Sub-Race Photoshop Mockups

[Baracuda]

Felblood elves betrayed the Sin'dorei, attacked Silvermoon City, took over the Sunwell and almost succeeded in summoning Kil'Jaeden to Azeroth. They also bathed in demon blood to turn themselves into demons.

Now, a few years later they are supposed to come back knocking at the gates of Silvermoon, say "Weve sowwy" and be accepted back into Sin'Dorei society? It's more likely they'll be flayed alive if they ever step on Azeroth again.

Next you'll propably suggest adding Eredar as a subrace for Draenei.

Draenei = Eredar. You're referring to Man'ari, which are also Eredar.

[Yig]

They're de-canonised because Blizzard can't endorse everything within them. What they are in effect saying is that there's parts of them they can't agree with any longer; they're not saying everything in them as wrong; I think this has been mentioned in a couple of blues before. Things like the lore in them on the nature of the arcane, for instance, might since have been revised. So they will have to re-visit them one day and decide what is and isn't canon.

I also don't tend to take things like the race weight/height tables or ageing tables seriously, because it's often stuff that is contradicted by the concept art, models or other pieces of lore. However, I do tend to think the stats are one of its better parts, and a good indicator of the relative power of the races. Thus why I say the Eredar are quite clearly several orders of magnitude more powerful than, say, the draenei, or indeed any of the playable races.

The RPGs are basically Metzen's raw concepts which are subject to change once he sits down and decides to cement them. Often a really cool twist might require him to alter something that was canon in those books, so I agree with you they're very valuable for a lot of things. People are kind of fallacious when it comes to dismissing them entirely. Kind of like the wikipedia fallacy if you're familiar with that.

Chris Metzen has stated that some things are less canon than others, but he wants everything as integrated as possible:

Metzen:

"...yeah, the novels are pretty much considered canon, ahm, the funny thing is that some things are less canon, you know, but we shoot for canon... that's a strange statement... we shoot for canon... but yeah, typically the characters in novels are canon.
A lot of times... depending on when one thing gets started during another, we happen to be in the middle of the game, or doing the manga thing for instance or this comic series specifically, we try to engineer as much inner play as possible. Like characters in the manga series showing up in Netherstorm and we are doing stuff like that, so we want to make everything feels as continuity friendly and as integrated as possible. Cuz that would make it cool as if all its moving, right". - Chris Metzen

Metzen also stated that a character of the RPG books is not necessarily considered canonical:

Metzen:

"I’m sure this will be controversial, but I don’t necessarily consider her canonical, and based on that we haven't really had any plans of leveraging her in the future. Uh, I think she appeared in one of the RPG books, but you know she's just not a character I have thought about, so at this point I don't really know if we are going to do much with her." - Chris Metzen

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Mmm, I think that's a little unfair, there was "fantasy" fiction before Tolkien and the most popular was Conan and the swords and sorcery genre which was closely related to pulp fiction of the time. But Tolkien's work is very different from that genre and it's not a stretch at all to say he invented modern "high fantasy". I think his influence goes even further than that, not only having a strong effect on all other subgenres of fantasy but even spilling over into modern sci-fi and other genre fiction. In particular the concept of a fully-realised self consistent fictional universe as a backdrop to a story is something we very much owe to Tolkien. Star Wars probably wouldn't have existed without LOTR, and it in turn influenced movies to a huge degree.

It's also interesting I think to look at older works like Lord of the Rings and notice things like how little description is given to Elves and Orcs, where we take their "look" for granted today. It's part of a shift in literature in recent decades - books today are heavily influenced by the power of movies and TV in popular culture and as such have become much more visual. Modern fantasy novels for the most part give you a very clear mental image of what a fantasy race is supposed to look like. Tolkien just told you this one was "fair" and this one was "short and fat" and this one was "ugly and evil-looking". The rest was up to your imagination.

Oh I agree, I'm not trying to say otherwise, Tolkien deserves a lot of credit for a lot of things. And between you and me, which is why I mostly despise the Star Wars expanded universe of novels, Star Wars IS fantasy, just given a veneer of science fiction to make it feel novel. So many of the EU novels mistake Star Wars for scifi, detailing technology and engines and other heavy scifi elements.

