Why new character models?

Because they were looking pretty outdated, of course. While our environment art gets better and better, dungeons and raids have higher fidelity, zones have more detail, as we update models for prominent heroes, introduce new enemies and bosses with high polys and high res textures, etc. etc. the old character models just look worse and worse by comparison. It was past due, really. But you are right, it's an enormous undertaking, and one our artists are extremely passionate about.

But, to respond to your point about armor, yes that's true armor can cover a lot, but plenty of people do like to play with their helmet turned off--and it's nice to have a pretty face showing. But also the basic upgrade of polygon count and animation detail will have an effect all of the time, regardless of armor. Plus, updated character models are a shot-in-the-arm for any machinima makers out there looking to cut together WoW footage. Oh, and also, probably not super obvious but a lot of armor is actually just a texture directly on the geometry of the character. Any increase to the polys of that geometry can have a direct benefit to the way armor looks, new and old. And also now we can design gear to show off the male human high res nipples/chest hair. If we were so inclined.

06/26/2014 02:43 PMPosted by Eldevane

By this logic much of the vanilla game world needs a retexture at the very least. Most of the old mob models looks like they were ripped out of an N64 game and most of the trees are an eyesore.

Uh, sure, and I'm sure we'd like to given the time, but the vast majority of people playing are high level, you continually are looking at your and other people's character model regardless of what zone or expansion you're in, and the old zones and creatures are usually quite relegated to their places in the world. Measuring bang-for-the-buck metrics, character models are about infinity times more important.