This is a bit of a tangent, but both male Nightborne and Night Elves need new face types. The removal of the snarl was a good start for the Nightborne, and will hopefully be extended to the male Night Elves in the future, but it’s still not nearly transformative enough.
Both male NB and NE have need for varied facial types other than angry, old, snarling, and wrinkled. The players that want wrinkled and angry faces should have those options, but there should be room for other forms of expression as well.
It’s basically a toned down version of the face in this official concept art. It’s great that the developers wanted to be faithful to the original concept art, but how about not letting this depiction inform the design choices of every face?
They’ve got the concept art version of the wrinkled, angry, pouting Night Elf down pat, now let’s move away from that and allow different forms of expression for the races of the game.
The menacing scowl has been a customization option for male Night Elves since the launch of World of Warcraft. Back in the Warlords of Draenor expansion, the Night Elves had their character models updated and that’s when we updated the 3 menacing scowl faces to be the somewhat less menacing faces that you see today.
We looked into the number of male Night Elves that players have created with those faces and we found that they aren’t as popular as the other face selections. We agreed with your feedback that having 3 of the 9 faces with the scowling mouth may be hindering your face options, so we have copied these scowling faces and added a more natural posed mouth as 3 new face options for you to choose from in Eternity’s End.
We understand that there’s a long history with these male Night Elf faces, so we would love to know what you think. To help visualize the changes, the three new face options should be available for testing in this week’s PTR build.
Thank you! Although I don’t think it will entirely fix the male nelf face problem since those 3 faces are still wrinkly. I hope we can get some more handsome/younger options in the future
Can we please also take a look at the shoulder armor placement for Male Night Elves while we’re at it? The anchor point for both shoulders are not in the same place symmetrically and the left shoulder (right facing the front of the character) is tilted more downward to the side and makes transmogging shoulders a nightmare as anything slightly larger or poking out are very visibly unsymmetrical.
My first, and continued, character is a Night Elf. Back in Vanilla, I picked a specific face because that face reflected a degree of, not simplicity, but a minimalist mindset. The character was always meant to be more about what must be done and she didn’t care how she looked. That face came with a smile though, that didn’t reflect my character’s somberness. But it was the best compromise of the options available, so up until WoD, Ata had, what I called “Joker face.”
When WoD happened, and we got the new character updates, I found that that smiling face didn’t work anymore, and I was glad that Blizzard put face optimizations in the game. Because it turns out the next face on the list, one that was too much “done up” for my tastes then, now reflects the somberness and sorrow that defines my character now.
I guess the point is that now that the faces have rigging, Blizzard shouldn’t be afraid of what the resting faces look like. The player will find a model that works for them.
There it is! Personally I think the “M-Shaped” unnatural mouth was always odd and just needed to be fixed, but I actually GREATLY appreciate the principle that you guys are “adding instead of replacing.” Very excited to see what they look like!
