World of Warcraft Developer Livestream – Inside the Art of WoW

Blizzard Entertainment’s senior 3D animator Ian Lang and 3D artist Kenny McBride recently took part in a livestream where they talked about the intricacies of their creative process that results in World of Warcraft’s great-looking and instantly recognizable art assets. During the livestream they also revealed that a couple of new allied races (Zandalari Trolls and Kul Tiran Humans) will be coming to the game around the week of March 12, 2019. Here’s the full VOD:

We sat down with Senior 3D Animator Ian Lang and 3D Artist Kenny McBride to discuss the wizardry behind World of Warcraft’s art development and animation.

And while you’re here, you may also be interested in this official forums post by one of WoW’s community managers that updates us on the ongoing development of World of Warcraft Classic. A few sample paragraphs:

Hello Classic enthusiasts! We’ve been following the discussions about Classic closely here on the forums (and elsewhere) throughout the winter, and wanted to give you an update on a few things that the Classic development team has worked through since BlizzCon and the Classic demo.

The feedback we got from the demo was fantastic. Thank you to everyone who gave us so much feedback to work with, especially the community members who compiled lists of issues that people found with the demo. We’ve looked at everything that was reported, and want to share a few anecdotes with you so you can see how we’re tackling these issues.

One thing many players noticed was the incorrect health regeneration and the spell critical hit multiplier. Good catch! Going into the demo, we thought we’d fixed that and were surprised to see the issue crop up. Before BlizzCon, we specifically checked health and mana regeneration, and fixed the critical hit cases. We also did combat and regeneration tests to make sure we had those accurate.

It turns out that there was a discrepancy between how Classic was configured on our environment at the office (correct!) and the environment serving the demo to you (not correct…). Tracking that down taught us how to best check our environment configuration as we prepare it for launch.