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Check Out World of Warcraft's Updated Male Draenei Character Model

World of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment has released the first images of the overhauled male Draenei character model. As you can see in the image above, the new character model features higher-resolution textures that are capable of better depicting emotions.

“The original was one of the better character models in the game, so it didn’t require a ton of translation,” World of Warcraft at director Chris Robinson said in a post on Battle.net. “But with higher-resolution textures and more polygons to work with, we were able to bump up his fidelity quite a bit, as well as improve how we convey emotion through a new animation rig.”

All eight of World of Warcraft’s original playable races, as well as the Draenei and Blood Elves, will get character model overhauls in the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion. However, it’s unclear which races will be available when the expansion launches later this year. The fact that the new models have more polygons and animation effects might mean that you’ll need a better PC to run World of Warcraft in the future, but Blizzard isn’t sure about this just yet.

Blizzard has already released renders of the revamped versions of the Human male, Human female, Orcs, Taurens, Draenei, and Night Elves. Some of these in-progress models will start appearing in the Warlords of Draenor alpha test “soon.”

Warlords of Draenor is World of Warcraft’s fifth expansion, following The Burning Crusade (2007), Wrath of the Lich King (2008), Cataclysm (2010), and Mists of Pandaria (2012). It comes with an instant character boost to level 90, which you can unlock right now by pre-purchasing the expansion. By Blizzard’s latest count, World of Warcraft has 7.6 million subscribers, far outpacing any other subscription-based MMO on the market.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
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