fbpx
Menu Close
  • WoW Weekly

Blizzard Introduces Azeroth Choppers

Update on how the ingame chopper will be chosen and how you’ll be able to get them:

Quote from: Blizzard
Earlier today, we announced the Azeroth Choppers head-to-head match-up between the Horde and Alliance, and we’re very excited to share the upcoming episodes and final bike creations with you. We saw a few questions following the announcement and wanted to take a moment to clarify things.

First, we want to make it clear that players globally will be able to vote for their favorite faction bike—either Alliance or Horde. Second, the bike that receives the most votes will then be made into a faction-specific-only mount and be available FREE to all players (usable when playing characters of the winning faction, of course). Your vote will be very important and could just be the one that lands your favorite faction a shiny new mount. If you haven’t watched the trailer yet, check it out here and stay tuned to Azerothchoppers.com for more details!

Quote from: Blizzard

Led by legendary chopper builder Paul Jr., Team Horde will face off against Team Alliance to determine which epic custom-built bike will come out on top in the ultimate showdown. When the dust settles and the final designs are revealed it will be YOUR vote that decides which of these mechanical marvels will be recreated as an in-game mount.

Meet the Blizzard Teams

Alliance
Chris Metzen
Terran Gregory
Monte Krol

Horde
Sam Didier
Jason Hutchins
Gary Platner

Don’t miss out on all of the action! Azeroth Choppers premieres 4.17.14 on http://www.AzerothChoppers.com

Female Draenei Character Model Preview

Blizzard came with quite a surprise tonight! After yesterday’s Tauren preview they have now released a female Draenei model preview, which is of course the real one and not the april fools one. Check out the preview below!

Quote from: Blizzard

Hello again! I’m Senior Art Director Chris Robinson, and today we wanted to give you a super quick look at our current progress with the new female Draenei.
After the April Fools’ joke we wanted to ensure you weren’t waiting too long to see where we’re at with her actual character model update. Keep in mind that she’s still in-progress, and doesn’t have any animation to pose her body or face.

Animation is a big factor for the female Draenei specifically, so it’s important to keep it in mind when comparing the two. The original female Draenei has some fairly extreme posing that happens when she’s animated. If you were to see the static model of the original without any posing you’d see that it looks very similar to the new one. With her pose applied her shoulders stretch backward, her pelvis rotates forward, and her chin lowers—causing her head to angle downwards. The curvature in her lower back, and why the head shape looks slightly different, are also due to the new model not having the same posing applied yet. She also looks a lot taller! Ultimately all of those things will be addressed when we animate the new model, they just don’t take place until she’s rigged and sent on to the animation team.

We hope you enjoyed this super quick look at where we’re at right now, and we’ll continuing sharing more in-progress art as we go forward. The next article in the Artcraft series we’re planning is a look at the creation of the Spires of Arak, a new zone coming in Warlords of Draenor. Thanks for stopping by!

Senior Character Artist Joe Keller did the majority of the work on this revamp, with direction from our Lead Character Artist Tyson Murphy (@tysmurph), and myself (@artofcgrobinson).

Tauren Male Model Preview

Blizzard came out with the next character model preview surprisingly quickly! Not only just model previews, but animation previews too!

Quote from: Blizzard

Hey there everyone, I’m Steve Aguilar, lead animator for the World of Warcraft animation team. Today we’re showing off the male Tauren, and with some help from the rest of the animation team, we’re going to give you a look at the animation processes we use to bring this big guy to life.

Before we even started animating him, we already knew the Tauren was going to be a blast to work on based on all of the detail the character art team added.

As we begin applying animations, we’re extra careful not to stray too far from the original. It’s important to us to retain the essence of the original animations, because how a characters walk, move, and carry themselves help to define their personality. We use all of the original animations as a starting point, and then go through the process of cleaning them up and adding additional articulation. Let’s delve into what that process looks like.

The Re-Animator

Steve Aguilar: The normal “stand” animation is one of the most important animations because this is what you, the player, see the majority of the time. When you stop moving or walk up to an NPC, the stand is the key pose that is being used. A huge chunk of animations also rely on this pose so they can easily transition into and out of it.

Dev Interviews About WoD Alpha – Final Boss.TV

warlords banner small

The second interview that took place today was over at Final Boss.TV! Again Zarhym and Celestalon joined them! Check out the transcript below, with a special thanks to Mario for transcribing it while it aired!

Jonathan Zarhym – JZ
Chadd Celestalon Nervig – CCN

Q: What do you do at Blizzard?

Title: WoW Senior Community Rep.
JZ – Is a weird title. Most people know us as Community Managers. Posting on Forums, Manage Official Pages (Face, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter), PR Marketing Campaigns, Community Feedback.We take seriously what we do.

Title: WoW Technical Game Designer
CCN – I work closely with the games mechanics designers. Systems design. I talk a lot with the core designers of the game. The main aspects of the game and how the class design and collaboration between the various departments that fine-tune the game experience.

I got started in Blizzard during WoTLK – during ICC. I was a theorycrafter. And back at that time, there were a lot of issues with “armor penetration”. So I created a few spreadsheets with numbers and calculations on the subject, to improve the mechanic of the game which seemed broken at the time. So I posted onto Blizzard pages and the next few days, I received a letter from Ghostcrawler that said: “Hey, I like your ideas, let’s have lunch”. And that’s how I ended at Blizzard.

Q: How do you feel about your job?

CCN – I think is important to follow what the community has to say about the game; I like talking to people and seeing what and how things are at all levels. Reason why I stay up late most of the time.

Q: Overall, does your information have a positive effect?

CCN – Absolutely yes. Players is what makes WOW alive and it inherently, makes the game better. We spend a lot of time on the patch notes to explain to the community everything about the changes or everything that we intend to do with the game. It helps the players to see the bigger picture with what we intend to do with the changes.

Reason also why we redesigned the patch notes format. People now can click directly on their class and skip down to that particular section, instead of reading through all the text.

Dev Interviews About WoD Alpha – Convert to Raid

On Sunday Zarhym and Celestalon are on to two other podcasts Convert to Raid and Final Boss.tv . And they are interviewed about the Warlords of Draenor Alpha. Check out the transcript from the Convert to Raid interview below. We might have missed some questions/answers but once the VoDs are up we’ll go back to see what is missing.

Convert To Raid:
Q: What is happening with the Alpha right now? How many people etc?
A: Right now it’s internal employee take home alpha. The reason we made the announcement, is that we plan on inviting a small amount of people soon. For that to happen the files need to be uploaded to battle.net. Which means that it could be datamined. So to not cause confusion we announced everything we have, so people know what’s going on.

Q: What does the roll out look as far as timing goes?
A: It’s still To Be Determined. The time frame is still uncertain. Even this week the announcement was delayed due to a problem with the 64bit client.

Q: Open beta, no open beta?
A: I don’t know. Generally it might be more limited than mists.

On time between Blizzcon and these patch notes:
Q: Did you guys encounter some problems? or was this the intended time line?
A: We didn’t want to step on D3 and Hearthstone’s thunder. But also the problems that occur like the client issues and builds that didn’t work. The stability of the builds is often suspect.

A: We have been in Alpha for a while now. It doesn’t mean much to the public but it’s still been a mile stone. All blizzard employees now have access to the Alpha, which in and of itself is a milestone.