Tag: Heroes of the Storm

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Sooooo….. this is a thing.

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This the Demonic skin for Aurelia, an angel character in Heroes of the Storm. She normally looks like this:

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So of course when she becomes a demon (or almost, according to the backstory blurb), she wears an S&M outfit, cause that’s what demons are about? Where’s my S&M Azmodan skin, then, Blizzard?? 

The closest a male equivalent outfit gets is the Demonic Imperius skin, where he shows off his abs but unfortunately doesn’t wear a leather harness.

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At least he wears hot pants, but at the same time, he gets, like, a legitimate chest piece. Auriel is getting a nip slip the second she casts anything, assuming angels have nipples. Imperius also has an actual demonic appearance about him, whereas Auriel is just a Hot Chick with red wings. The fact that none of the angels have faces only makes it worse with her design.

Ugh. It’s such a shame, they could have made her actually scary-looking, but we can’t have that. After all, even an alien insect queen has to have a hot skin.

-Icy

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Hot Blizzard dudes Part 2 – Alexei Stukov

While Ozzie continued her silver fox transformation theme, I continued my own theme of Hot Monster Men, this time with Stukov here. I thought his halfsie outfit had some fun potential.

So instead of toning down the monstrosity, I decided to just make the monster half Hotter. Instead of tentacles on his chest, I gave him a zerg tiddy, because we all know how much the zerg love those tiddies. (And yes, that’s a nipple.) I also got rid of his shirt, because it’s not like he needs it. It’s all torn up by the infection anyway.

I reduced his pants to a thong (trust me, it’s a thong in the back), made his boots into thigh-high high heels, and added some hair on the visible skin. After all, we have to remember that Stukov was a man once. It’s all part of his Character Development.

Oh, and we can’t forget the little tentacle dick in his shorts. Or is it just a tentacle down his shorts? It’s for the Fans to figure out!

Finally, I gave him a face that better communicates his age of 50-52, at least according to how Blizzard draws them.

Overall, I had fun with this one, since it was pretty silly, but I hope that Blizzard realizes what the people want.

-Icy

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Hot Blizzard dudes Part ½ – Genn Greymane (human form) 

Continuing with my apparent theme of turning male characters into silver foxes, I went for a silver wolf this time – the werewolf king. 

Greymane is plenty good looking already, so I let his face as is.

The costume design was my basic strategy of keeping most of the silhouette intact while exposing as much of the chest, thighs and buttocks as possible. 

He’s a stocky boy, so I didn’t go with washboard abs bodybuilder look. It’s more of strongman/power lifter musculature. Of course, a werewolf has to have decent amount of body hair even in the human form. 

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His undershirt (?) now became a loincloth, and buttons (?) on his lapels, as per Icy’s (or maybe a viewer’s) suggestion got turned into golden pasties, to shelter us from his male-presenting nipples. His wolf form would probably need a couple pasties more 😉 He’s also sporting some (really not that ridiculous) high heels now, as more men should. 

As usual for Blizzard male character, Genn suffered from a case of Strategic Butt Coverings. I did my best to help. This here shiny bubble butt is probably so far my biggest achievement in painting dude asses. Go forth and admire it! 

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~Ozzie

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@emissaryofwind submitted: 

With Sally Whitemane’s High Inquisitor skin, I didn’t want to change much, as her design has some really cool elements and style. Rather, I chose to turn her leotard thing into a coat, keeping the style of her hanging banners. After all, the idea of an inquisitor is much more closely associated with flowing robes and coats, and a leotard isn’t usually considered appropriate attire for religious leaders. 

Such a small change in the overall design, and suddenly she looks like a religious leader! I would love to see a skin similar to this one in-game, instead of what we ended up getting.

This isn’t the fault of the redesign, but covering her legs really highlights how the original artist considered Whitemane’s skin to be a color in her palette; without it, she just has red and gold, basically (the black is barely present). The original design just keeps disappointing, really.

One small thing, and granted, it’s hard to see in the picture, but I’d get rid of her ridiculous stiletto heels. I think overall, this redesign really showcases how inadequate the original is in its intent. Thank you so much for the submission!