Star Wars being secretly a fantasy story reminds me of the the same way Warcraft gives sometimes very dark elements of Tolkienesque and human mythology the look of a Disney or Don Bluth cartoon mixed with the comic book art of Simon Bisley and Jim Murray and all the other genomes in it's DNA to give it something novel in flavor for our palettes. I have a lot faith that JJ Abrams totally get's that element of Star Wars and that the new trilogy will be very heavy on destiny and mysticism and avatar like struggles between stark good and evil. And using Super 8 as an example, he's going to nail that nostalgic vibe with the cinematography that had Super 8 looking like Close Encounters and ET.

P.S. I like your ridiculously long posts :P

Thanks, they're admittedly very self indulgent and long winded and I am just happy someone has the bravery to read them at all. But I love being a fan and I love communicating ideas and dissecting topics as we do here.
Thank you for keeping me on my toes. It looks like this might be a bit of a doozy of post right here /incoming, image wise at least. But this thread feels like an appropriate place to indulge in images with the crowd of regular posters we seem to have gathered.

I actually think he looks weird like this. His torso is absurdly short for his shoulder breadth.

Well that's the fun of conveying power and personality in caricature art. As a cartoonist myself, I totally geek out on it.
And with orcs and especially dwarves, studying gorilla anatomy is invaluable I find in working out the mechanics of their posture and movements and really helps to make that exaggeration not really all that unrealistic. Don't take this too literally, it's a loose foundation.


Ambam is a great resource, gods bless Ambam. Youtube Ambam, and love Ambam. He needs your love.

This is the vanilla Orc model with the "appropriate" posture, they use it while mounted, while walking backwards, and while in combat poses. Asking if it's realistic or not, it's like looking at a Simon Bisley comic book and wondering how Lobo has 300 bullets embedded in the side of his face while his waist is almost as thin as his neck and his shoulders as nigh wide as he is tall, I guess.

But yeah. Here we have the vanilla orc assuming his appropriate posture, albeit even in a slight defensive crouch,...


Mounted and not slouching





and I just want to cry when these guys go from these examples of "appropriate" posture to the posture of the in game orc player model, lurching over like some drugged sedated hobo, or some arthritic twisted hermit, or some sinister ghoulish warlock, which all work great for individual characters in the wow world as a body type, but the classic iconic orc was done a grave disservice I think, and so were we the players for having that option denied us. And it was all I deduce done so in the name of nothing more than giving them an instantly recognizable silhouette in a game based on instantly recognizing your racial enemy from a distance in a story based on xenophobic race war.


A funny thing is, in the visual lexicon of cartoon body language, the player orc posture elicits the personality of a slack jawed pea brained "peon", or a crude primitive brute.
And often people make the mistake of thinking the peons had a hunch, they didn't. It's a trick of cartoon language making people assume otherwise.


And based on Blizzard clearly taking initiative in changing the depiction of orcs in game ever since Cataclysm in their cutscenes and NPC models to reflect their appropriate posture and with the Blizzard art team lead's Tweet about making this anatomical option possible soon in the player customization choices (being on their developer wishlist),...I hope Robinson's wishlist is granted, and many happy returns. I was overjoyed to see their posture corrected here in the Jade Forest intro.


And at this point, I'm not sure how much you know or care about this issue and I think I've maybe overstated my point, but I take whatever excuse I can to give my song and dance on this topic. Sort of like the Mormon missionary thing. If it helped, I'd put on a god damn suit and tie and go to door to door on my bicycle spreading the news on orc posture to the world at large. If it helped,...

This guy below,.... now this guy, he makes sense with the hunch. An elder of the Frost Wolf clan who succumbed to his wounds in the 2nd war and wandered off half alive from the battlefield into the wilds away from the conflicts of men and orcs. Now he's an old arthritic hermit whose been communing in solitude with the elements as a shaman and farseer for years at a time without venturing back to civilization. His body is stooped and racked with the ravages of age and old wounds and stiff joints.


But here we have Garrosh, demonstrating the power and confidence the common orc warrior should exhibit.

And here I've gone and given him some photoshop biscuits to clone him and make him look more like what our player model could actually appear to be in game.
But there seems some terrible law in the universe against looking this cool in WOW, and I fear this darkness, this intangible spirit creature that it is, that it will see my dream forever deprived of my desired reality.

