No worries. Honestly it was pruning that was necessary and although it was off-topic, I felt the ‘putting of my foot down’ to the behaviour I was receiving was necessary too.
The one thing I was going to ask at least though was if you had any visual reference for the kind of Footman design you’d like to see in Reforged. Doesn’t even have to be a Warcraft reference if there’s another place you think has a nice “standard fantasy soldier” visual.
Totally possible. Looking at that old Mists model and even his current one, that art definitely draws from both. But certainly isn’t the stock standard Chieftain and Cairne (though since his model is identical in Warcraft 3, I’m going more off his other renditions after 3) so it does make me think, too, that it might be a less decorated Baine.
The fun thing I noticed is that the axe shares a bit of the silhouette as this axe from Cataclysm.
https://i.imgur.com/F6zKyNU.jpg
This is the one downside I’ve really noticed to the evolution of the Warcraft style to stuff that’s a bit more… comic book-y than ever before. Tauren kind of stepped away from being really bestial bull and minotaur people to more anthropomorphized bovines in-game for World of Warcraft. Outside of it in official art (save for a bit of Hearthstone/TCG stuff) they’re still really close to the early era stuff around Warcraft 3, but ever since the model updates in Warlords they really got more cowlike.
It subscription numbers climbed throughout the initial release and through two expansions, where they peaked in the second with 12 million players. So they hit the ground running and people were really on with it. Maybe the story hasn’t been as intimate as it could’ve been (although I liked all the Arthas/Lich King stuff in Wrath, was an interesting take on how an NPC handles or thinks about the heroes that are the player characters) but the volume critiques seemed to hit in the latter half of Mists of Pandaria and onward from there.
There’s a lot of good ideas but the in-betweens of how to get to point C from point B and point A before that do leave something to be desired when they are addressed. Or addressed at all. Let’s also not forget that, yes, World of Warcraft is the main platform for Warcraft lore but it isn’t the sole source.