-Icy

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Red is for the High Inquisitor skin, Blue is additionals from the Celestial Empress skin

Clickbait Title: You Won’t Believe What Character Blizzard is Adding to Heroes of the Storm!

Having blocked out most of my memories of playing World of Warcraft (and I didn’t do raids), I didn’t remember Sally Whitemane, so boy was I surprised to learn she led a religious order!

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I’m not sure how anybody took this character seriously as an authority figure of any kind. Her outfit looks like something out of a fetish lingerie catalog. The HotS design is almost exactly the same as her original WoW model, which really highlights how much effort Blizzard is putting into doing women better.

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Not to mention, her first alternative skin is some kind of scissors accident, rather than, for example, her Horseman version? Yeah, she became one of WoW’s Four Horsemen (the only woman in the current lineup, of course).

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I mean, give her some padding on her exposed stomach, and that would be a fine alternate skin! But she does have a lot of skull motifs all over, so maybe they thought it would be too similar-looking to Sonya’s Death Knight skins.

-Icy

h/t: @evjazurian

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Having a heavy armored horse part, but wearing… this on the human part makes total sense for a centaur, right? After all, with two torsos they have, like, two sets of internal organs. 

I guess lungs and heart under those basically exposed boobs are just spares, who needs them as long as the horse organs are safe and sound, right?

~Ozzie

For a character who doesn’t even qualify for 4 of the squares, Lunara scores pretty high on the Bingo. Impressive??

-Icy

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So when a recurring character in Overwatch looks vastly different between her 3 appearances, we get told that different artists have different styles, and that Blizzard is allowed to change their character designs over time. But when Alexstrasza, queen of the dragons, gets a makeover and a pair of pants in Heroes of the Storm, there’s outrage on the forums. 

This is her original WoW model:

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You might notice that her clothes look a lot like Sylvanas’, even after they gave her pants. Even down to keeping the thong!

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They did try to differentiate her with the leg armor and cape, but they couldn’t bring themselves to actually design her properly, despite the fact that they supposedly redesign their characters all the time. She has the exact same coverage as Sylvanas, even down to the upper arm bands. Doing a bingo on her would just be redundant! 

I’ll give them props for giving her an interesting jawline, but that seems to be the extent of their creativity.

Also, is it just me, or does the jewelry she wears in her dragon form not resemble her humanoid jewelry at all? Even the rings on her horns seem to be different.

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And if the answer is, that’s what she chooses to appear as when she’s not a dragon… well, we already have stuff written up about that.

-Icy

h/t: @ghostoftom

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Let’s take a closer look at Sylvanas Windrunner, Queen of the Forsaken, as revealed in official Heroes of the Storm art. First though, to address one issue: 

mitulita​​ replied to your photo: “For the people who rushed to tell us we should never doubt Blizzard’s…”:

The Sylvanas design is not new, though. It has been exactly like this in World of Warcraft for years. They are just repeating an old mistake there…

Which still totally proves our point that Blizzard is NOT trying to improve. They had a perfect opportunity to update the design and did basically nothing.

While her official model for some reason wears a thong over nice pants, lots of popular Sylvanas fanart depicts her as pantless and Blizzard seem to be pretty okay with that.

~Ozzie

more Female Armor Bingos | more World of Warcraft | more Blizzard

Since Blizzard fandom still seems to think that “You shouldn’t criticize this outfit used in Heroes of the Storm, because it originates from another game!”, we thought it’s time to bring back this HotS Sylvanas bingo. Along with the commentary that just because something existed in an older franchise from the same company, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be redesigned and improved. 

Like… how does rhetoric make even the slightest bit of sense? 

Bad, sexist design is just that, no matter how well established it is.

If Quiet somehow reappeared in a future MGS game, still dressed in a handkerchief bikini and torn tights, would you really expect us to stop making Breathing Through Her Skin jokes?

~Ozzie

So besides the fact that Blizzard has redesigned a lot of their characters over the years, promising to improve on a problematic aspect of your game, and then blatantly recycling those same old aspects, that’s not improvement. That’s the kind of behavior that gets you ridiculed by us.

-Icy