Tuesday, July 21, 2009

3.2 Playable Races: Definitely Worgen!


By now, you've all heard about the masks. The dataminers over at MMO Champion found 2 new sets of Halloween masks in the PTR build: Male and Female Goblins, and Male and Female Worgen.

Female Worgen don't exist in the game, and the the textures are way more detailed than most current in-game models.

I'm going to join Boubouille and go on the record as saying that this is definitive evidence of Worgen as a new playable race.

Reasons:
1) All previous Halloween masks have been for playable races only.

2) The female worgen out of nowhere.

3) This is the big one: look really carefully at the textures. Sure, they look more detailed, right? Now go look at the new models for bear/cat. Notice how old textures are blocky, with solid colors, while the new textures take advantage of higher resolutions to add detail and shading that make the model look even more 3-D than it actually is? Creating depth even with a low polygon count? Detailed fur, rolls, ridges, etc.?

Now look at the detailed folds of skin around the mask's eyes. And the detail put into the fur, a quality only seen before on the new druid models. These textures reek of having a ton of work already put into them. It's just too much for something throwaway, especially considering that there's already 2 different male Worgen textures in the game. It took them this long to update druid forms, do you really expect me to believe that the art department could be bothered to put this much work into a throwaway mask? Not a chance.


I guess there's a chance it's a hoax, but it's so elaborate and unnecessary that I seriously doubt it.

The next edition of the PTR added masks for all of the races that have been speculated in the past as possible future playable races: Murlocs, Vykrul, Naga, etc. Even a never-before-seen female Ogre!

Except the female ogre isn't even a model-mapped texture, it's just a copy/paste of a drawing from the WoW tabletop RPG!

I think it's pretty clear that these are just meant as a misdirection to cover up the leak. Fully expect the Worgen/Goblin announcement next month. I'll be looking forward to playing both.

3 comments:

Rich said...

no, no and no.

unless the 'OTHER, MYSTERY' announcement is that you roll new toons at 65 (which wouldn't surprise me, but hey), they aren't going to dump new races into the mix.

think about how lazy they're being with everything, then think about making every piece of armor ingame 'fit' new races... even if they just use 'undead & gnome' sizes to fit the two 'new' races, there would be enough clipping issues to make it an issue.

And remember I said LAZY, not SLOPPY.

hold me to this, i'm standing firm that they're JUST MASKS.

MLW said...

All armor already fits Goblins, Ixobelle. Check out the tournament realms, or a model viewer. That reduces your work by half.

Redesigning all armor for Worgen? Well, they've gone through this exercise already in TBC, there's one less race, and there's no new class to design. And maybe they will just recycle another race's skeleton anyway.

Sounds like a pretty lazy solution to me.

Starting at level 1 seems the biggest roadblock though.

Hatch said...

I'm still banking on the xpac obliterating the Old World and letting everyone start at level 40 and going to 68 in a revamped version of Azeroth (restructured by the Cataclysm), then returning

I agree that they won't add new races without severely cutting down the leveling time, but I get the impression from all the changes lately that they're itching to do so and just waiting on an expansion.

Even if it isn't a new race, you have to admit that they've already put a ton of work into those wolf textures. There's *something* behind it.