Making updated models seems to take them forever. I feel like they need to hire outside help that they don’t have to keep on to help ease the load of things.
Example is the Creation Club (I know i know) They pay outside people a flat fee for work. Bethesda then keeps the items and sells them on their club thing.
I’ve seen a lot of modelers out there wishing they could revamp a lot of stuff and I’ve seen them remake existing models better (Yes some lewd but that’s not the point) and they did it with dedication to the looks.
I’ve seen some nice tauren remodels by these people with more diversity in their looks. More horn accessories, body paint, hairstyles, fur colors, etc etc.
I feel like they have an untapped resource in dedicated fans to help make things better overall but they choose to sit up in their ivory tower.
EDIT: The art team does a wonderful job. I figured they could outsource all the smaller mundane stuff like updating textures of older armors. All the small things they can’t handle cause they are working on the next zone.
While they have been outsourcing for Diablo: Immortal, the practice is never great long term. Blizzard has always had a stance at quality and that quality takes time. By pushing their products to a third party dev team, you lose out on that quality control for cost savings, even if it’s from amateurs or in a non-paid set up.
That’s outsourcing to a company that cuts corners for profit. I’m talking about the dedicated quality work I’ve seen done by people who do this as a hobby.
Sometimes there is a lot of hidden talent out there that goes unused.
They hire on teams for store mounts or claim to so it isn’t that they are adverse to the practice… now them hiring them for something they can’t sell as a extra buck that they might take issue with.
Blizz takes their art department VERY seriously. I got a buddy that works over at Bethesda ( If you liked that prison escape mission in Skyrim over in Markarth, he says you’re welcome ) so sometimes he gets to see other gamer folks. Dude Blizz’s art team is constantly pushed to their limit because they know they got a lot of work to do and it has to be perfect. Outsourcing gets in the way of that.
Considering that it takes them years to even update a character model and seeing how outdated most of the “Armor” is in the game which, let’s face it. most of the armor in the game is just replaced textures on your character.
Yeah, it’s kinda clear that they do infact need to outsource the Modeling work as it’ll allow the players to acquire more Tmogs for example that look unique and interesting instead of just a re-used asset… or are you saying that you want more reusing of existing assets instead of getting non-reused assets?
If they could outsource concept artists, totally. There are a lot of brilliant art minds out there creating beautiful content like this and Blizzard usually just pushes out minor textures on models we already have. At least, with this, they’d have some grounds to modify and apply it to new things. But if they’d open their doors to all of the fans that do work on Blizz-like levels, that would be awesome too.
Even if they just hire some people to make some new damn hairstyles and make them use physics like mounts and gear, it’d be great.
Honestly it would be good for them. My intention was outside help could work on the more mundane stuff like all the old armors and such and give them a new paintjob and touch up here and there and let the main art team work on the new areas and gear and all the other stuff they enjoy making.
Players work on the past while the Art team looks to the future.