The result is a sexy blue hunk of… goat-man…thing… with better texture definition and a much greater variety of animations. Check out those individual teeth. Look forward to this and all the other upgraded visuals, as well as a bucketful of new content, when Warlords of Draenor hits this Autumn.
