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Blizzard, why is Golden Malfurion and Valeera still toned down?
As most of you know blizzard introduced a patch in 2015 june (i think 15th but i might be mistaken) which included the first alternate hero portraits that you can purchase (Magni, Medivh, Alleria). Now the patch had some other changes as well, to UI and also added the tavern brawl mode, but had a -i have to assume not intended- side effect: regular golden heroes were toned down. By a lot in some cases. Animations where missing, colors not that vivid i can go on, they where much less animated.
Here is a video of kripp at the time even talking about the hunter one (at 2:20) that it's no longer that good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXtTCQK8R2U
Now it must be mentioned that he only touched upon hunter cause it was the "class to hate" at the time because of facehunter, and the other reason being the patch was out for a day at best so most people did not notice yet.
However it was fixed later on, they even included it in the patch notes pretty much admitting it was not intended, here is the source:
https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Patch_2.8.0.9554
But hunter was not the only one to suffer this, warlock was toned down the same way but it was fixed mounth later without any notes.
Which leads us to the present: druid and rouge (malfurion and valeera to be precise) is still not fixed.
Here are the comparisons of how they used to look and how they look now:
Malfurion in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su-jLBrral8
And now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc59hnA2yTo
Valeera in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNY1F9AJkyk
And now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PPeMm6uv4c
At the end of all videos when the players aquire the animated portrait you can clearly see the difference. Valeera-s background is way better, while Malfurion-s foreground has the same animated leafes as his background.
My question to Blizzard is: why have these been not fixed along with the other ones that were previously have, and why did they had to be toned down to begin with? I personaly prefer the more detailed animations and would like them to be returned just as the other heroes.
Hadidjah
Okay I'm super lame and forgot to take a proper look at all the golden heroes at work today - I'll try to remember tomorrow and report back if I get any new info. (Just to set expectations, this was before my time as I've only been here since the start of 2016 - all I can really offer up is what I see in the animation changes and some of the general artistic guidelines we try to keep to for goldens.) So unless I can track you down a proper answer - I shall stall with general artistic philosophy. :D
We try to keep to a (verrrry rough) hierarchy of 'loudness' in golden animations. Spells get to be the loudest - in terms of the speed of the animations, brightness, etc.- because they're only ever seen in your hand or as the big card when they're played. Minions come after that, because they're on the board and generally the stars of the show. Weapons are a bit lower key than minions. And hero portraits are the hopefully the subtlest, because they're always there, the whole game, every game. We also try to keep the attention on the subject of the art piece - in these cases, we would want the eye to most be draw to Valeera and Malfurion themselves. The common thread that I see between those two changes (doesn't mean it's correct, just that it's what I see from the mindset of goldenizing these), is that the bright background mist on Valeera and the translucent leaves on Malfurion are kind of actively distracting from the heroes themselves. It's not that we don't like ambient stuff, we usually try to have at least a bit of it to help make sure the whole portrait feels animated, but too heavy a hand with it and the piece stops being as much about the hero.
As an aside, as an art piece that needs to get goldenified... Malfurion is the sort of piece that I would dread having to come up with the right balance of stuff to animate. Magic-users like Jaina and Anduin are cake, all sorts of cool spells and bounce light on them, Valeera has her cool daggers and cape to play off of... But freaking Malfurion's got nothing. No spells, no capes, not even some bloody armor to run a glint over. Pieces like that always wind up on the subtler side no matter how much we tear our hair out over them, because most additions draw the eye to the wrong place, look tacky, or make the art look like a different piece than it was as a non-golden. It's easier to get awesome nuanced stuff with the new shader that's letting our goldens guy do crazy stuff like Humongous Razorleaf, but these are all from the old version of the shader where we didn't have nearly as much animation capacity (or quite as many artists to do the animating).
I know that doesn't directly answer the question, but hopefully it at least gives a bit of context for now. :) Cheers!
Hadidjah
Honestly I'd love for the hero portraits to get an update at some point, if anything deserves the new shader it's them. It just goes in the same passion project bucket as classic legendary animations, and there's not a whole lot of free time in between expansions to chip away at them. When It's Ready™, I suppose. :P
Hadidjah
Well the last person to try to bribe FX out of me offered me a six-pack of beer, but I can't finish an entire one on my own. So I guess if you're ever in the area and want to split some beers, we'll call it paid. :)
Hadidjah
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm yeah okay i guess, but only because that explanation was really convincing.