Blizzard's Greg Street Talks About Wanting to Change WoW Character Models, Pandas, Pets and More

AusGamers interviewed Blizzard's Greg Street about the next major Word of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria and broached many topics, including why they haven't changed the game's character models in quite a while.

"We really want to do that," he told the site. "The challenge we’re at right now is that when we decided that we wanted to do this new continent that we couldn’t just have the same type of creatures walking around that players were used to -- to feel like an exotic land, we needed a lot of new creature models.

So we have a lot of tasks placed on our poor character artists to deliver on all of these and then a lot of them need new animations as well -- if you saw some of the enemy creatures we’ve come up with like the Mantid and the Sha. You can’t just stick that on existing animation rigs, there’s a lot of work there to do."

He also talked about the game's pet battling system and the obvious parallel there to Pokemon, and defended that by reminding everyone they're gamers as well.

"I think like all game designers, we look for good ideas in other genres," he said. "That’s like saying that Diablo is too much like World of Warcraft, because they’re both games where you have a health bar and you get a sword and things like that. So there’s a lot of games out there that do that. We don’t want to step on anyone’s toes too much or infringe, we just want to use features that have been shown to be really popular with players."

The full interview covers 4:3, quest-lines, linearity, post-dynamic panda implementation in Azeroth and much, much more...

[negroguy]

Battle with 3 pokem.. err pets and use 3 abilities in battle while traveling around the world to fight leaders.. lol Pikachu is not happy.