| Browse these pages: | Backstory Overview | Cinematic and Storytelling | Demon Hunter Intro | The Broken Isles |
| Val'sharah | Stormheim | Azsuna | Highmountain | |
| Suramar | End-Game Systems | Dungeons & Raids |
Creating the World: Val’sharah
Gary: Thanks, Jules. My name is Gary. I am going to talk to you about the process that we all went through to create the world of Legion.
I am going to show you a lot of concept art, and even have some video about our latest versions of every zone.
So let’s continue where Jules left off with Val’sharah. This is meant to be a druidic paradise. So in order to make this, we wanted to create a true fantasy forest. Everytime we start a new zone, we create a concept to try to illustrate that vision, and this was that concept.
This piece is our foundation piece. From here lots of people can do a lot of work for this concept, because this is our palette. It gives us our shape, and it even gives us our mood. So from here, we can start to build the zone, and we can start to build these druid structures.
All the structures in Val’sharah are almost undistinguishable from trees, so it was really important that the art team, and the design team works very close together to create this druid world.
Another pretty substantial part of Val’sharah is this. This is an early concept of Black Rook Hold. Carved from the very rock, with a small town that lives in its shadow.
So like in every good story, Val’sharah has a cool twist. In this case, the twist is the Nightmare. We had a lot of fun trying to illustrate: “What the heck the Nightmare was going to be?”
How it was going to look? Was it going to move through the forest like a fire? Was it going to be like a big forest field?
We knew we wanted it to appear evil. We knew we wanted it to look dangerous, and we knew that we wanted it to affect everything it touches.
Another big challenge was this. The giant tree Saladrassil. This is a giant tree that we had to see from almost an entire zone away, but still keep that unique feel of the Nightmare that we were still trying to work on.
Let’s take a look at a video of our latest version of this zone.
| Browse these pages: | Backstory Overview | Cinematic and Storytelling | Demon Hunter Intro | The Broken Isles |
| Val'sharah | Stormheim | Azsuna | Highmountain | |
| Suramar | End-Game Systems | Dungeons & Raids |
