The clock on the release for World of Warcraft's next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is ticking down, and Blizzard is continuing to show the fans that they're still knee deep in production. The developer has been offering peeks of a number of different character redesigns specifically for the new expansion, and today, they have one more to show off: the female Night Elf.
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A new blog post is out from the developer on Battle.net, detailing some of the changes that were implemented for the character model. Wrote Lead Character Artist Tyson Murphy, "The Night Elves have such a distinct but subtle character, and we spent a lot of effort in trying to help that come through. As with all of the updated character models, our goal is to keep everything the original model accomplished intact, while using the additional fidelity to realize characteristics that we weren't able to fully represent with the lower polygon counts and texture resolutions. Overall, we've made her new model a little more defined, made some of her proportions a bit more realistic, and added a bit more muscle tone. We wanted to visually communicate that she is a fully capable warrior huntress, and small details like muscle definition help highlight that. We also put additional focus on her hands and fingernails, giving a very slight point to her nails to provide just a hint of a more feral nature."
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The end result? It's what collaborator Tamara Bakhlycheva described as "beautiful, wild, and dangerous".
The female Night Elf is the latest character model to undergo the redesign process, and joins both the male and female orcs, gnome, dwarf, forsaken, tauren, and others, all of which Blizzard has offered peeks at in past Battle.net posts.
Beyond featuring character redesigns, the Warlords of Draenor expansion will allow players to level up to 100 from the previous cap of 90. New dungeons and raids are an obvious inclusion, but it will also introduce a "Mythic" tier of heroics, which promises to be the hardest version of raids yet.
It will also let players upgrade a garrsion, to which they can recruit and order NPCs to carry out specific missions, earning them rewards like special items. PvP is also undergoing changesm and the new island of Ashran will be added, full of objectives to complete and battles to...well...battle.
The expansion is set to release this fall. You can check out its announcement trailer below.