Art of Warcraft

Well this came to my attention directly after posting that thing about enraging, soo... here's a quick two posts in a day thing. Yeah.

Grizzly Hills - that's one of the zones in Northrend, for the uneducated - was just put up on the WLK minisite. Now of course there'd already been stuff announced about this zone, pictures here and there, but there were a couple of new stuffs there, including a nice short movie which showed what seemed to be the highlights of the zone. This got me thinking about the art of WoW.

I was a great fan of the art of vanilla WoW. It seemed... cohesive. It had some very different places, yeah, but all in all it was dark and gritty. I've heard it described as 'gothic fantasy' before, and I think that that's appropriate.

Take a look at, for example, Scholo. Scholomance is a school for necromancers. People learn evil in there. It feels like it, too. It's full of ridiculously ornate candelabras and bubbling alchemical contraptions and heavy wooden bookcases and piles of bones and cast-iron gates and furniture. The floors, walls and ceilings are stone, and there are tapestries and carpets all over the place.

Now compare that to the pink sparkliness of Tempest Keep, or the ridiculous steampunk-esque machines that populate Coilfang. I actually quite like the look of the Tempest Keep raid instance, but... it doesn't feel like WoW should. TBC in general felt wrong - the exception for me was the zones in Quel'thalas - sort of like it was full of weird machines and aliens, rather than kickass dragons and demons and undead. I mean, draenei? What is that? They're blue. And it's not subtle, like night elves are subtlely purple. They're bright freaking blue, and they have hooves, and they have tentacles on their faces. You can't simultaneously slay dragons and be bright blue. It's just not possible.

So, now back to the original point of my post - took long enough. I think that the Blizzard art team is doing an amazing job on the Northrend zones. They all look cold, despite not all being Winterspring. They all look different without sacrificing the overall theme of the expack. They tie in well with existing Azerothian zones without reusing the textures (at least from what I could tell).

Things I'm really looking forward to in WLK, art-wise:

-Seeing the fire effects in Utgarde ingame.
-Seeing the ice caves of Dragonblight ingame.
-Seeing what the team does in Coldarra - I've heard that the level 80 5-man is 'a series of floating rings, magically suspended above the ground.' That sounds like it could be freaking awesome. Especially if you can see off the rings, look from them down onto the zone from, say, one-thousand yards into the air.
-Seeing how Sholazar Basin, Crystalsong Forest, and the Storm Peaks are worked into the overall Northrend theme. Sholazar Basin especially - how can you make a lush tropical paridise fit into the theme of 'ice and evil'? I'm looking forward to finding out.
-Seeing Ulduar, if it's made into an instance (which I think it is). Also Uldum in Tanaris, if that's opened up. Some art I saw of Ulduar once (which may have been concept art and may have been from a WoW RPG book) was very cool, with arching stone bridges and purple lightning crackling from place to place. On a non-art-related note, I think that the whole Titans storyline that began in Uldaman rates very high on the 'stuff I wish they'd conclude' list - below the Ashbringer storyline, and above the Eranikus/Emerald Dream storyline.
-Seeing CoT: Stratholme, mainly because I just know that it'll have a similar layout to ingame Strath.
-Seeing the return of Scarlets and the Argent Dawn (please? c'mon, the Scarlets deserve a raid instance at least!) Come to think of it, that's not exactly art-related either.
-Seeing Icecrown Glacier. The defining moment of TBC for me was when I walked through the portal for the first time and realised just how massive it was, then looked out and saw a wave of demons attacking the Alliance and Horde defenders. I think that the defining moment for WLK is going to be walking up Icecrown Glacier for the first time. Not sure why... just a feeling. I really hope they keep the whole spiral-starcase-made-of-ice thing.