Garrison Art in Warlords of Draenor

by Hotstreak - 10 years ago     show comments

Bashiok dropped by the official forums today to give some insight on the art design of Garrisons. He stated that it isn’t their intention right now to add race specific buildings for your garrison but that the possibility is there depending on how successful the feature turns out to be. He then talked about how the design approach for Warlords of Draenor is to have some of the best looking sets, buildings, and props that the game has ever seen. He also mentioned that we will be seeing another Artcraft blog next week that will go over garrison designs.

The level of detail we’re approaching with Warlords of Draenor means that these are going to be some-of-if-not-the-best looking sets, props and buildings ever seen in the World of Warcraft. Creating just one set of buildings for each faction (as well as their individual upgrades) is a huge amount of work, and they rely on most of the same artistic resources as the expansion’s dungeons, raids, quest hubs, and cities. Creating any additional buildings would quite literally translate to less content for those other parts of the game. We are incorporating some elements of other races into the individual Garrison buildings, but the themes are largely of Durotar and Elwynn. We’ll be offering a sneak peek at the Garrison buildings in the next Artcraft, which is currently slated to be posted next Tuesday–written by the art team and formatted by moi–so be sure to keep an eye on the front page next week.

Not at release but do you think eventually we might be able to buy racial specific themes later sometime? Or is this design set in stone? I loved the way Lotro did their housing, each race got their own theme for housing.

Certainly there will be updates and changes as the expansion progresses, but I don’t believe there’s any current intention to add full sets of additional buildings. If we were to work on those for an expansion patch it would quite literally come at the cost of a raid tier. That is where that work would come from. We have to make decisions on how to spend our time.

I think if the Garrison becomes a long-term persistent feature there’s certainly a possibility for larger additions, but we’re focusing on it being a feature for Warlords of Draenor as your fortress against the Iron Horde. I think we’ll have to see how it goes.

I am a little confused about this issue (no not the french word for me 🙂 because I thought the artwork for all the different races buildings already existed, so does this mean the artwork for the garrisons is all new just done in existing styles of human and orc and if so that seems like a big waste of time and resources since the existing art assets could have been used.

You’ll find out more in next week’s Artcraft! XD