New Human Model
The art team continues to revamp the player character models for Warlords and in the latest Artcraft they showed off the new Human male model.
Check it out:
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Old model on the (R-picture, far left) for comparison.
As with all of the other previews we’ve seen thus far, the updates are tremendous and look great. The official blog post also mentions that other in-progress model revamps will be hitting the Warlords of Draenor Alpha as well. Here are some of those models from the character creation screen:
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Undead male and Draenei male
As Blizzard releases better shots of these races once they’re complete I’ll be sure to share them in future articles. Based on the facial animation of this build I’d say it’s safe to assume the undead model is further along than the Draenei.
Alpha Additions
A new build of the Warlords of Draenor Alpha recently went live and featured a few new additions. One of the most notable is a new series of options that let users set separate graphic settings for raids. This is wonderful news for many players who don’t run the latest hardware and have to lower their settings just to handle all the visual chaos of larger raids.
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New raid graphics settings.
As you can see there is a separate section in the system options menu that allows you to tweak all the visual settings you would normally see in the regular graphics settings. Upon zoning into a new raid these specific settings are automatically applied. An awesome addition I never even thought of.
Upon logging in for the first time after the update users will be greeted with a new “What’s New” window briefly describing a few of the new Warlords features.
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A “What’s new” window upon login.
The new interface features I touched upon in the last All Things Warcraft column but didn’t discuss the new Premade Group Finder. As of this writing the Premade Group Finder is not currently active in the alpha. The idea behind this new tool as you’ve probably already guessed is to allow players to find groups specific to the content they’re looking to do. You can browse a list of forming groups based on several filters as well as look for players interested in what you’re doing to fill out your party or raid. Now when your group loses a player you won’t need to send someone to a city to spam the trade channels, you can just pop open this window and see who’s immediately available. As any World of Warcraft player can tell you the trade channels are nothing more than LFG spam so hopefully this new tool will make things easier for everyone.
Naxxramas Dated
One of the community managers for Hearthstone took to the forums last week to let players know that Blizzard is currently targeting July for the release of the Curse of Naxxramas adventure. They also announced that pricing would be announced on July 1st which may have already happened depending on when you’re reading this. All we know so far is that the first wing of the adventure will be free while all subsequent wings can be purchased with real money or in-game gold.
The Hearthstone team has also been slowly unveiling new cards over the past several weeks - here are three recent reveals to get you excited:
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New Mage, Hunter and Priest cards.
One note about the Webspinner card: Ben Brode, Senior game designer on Hearthstone, took to twitter to clarify the card text:
It doesn't pull cards from your deck, just puts a new card into your hand.
— Ben Brode (@bdbrode) June 19, 2014
If you’re a hunter and are running a beast deck you should be excited - upon death this card could draw you any beast in the game, regardless of it being in your collection or not. I don’t know about you but I’m dying to get my hands on some new cards and have the metagame shaken up.
Many of you have said that all the changes and additions coming with Warlords of Draenor are “too little, too late.” What new features or content would grab your attention and bring you back? Let me know in the comments below!
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Reza Lackey / Reza is a giant nerd who loves video games, board games, film and way too many other things. Works in the film industry, on some startups and thinks science is cool. Also launches rockets.