If you de-anime'd it that is pretty much what my live Orc female looks like.

How do you see anime in that at all, you wacky little kobold? Samwise is more comic book/Disney to me, always struck me as very Wendy Pini looking too.
/shrug

I don't know how WoW Elves could possibly look more macho and still look vaguely like Elves. This whole thing just strikes me as ridiculously homophobic.

IMO if you can't handle being a little bit fabulous you should not roll an Elf.

I think there's a time and a place for lithe and delicate elves. Warcraft isn't that place, when it comes to the "norm". Warcraft puts it's own touch on classic themes to make it Warcraft. Their night elves are 7+ feet tall and built more like lithe orcs than humans. Well, humans in Warcraft are built more like orcs than humans too.

I love fey mythology, sidhe, The Tuatha Dé Danann(Danu), and I prefer my elves to look like alien spindly fairy/goblin things, for instance this puppet mock up of mine. I love Brian Froud and Alan Lee and their world of the fey just seems a part of my genetic memory if such a thing existed. But I think you can see here in my sketch I can appreciate a spindly elf.
http://yig.deviantart.com/art/Elf-concept-200416873

My ideal for WoW's updated elves would be more posture than build, but they could use some more mass when you play Wacraft 3


Originally I actually wished Blizzard stuck with the alpha Blood Elf model which was much more lithe and skinny, as I wanted a spindly warlock or rogue body type. But here I've taken a requested tweaked to the San'layn I requested from Shoc and heavily edited it into my ideal Blood Elf model.



And in many ways this would by my ideal high elf if they ever make into the game, I don't know who made this, but I found it with google image search.
Seeing this updated with pandaren fidelity,... magnifique! Would love to see them somehow in the Alliance, so very evocative of the "blue and gold".


That high elf posture I especially love, next to the modified night elve models used for the Silver moon guards, standing tall, their chins held high and regal with elven pride.

I stare at them in envy often in my WOW playing lifetime.

I once actually really liked the asymmetry in the Blood Elf pose, but it soon began to to drive me insane with the artificially contorted shoulder you can tell was stretched and forced into that pose and not originally sculpted to look that way at all. I suppose at least with the model update if they keep the posture and silhouette, which is almost certain, it will won't look like they melted the model and contorted it into that arrogant hip/shoulder posture thing they do. They'll have the same look, but it will look natural and the musculature will be sound in it seams. I try to walk as much as possible with my Blood Elf, as when standing tall, I think they're great. Here you see him slanted, then on bottom he's walking and his shoulders level.

Meets Ray Harryhausen? Reference too old?

After admiring the DoF effect in a lot of modern games I'd love to see what it'd look like in the WoW engine.p

I am a monster loving freak. Harryhausen is a love of mine. And I think it's a crime WOW lacks a DOF FX, I wish Chris Robinson didn't personally dislike it.
I think the bodes ill for it ever making it into the game.

God I can't wait for Orc female.

[Kathranis]

Most of the RPG stuff also wasn't written by Blizzard directly, but rather by people from White Wolf Publishing, though Blizzard obviously provided a lot of conceptual material and signed off on the stuff. There was even quite a while when people took those "adventure hooks" as canon, even though they were never anything more than suggestions for people to base their own stories on.

It's best to look at the RPG as a sort of proto-canon. They basically occupy the gap between "concept" and "canon." Very early world building ideas fleshed out for the sake of a product before Blizzard actually took the time to iterate and refine them. There's a lot of stuff in those books that will probably make it into the game eventually, in some form or another.

If you have the actual sourcebooks to reference, it's easier to tell what material is more likely to become canon (like world building) and what material is really just for the benefit of a DM (gameplay oriented information, story hooks, etc.).

[Yig]

Yes, when I talked about Metzens contribution I am specifically alluding to Shadows and Light as the most relevant which is the only one I personally own, with it's detailed compendium of the Titans and their respective histories and personalities, their names, the pantheon, much of that was canonized in WOTLK and Ulduar's surrounding content along with the various books in the world on the subject of the Makers. The Ancients and the Aspects are all well defined as well but this was all around when Knaack was writing the Well of Eternity trilogy.

