It’s very common for World of Warcraft‘s developers to apply visual updates to major characters with the launch of a new expansion, and no character has received more of an evolutionary glow-up than Anduin Wrynn, the Human king of Stormwind, who has literally grown up alongside the entirety of the player base.
When WoW first launched in 2004, Anduin was a toddler, and now, he’s fully grown into a man. However, players noticed that although Anduin’s character model is extremely detailed in WoW’s art and cinematics, those extreme aging-related changes aren’t reflected as drastically in the game. In a post to the WoW subreddit earlier today, players discussed the inconsistencies between Anduin’s looks, citing how the character looks slightly different and borderline underwhelming in-game compared to what’s shown off of him in official art.
“[Anduin’s] hair and beard are the wrong color compared to the artwork (too blonde), and look quite low-res / low-poly compared to the rest of his model,” the original poster of the Reddit thread said in a comment. “His eyes also look rather dark and his expression is all grumpy, while the cinematic version is more … I don’t know, worn and tired?”
Anduin has received a model upgrade in three of the game’s last four expansions, and his look in The War Within is easily the most mature of the three. The steps that Anduin took between The War Within and his last big appearance in Shadowlands are massive, as his new model is a night-and-day upgrade.
The newest edition of Anduin is extremely mature compared to his older looks, as he’s grown a beard and cut his hair real short. His face also has lost its young, boyish charm and is instead reflective of the hardships his character went through in the Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansions.
The biggest reason why Anduin looks so different in-game when compared to his cinematic look is likely because it’s much easier to create a realistic and detailed render of the character in a cinematic than it is to do so in the WoW engine. While there are seemingly unlimited artistic resources in the cinematic department, WoW’s in-game art style has remained relatively stagnant in recent memory.
Additionally, Anduin’s race (human) plays a role in how he’s portrayed varyingly in different media forms. Across the board, one can expect the more specific races of WoW to remain relatively similar due to how streamlined their appearances are throughout forms of media. However, humans can be tougher to pinpoint, and Anduin is no exception.
One player in the thread actually pointed towards Anduin’s model in Heroes of the Storm as a better way to judge the character, as he’s not “stuck using the human male skeleton from WoW” in that game.
Anduin’s new model is available to check out in the WoW The War Within alpha, which went live earlier this week.
