In a post on the official forums yesterday, Drysc spoke about the reasoning behind why Blizzard reuse the same models for some armor. Sure, it’s easier, but there are other reasons too. But he went on to explain that another reason new models aren’t being made at this stage is because the designers are working on their next project: Wrath of the Lich King. He says the quality of graphics in the next expansion is much better than anything in-game now. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to get a glimpse of that stuff…
Here’s what he said:
[blue=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5784447684&postId=58345271664&sid=1#42]Contrary to popular belief (?) designing a new item set does take a while. We usually use color shifts on the same designs to save time, the exception to that would be the arena sets where we want the items to specifically match the PvE counterparts. The choice to color shift is usually when an item isn’t something that would benefit from having a unique model, usually a leveling item. In the case of the badge rewards I can see the reasoning to use color shifts for the level of investment taken to acquire them. Is buying an item with badges the same as clearing Black Temple? No, no not really. So, it isn’t so horrible if a shift is used.
What I find odd is that in this particular case we seem to have gone against what would normally be shifted, which is the matching dungeon items, and instead shifted from a previous dungeon’s/quest items. My only guess is that those shifts were already done, or the artists preferred them to the new design.
Now that the entirety of the art department’s is focused completely on Lich King I don’t find it surprising that their time spent invested on the badge items were color shifts. The level of quality of the environments, items, textures, models, etc. in the next expansion are far and above better than anything in the game thus far, so I definitely understand the desire to focus as much time of their time on them as possible.[/blue]
Bear in mind that with Burning Crusade, there was a +20% “buff” done to character models, or at least new ones. The Blood Elf and Draenei models have a lot more detail than the old world ones, but the models of all character models were upgraded in 2.4 (but only visible on Human female characters), so there might be some more really nice changes coming with Wrath of the Lich King. It has previously been stated that WoW was designed with the intention of being able to upgrade graphics, so for Lich King we might actually get to see some proper earthshaking changes!
I’m sceptical about being "blown away" by their new WOTLK models and textures unless the game rendering engine receives major updates as well.
But being a wow player I would of course love to be proved wrong!