It's cool to look back now and see things detailed in 2004 like the Elemental Lords and their realms described in depth like the Firelands, Skywall, Deepholm, all described pretty much as we saw them years later. Al'akir, Neptulon, Therazane,...all were canonized pretty much as they appeared in Cataclysm

Ulduar is described as well as the Stormpeaks, years before WOTLK was released. We see the Aspects which already much was known of, but the juiciest stuff yet to be seen is the Titans, specifically I'm excited about Aggramar and his hatred of Sargeras, the shattered blade Gorshalach (Dark Render) which was once the most powerful weapon in the universe Sargeras wielded before his fall, now riven into two halves, Gorribal (Dark Seether) held by Sargeras and Taeshalach (Flame Rend) now held by Aggramar. And then we have extensive information on the personalities of the Titans, Aman'thul, Eonar, Norgannon, etc.

And then juicier bits on the planar realms, Outland, the Twisting Nether and it's worlds, the Great Dark Beyond, races of demons we haven't met yet like the Tothrezim, winged cousins of the Nathrezim and manufacturers of the Infernals, their wings covered in fel runes and self mutilated scars and stitched designs, and the various worlds of the planes and homeworlds of the demons. Nether Dragons which later came to be called Netherdrakes in TBC are described as they appeared.

The Emerald Dream is described with a little depth with it's major locations and regions. The Nightmare may be no more, but it's still there to be visited as a plane.
Would love to see the Eye of Ysera.

These are all things I think will be relevant, as so far everything before them was par for the course in TBC, WOTLK, and Cata. I don't have any other of the books beyond Shadows and Light myself but I've glanced at them. Shadows and Light is what I consider mostly Metzen's abstract notes on the foundations of his ideas and this universe's ultimate limits, while in the mean time any number of stories can be created which never existed in these pages, the Infinite Flight, the entire Warlord's of Draenor theme (at least so far it remains to be seen nothing in these pages will show up there beyond details of Draenor pre Outland, twists concerning Gul'dan and the Legion could always happen) The netherwyrms, demonic dragons of the Twisting Nether I'm sure are awesome and will show up when we start dealing with the worlds of the Burning Crusade.

Also the Epic Classes are something to keep an eye on in this book not necessarily as hero classes but as NPCs, like the Tauren Epic Runemasters, Epic Keepers of the Grove druids like Malfurion has become in so many ways and beyond.

The other books I consider fluff with hints of things that could come about, I'd like to see the book detailing Pandaria and how much of that ended up being used.

- - - Updated - - -

The only thing I've come to slightly lament is the way for instance in vanilla how, esoteric, arcane, recondite, and mysterious, and awe inspiring the Dragon Aspects seemed when we knew so much historically as legends about these beings and could almost feel their presence in the world observing us, how much reverence my characters held for them as near divine being to be prayed to as a Night Elf, and how when they finally were seen in the flesh all that enigma and vastness was kind of forever cemented and lost it's unfathomable scope in the process.

The same seems primed to happen when the Titans come along, though it will be amazing if they pull them off on par with something like a boss's scale in the God of War games. Imagine standing before Aggramar, his model taller than Wyrmrest Temple or Kharazan put together, the larger the more impressive, truly beings which make us seem as insects. And to take part in a battle between two such beings would be epic to imagine. Possibly just trying to stay out of their way while we deal with some matter involved in the thing.

I actually created a boss scenario for Deathwing I posted on the Cata beta forum's that was just uncanny for what turned out manifesting as the actual fight, but I guess it seems kind of the natural way to go in many ways. In a way I've kind of anticipated every expansion we've gotten but for WOD, that was out of left field.

I always hoped they would do something massive to changed the old world of vanilla and give us end game players a reason to return to the lands we once leveled through, with new music and changed to the terrain, something maybe too ambitious I thought, but sure enough it happened, it a bit less impressive than what I imagined. My 90s just one shotted it all, and really it could only be appreciated leveling an alt, which I've been saving the majority of content for the model revamp which I knew would inevitably come one day and I would finally have a reason to really get out there in a double whammy of novelty. There are still areas of Cata in the old world I've not flown over or visited.

