BlizzCon: A brief look at blood elves
The new Horde race for the World of Warcraft game, blood elves, will become available in next year’s expansion, and it was previewed by Blizzard Entertainment at BlizzCon in Anaheim this weekend.
A guildmate of mine pointed out that waiting in the 90 minute line to play the Burning Crusade expansion wasn’t necessary, since we could wait for two minutes at the Nvidia booth to play it there. So we did.
Pregenerated blood elves — mage, warlock, warrior and priest — were set up on all the demo machines at BlizzCon, and we each gave Blood Elves a whirl. Only one quest was initially available on Sunstrider Isle, although I suspect people before us did most of the level 1 quests. The one quest available was to kill mana worms — think tiny versions of the flying dragon snake thing in “The Never Ending Story.” But running around the island, we got to see hostile miniature treants, a banished blood elf warlock (hostile) and some small great cats, also hostile.
The blood elves are definitely not simply repaints of the existing night elf models. Their features are more rounded, their ears stick straight up, and their bodies are less muscular. All of their newbie gear has a more stylized look, including kukri-inspired daggers and swords, and newbie robes with gold ornamentation. They jump in sort of a flying martial arts pose and instead of sometimes flipping, they sometimes spin instead. Their dance is a 1950s style shimmy of the hips combined with rubbing a toe on the ground — I think that might be called the Mashed Potato, I’m not sure. It was too loud to hear any vocal emotes, if they’ve even been added at this point.
Their innate mana-draining ability is pretty impressive against level 1 and level 2 foes, but only the silence ability — which has a significant cooldown period — is likely to be useful past level 20 or so.
Sunstrider Isle looks sort of like I’d imagined: Take night elf art and architecture, rip out all the nature-based motifs, and replace them with a strong reliance on magic. Objects like bookshelves float or even rotate in the air. There are small translocation gates used to get around between floating platforms. Pet Siamese cats are everywhere. Life for survivors of the Scourge attacks on Quel’Thalas looks to be quite comfortable, even if they’re effectively just living in a small gilded cage.
The one quest text I was able to read specifically mentioned the destiny of the blood elves is on Outland.
Having seen the new race creation process through the alpha period, from this brief glimpse — only one quest, and I wasn’t able to get to the zoneline for the next zone, if it was even open, with a level 1 blood elf dodging angry treants — the polish and quality looks comparable.
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