Posts with tag concept-art

Blizzard hires some of the finest artists in the land to do its designs, concept art, world building, and settings. It's no surprise, then, that I adore the World of Warcraft concept art and am always delighted to see just how close in substance and style that the art team got in translating an image into a finished product. Suffice to say, Blizzard concept art is some of the best in the business.

One of my favorite art pieces from the original World of Warcraft was a crashed zeppelin image that just always stuck with me. While my art book isn't next to me, I remember cracking open the book or at least a website and seeing that shot, analyzing it, looking at that little scale dude at the bottom. I have no idea what about the image is awesome to me. Maybe because the image eventually came back in spirit in the Cataclysm cinematic when that zeppelin over Orgrimmar hits one of the central buildings.

That being said, we have not seen the concept art for the newest mount to hit the pet store, the Heart of the Aspects. I'm willing to bet it's pretty cool, and I want to see it. Which pieces of Blizzard concept art are your favorites? Let's show off our favorite Blizzard art pieces.

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Blizzard has updated the Cataclysm and leaders art galleries with a few new shots featuring an awesome picture of Genn Greymane all wolfed out, a moody shot of Gilneas, and a familiar shot of goblins taking on a worgen.

The galleries are always a source of awesome art, and it's nice to see them getting updates more and more these days, even from expansions past. Most recently, Blizzard updated the Wrath of the Lich King art gallery with some cool shots.

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WoW Patch 4.1 is on the PTR, and WoW Insider has all the latest news for you -- from previews of the revamped Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub to new valor point mechanics and new archaeology items.

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The Wrath of the Lich King art gallery has been updated with six awesome shots of clean artwork that features familiar locales and loading screens. Art from the Pit of Saron, Eye of Eternity, Forge of Souls, Wintergrasp, and Trial of the Crusader are available for ocular enjoyment.

The art for Wrath of the Lich King has always been some of my favorite concept art because of how easily the look and feel of the pieces convey what the entire expansion and Northrend itself was supposed to be. Success, indeed. Check out the gallery here.

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WoW Patch 4.1 is on the PTR, and WoW Insider has all the latest news for you -- from previews of the revamped Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub to new valor point mechanics and new archaeology items.

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Hey, you! Yes, you -- dude sitting on the stained couch watching Family Feud and eating Cheetos. Need a little bit of high culture in your life? (And no, rewatching Once More, With Feeling doesn't count.)

WoW Insider may not be able to send you to the Louvre, and I'm not sure our legal department is okay with us reprinting the works of Maya Angelou. What we can do, however, is forward you along to some great new art just released at the Blizzard website. Specifically, there are three new pieces from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion: the Wrath box art, a piece called "Boneyard," and a piece called "Winter Tauren." They all show off the incredible level of talent of Blizzard's art department.

While you're there, be sure to page through the gallery and enjoy all the pieces of older concept art, too. They provide some great insight into how ideas transition from mere thoughts in an artist's head to a miserable, frustrating 5-man instance like The Oculus.

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This past Monday, the lucky Warlock and Omacron of Scrolls of Lore got to pay a visit to Blizzard's headquarters in Irvine to check out the Starcraft II single player press event. While there, Warlock and Omacron also went on a tour of the building and posted a gallery of the photos from their trip, including a look at some never before seen Cataclysm concept art. While Blizzard has released a few art pieces in the new concept art gallery that has just been released, very few of the pieces in SoL's gallery are in the official gallery on the Blizzard website. With gorgeous landscapes, exotic flora and fauna, and what appears to be a truly massive wall length mural of Deathwing in human guise, the gallery is absolutely stunning. Let's hope that the collector's edition for Cataclysm will include an art book -- but in the mean time, check out the gallery and the new artwork over on Scrolls of Lore.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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Blizzard.com

We're pleased to announce the grand opening of our new Concept Art gallery, highlighting the myriad characters, environments, and other artwork we create during the development of our games. We plan to update this page regularly with a wide variety of never-before-seen pieces of art reaching all the way back to Blizzard's early days, so be sure to check back often!

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Early days is right! There's artwork in the gallery that predates StarCraft and the early Warcraft games. Go check out Blizzard's concept art gallery, it will be time well spent.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Why yes, that is the most disgusting whale you've ever seen. Unless, of course, you've witnessed local authorities taking dynamite to a beached whale to get it out of the way since they couldn't move it just by pushing the thing. That is disgusting. Whale guts landing on cars a mile away? No thanks. I'll take the guy pictured above over that.

Moonkinmaniac asked...

"On the WoW calendar there's an undead whale picture. What the heck is it? Is it a rejected project for the current expansion or possibly one for Cataclysm?"

We still have no idea who did the voice of the Headless Horseman, but if you're playing a male Gnome Death Knight lately, we know whose voice you've been listening to: Dino Andrade, recently interviewed by Geeks of Doom, a voice actor who's probably most heard as "Pop" of the Kellogg's Rice Crispies mascots. You can hear his reels and demos on his website, and sure enough, that's our Gnome.

Andrade says the Blizzard recording was "the most secretive thing I have ever done" -- they didn't show him anything visually about what the character was or did, and apparently he wasn't even allowed to take the script out of the recording room. Andrade also says that Blizzard is keen to let voice actors do their thing -- rather than giving direction, they let the actor come up with lots of their own reads, and then chose the one they wanted to use. It's almost hard to believe that Blizzard's voice acting is so good, given how hands-off they are (you'd think they'd aim to connect it with the art or animation in some way), but Blizzard fans know how well it works -- the voice characterisation in Blizzard games has always been terrific.

Very interesting -- while Blizzard's voices are one of the things that have really made their games successful, it's strange that they've never let us into the process more. Their sites are full of concept art and model designs, but it would be cool to hear an uncut recording session or find out exactly how voice recordings are integrated with the game. Maybe we'll see more on that in the future.

Our good friend Kevin Kelly (who writes for Joystiq) has apparently turned traitor -- over at the Spout blog, he's written up four reasons why they shouldn't bother making a Warcraft movie at all. His arguments go from shaky to solid -- he first claims that movies made from videogames just don't work anyway, In response, I'd submit to you Doom, and -- oh wait. Never mind. His second reason is that they just wouldn't make enough money, even if every Warcraft player bought a ticket, but I don't know if I'd worry about that: Transformers made money, and that movie was a high-budget pile of junk.

His last two points are probably more solid, though -- he says that unlike Lord of the Rings, which the Warcraft movie is often compared to, most people (even players of the games who skip cutscenes) would walk in having no idea what the story was about, which means the story would have to be dumbed down or just be a confusing mess. And finally, we can't really argue with the last point: since that first piece of concept art, we haven't heard a peep out of Legendary or Blizzard about what's happening, so maybe the flick's not getting made anyway.

And by the end of the piece, we've got to agree with Kevin: even if a big-budget worldwide movie release didn't get made, we'd much rather have a high-quality DVD of Blizzard's cinematics anyway (or maybe even a feature-length put together by the same department -- they do awesome work). The odds are against a live-action Warcraft movie already, it seems -- maybe it would be a better idea for Blizzard to just release something themselves.