But when I posted by Deathwing scenario on the Cata beta forum, I was imagining a God of War scale epic battle where the Aspects had him kept busy in an epic (the word epic has to be used to the point of redundancy in a scenario of this magnitude :P) aerial battle of their combined forces, all the while we were on his back scurrying around like insects prying off his armored plating on a timer as he would at times roar and howl in rage and pain, diving down through the clouds and smashing into entire mountain side's turning them to rubble trying to shake us from his hide. Flying over the actual continents instanced in a giant recreation of the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor, passing through thunder storms one second above the clouds to clear blue skies near almost the altitude of space at one point.

Only I imagined in those early days before knowing he use the Twilight cultists, that he would have legions of his former goblin slaves in massive lemming like swarms hilariously running about trying to repair the damage we were doing as we had to handle them as adds and keep prying off enough of his plating to make him vulnerable to whatever deus ex machina was needed, which of course was the Dragon Soul, I never even thought to remember that but it seems the obvious thing.

I pictured Deathwind being a little bigger and seeing Azeroth speeding by below us as a little more epic and detailed in scope, it was very ambitious in concept and I never expected to see it happen. But what did happen was a cool alternative to my idea, if a little blander but still a crazy but epic encounter. The whole crashing into the Maelstrom and mutating into a monstrosity of the Old Gods was nothing I saw coming.

I never got to raid in Cata as I lacked the motivation and my guild was not really in need of an arms or fury warrior, but LFR let me see that battle at least.

But there's a price to be paid to see these arcane and mysterious figures and places with their air of mystery and scope being forever cemented when we get to see them. It's kind of like meeting a celebrity and becoming their friend and discovering they're just another person who get's the runs from food poisoning and complains about their own bullshit as much as you do.

But it's also great having these places in a tome you know are out there we will one day likely visit, the build up is in so many ways the majority of the pay off, the anticipation of possibility. As Spock once said in Amok Time:

"After a time, you may find that having a thing is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting."

words of wisdom, Lloyd..words of wisdom.

[Zathrendar]

I don't know how WoW Elves could possibly look more macho and still look vaguely like Elves. This whole thing just strikes me as ridiculously homophobic.

IMO if you can't handle being a little bit fabulous you should not roll an Elf.

The blood and night elf concept art is macho, IMO. I see no reason why the models shouldn't be aligned with this, particularly since the whole 'fabulous' trope was introduced with WoW and never featured at all with the blood elves pre-WoW, e.g. in TFT. Even the WoW concept art rarely portrays them as such. If by "fabulous" you mean "camp", then no, there's no reason I should have to "handle" my character being camp (which is not synonymous with being gay/homosexual) at all.

I myself prefer men but stray as much away from the camp stereotype as possible. I don't find it appealing or arousing on any level, and I think it is a shame that the blood elves (and some other models) were pigeonholed into this 'niche'.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

No reason at all why this should be the case, and like Yig has demonstrated, there's nothing 'fabulous' about the blood and night elf concept art. Whatever 'fabulous' means.

Fabulous came with Blood Elves in BC. Even then, nothing wrong with Blood Elves trying to look good.

[Zathrendar]

I edited my post. If "looking good" is what is meant, the terms "beautiful", "handsome" etc. work better as they are stripped of connotations of campness.

- - - Updated - - -

Most of the RPG stuff also wasn't written by Blizzard directly, but rather by people from White Wolf Publishing, though Blizzard obviously provided a lot of conceptual material and signed off on the stuff. There was even quite a while when people took those "adventure hooks" as canon, even though they were never anything more than suggestions for people to base their own stories on.

It's best to look at the RPG as a sort of proto-canon. They basically occupy the gap between "concept" and "canon." Very early world building ideas fleshed out for the sake of a product before Blizzard actually took the time to iterate and refine them. There's a lot of stuff in those books that will probably make it into the game eventually, in some form or another.

If you have the actual sourcebooks to reference, it's easier to tell what material is more likely to become canon (like world building) and what material is really just for the benefit of a DM (gameplay oriented information, story hooks, etc.).

There is some good stuff in them. I think they do a better job of defining the sort of powers and attributes each race is meant to possess than WoW itself. There's also some interesting lore fluff, but yeah, you can't rely on them without qualification.

