Posts with tag shoulder-armor

I guess answering your various questions will fulfill that need for now.

Jason asked...

"Since the Battle.net change has occurred, is it now possible for me to log on to WoW in Europe (like at an Internet café) with my American account? Or are they still separate like they were before?"

freelancer_bob (love that name) over on LJ has a good point: Shoulderpads seem to be the height of fashion in Azeroth. Not only do shoulder pieces call for the highest Arena rating in the game, but they're often the flashiest way to add a little flair to your character. While you can get the plainest of the plain before level 20, after level 70, they quickly and often turn into the wackiest thing your character can wear. Whether it's pure energy, lightning wolves, or even eyes (freakin' eyes!), Blizzard's artists seem to go overboard as much as possible, especially on the high end shoulder pieces.

Sometimes it just gets out of hand -- how exactly are Hunters wearing Tier 1 supposed to use their peripheral vision? But just as Bob says, oversized and garish shoulders are a big part of what makes WoW Warcraft. If we walked around with realistic shoulder armor, the game would look that much more boring.

So here's to the praises of huge, awesome-looking shoulders. We're looking forward to a lot of stuff in Wrath of the Lich King -- the new class, the dungeons, and the new continent to wander around on. But I'm also looking forward to seeing just how the armor designers will top having blindfolded statues of women on shoulder pieces. It'll be amazing for sure.

The fine folks at Eurogamer noted that, during their interview with the recently ubiquitous Kaplan and Brack, some tantalizing hints were dropped about an update to the WoW graphics engine. It's not coming in Wrath, for better or for worse.

"That's actually something we talk about every expansion," he said. "I'm positive we'll talk about it next expansion."

To a degree the World of Warcraft engine is showing its age. That doesn't really bother me very much... I enjoy the semi-cartoon look of the MMO as it seems evocative of the RTS games, especially WCIII, and stands out against a sea of very flat and sterile attempts to make hyper-realistic graphics in games. For all that I would like a bit more flexibility in my character design, I don't mind that WoW has a low polygon count or whatever. But I am very curious as to what they'd do with an updated graphics engine. I believe it was Jeff Kaplan who said, perhaps in jest, "Our designers assure me we haven't even begun to see how big shoulder armor can get."