Most of us know that the new HD character models from WoD received some mixed response when it first came. Some says that the new models don't carry out the spirit from the old one. Others say that they look all the same. Others say that the animations are overanimated. Etc. etc.
It is quite unfortunate for me that my personal favorite, the gnome female, was one of the models that were receiving quite a lot of negative response. After comparing their original to the HD one, I came to conclusion that the complains are valid. The character mostly looks very angry while idling, and all look extremely pissed off while jogging, and in the next second they can perform a /dance that make them look jolly.
For the most part, Blizzard seems to only retain some elements from the original, such as green eye color stays green, brown stays brown. Freckles on the brown eyed gnome also stays. Sadly the others had to go a lot of changes, such as wrinkles on characters who didn't have them before, wide eyes for everyone... mildly angry looking face turned neutral (see green eyed female gnome) and the neutral turned really angry. On the other hand, the death knight exclusive skin lost its' undead touch, except for the pale skin. The supposedly withering details were lost due to the extremely small size, and the black circle around the eye went missing. The cheek also stayed chubby on the spot where there was supposed to be deep wrinkle.
I did not manage to take a look on the original MPQ from WoD, but judging from the looks, it seems that the logic of character customization largely stayed the same : A single character model with multitude of textures. The problem that arise is that while the old model relies heavily on textures to define the character, the new ones are very polygon-reliant, making it hard to be modified by textures. This would explain why every of same race and gender character looked the same, especially on the eye and mouth size, as well as facial feature positions. It does not exactly redeem the mistake, as the brows stays customizable and some facial features are still possible via textures. Even further, Blizzard could've changed the visual code to support model morphing (If they actually did though, that was a lousy job)
The animations however, does not have anything to warrant any redeeming, as they are as flexible as their old rendition, if not possibly more. Perhaps they want to have the sense of exaggeration element of animation. However, as it is necessary to exaggerate movement in animation, too much of them will cause the animation to become unrealistic.
With that said, there's a saying that if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself... and I just happen to have gotten a bit bored with playing WoTLK
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