[Kathranis]

Yes, when I talked about Metzens contribution I am specifically alluding to Shadows and Light as the most relevant which is the only one I personally own, with it's detailed compendium of the Titans and their respective histories and personalities, their names, the pantheon, much of that was canonized in WOTLK and Ulduar's surrounding content along with the various books in the world on the subject of the Makers. The Ancients and the Aspects are all well defined as well but this was all around when Knaack was writing the Well of Eternity trilogy.

Shadows & Light (cosmology), Lands of Mystery (geography), and Dark Factions (goblins) are probably the most interesting of the sourcebooks, and the most relevant to lore discussion, as they've all contained a lot of proto-canon that was further fleshed out in-game.

Lands of Mystery in particular goes into a lot of details on locations which at the time were not accessible in WoW, including fully fleshed out maps for Northrend, the South Seas, and the Maelstrom region, complete with subzones (some of which are onlyd described, not mapped out). The Northrend descriptions are definitely from a very early pre-concept stage, but the zones are all there.

Dark Factions contained a ton of lore for the goblins and pandaren. The goblin lore was basically all canonized, while the pandaren lore was pretty much completely scrapped. I can't even think of a single key term or concept that was carried over into Mists.

The books also unfortunately never really got into the Outland/Draenor stuff, though I suppose it's a good thing, as they'll have more freedom for Warlords of Draenor.

[draugril]

RPG books: general rule of thumb is that they are canon until they're contradicted. Then that aspect isn't.

[hrugner]

RPG books: general rule of thumb is that they are canon until they're contradicted. Then that aspect isn't.

That's about how most, maybe all, of the lore is. If Lianne Menethil showed up as a dragon in some future expansion we'd all just have to roll with it.

[draugril]

That's about how most, maybe all, of the lore is. If Lianne Menethil showed up as a dragon in some future expansion we'd all just have to roll with it.

Well, people try to attribute different levels of canon to things for no real reason. There's only an issue when it's overtly contradictory. Things get even more complicated when you consider that the highest level of canon - the game itself - is merely a representation of what Azeroth (and Draenor) truly is. I mean Stormwind's population is surely more than a couple hundred, most of them guards. It would take more than 30 minutes or so to ride across Kalimdor, tip to tip. So where does "true" canon lie? With a stopwatch or a headcount in-game? Or with the numbers in the RPG book?

[Zathrendar]

Perhaps neither.

[draugril]

Perhaps neither.

Precisely. "Canon" only exists to serve a narrative, whether it be a tabletop campaign, a book, a movie or a video game. When a franchise spans different mediums, there can be no unifying canon to serve all those different venues equally. And to privilege any of them is an exercise in futility since it can be changed on a whim to suit a new narrative or a different medium for that narrative to be expressed in.

In short: it's not worth the headache. Just roll with it.

[Rhlor]

[Zathrendar]

Nice. Give it longer eyebrows and ears and green or blue glowing eyes and you have a high or blood elf.

Precisely. "Canon" only exists to serve a narrative, whether it be a tabletop campaign, a book, a movie or a video game. When a franchise spans different mediums, there can be no unifying canon to serve all those different venues equally. And to privilege any of them is an exercise in futility since it can be changed on a whim to suit a new narrative or a different medium for that narrative to be expressed in.

In short: it's not worth the headache. Just roll with it.

I am still wondering whether they will opt for a new lore source, at some point, unifying the lore, something like a WOW encyclopaedia.

[shoc]

Nice. Give it longer eyebrows and ears and green or blue glowing eyes and you have a high or blood elf.



I am still wondering whether they will opt for a new lore source, at some point, unifying the lore, something like a WOW encyclopaedia.

If Blizz just "fixed" any inconsistencies on Wowpedia I'm sure it would suffice.

[Immitis]

If Blizz just "fixed" any inconsistencies on Wowpedia I'm sure it would suffice.

blizzard devs actually arent allowed to edit wowpedia incase they accidentally put out spoilers

[Xilent]

Hoping the updated Blood Elf males look similar to this, in the WoW art style of course.

[PomPomPop]

Source please? That face looks heavenly.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Source please? That face looks heavenly.

It's from Dota. The Invoker Hero.



OT: Everything barring the RPG Books is canon. That is how Blizzard has stated things. It's much easier to deal with then the whole Starwars canon nonsense.