Draenor revealed - Work in progress, but looking bad

That looks a lot like the Barrens with floating trees.

It seems that a korean site released a bunch of screenshots from Draenor, an unfinished region in "The Burning Crusade", the expansion for WoW that will arrive later than sooner.

Eww. It seems that WoW's solid art style just went to hell. Too many things and textures are clashing or looking plain bad. Most of the stuff that doesn't look terrible is about reused art assets that are already in the game. One of the best things of WoW is the wonderful art of the ground textures. This is the first thing that seems lost in these screenshots. The new brushes used are terrible and only a very bleached copy of the graphical splendor of the Blasted Lands (or the orc/troll lands but I didn't have a screenshot ready).

The sense of choesion and careful level building seems also completely lost and leaning more toward the bowl-model of zone, with the mountains at the margin and open space in the middle. Without the nooks and crannies to explore, small passages to cross and all those elements that make the exploration of the places so much satisfying. Instead this zone seems to have no sense, with the objects added at random and without a specific planning.

Of course it is obviously far from finished. We can only hope that the final result will look completely different but the work in progress looks at the antipodes of the concept art at the base of that region. The zone will be polished, but it's the overall layout and feeling that isn't convincing me. I've seen plenty of unfinished zones in the past, but noone looked ugly like in this case.

The original source is here. I have the images saved on the HD in the case that site goes down.

EDIT- Comments useless since it seems that the zone was already in the mpq files long ago.

EDIT2- Tigole commented:

Bogus
Those aren't pictures of anything in the Burning Crusade. Those are hacked pictures of a 2-year old demo zone that a level designer was experimenting with before he had tile sets, objects etc. You can see Eastern Plaguelands mushrooms there and the thorns from the Quilboar camps from the Barrens. That's what level designers do when they are experimenting -- they use existing textures and objects to try to simulate what an actual zone would be like.

It's a picture of a level designer's experiment, ripped open with a map hacker. I'm confident you'll find the actual screenshots of the zones in Outland to be much more pleasing.

Re: Draenor revealed - Work in progress, but looking bad

I dont know how reliable those pictures are, ive heard its a test map for Draenor that they used a mapviewer to get into. Dont know how reliable that information is, and it could just be me having a little more optimism and faith in Blizzard than I rightfully should have.

From the way they're talking I really dont expect to see very many "bowl" maps. The whole "Flying mount" to get to places, floating islands. It seems more like Draenor wont be just one large landmass with just one or two offshoots like in the picture, but that instead of bowl-shaped maps it'll be more giant floating islands where if you're drunk and not careful you'll fall to your doom.

Once again...I could just have more faith in Blizzard than I should have. So who knows.

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