If you’re at all familiar with World of Warcraft, you might have also heard the name Hurricane bandied about a few times—that’s because the machinima auteur and their team have been commissioned by Blizzard in the past, first for the Wrath of the Lich King Classic, then for Cataclysm soon after.
That hasn’t stopped them from working on their own projects, clearly. Yesterday, Hurricane & Co released a mock trailer for “World of Racetrack”, and while “World of Carcraft” was right there, I’m otherwise fully on-board with the Mad Max-meets Formula One vibes this thing’s putting out.
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Like the trailers that came before it, World of Racetrack is a professionally styled production that weaponises the game’s assets (many of which saw extensive remodelling) to great effect, showing us an Azeroth changed by the all-consuming desire to drive.
I’m mostly just impressed by the cinematic vision on display here. There’s rustling up a cute machinima, and then there’s punching in the weight class of official products—this could absolutely scan as a cinematic teaser for a Plunderstorm-like limited time event, and I’m honestly sad it isn’t one.
“This has been my personal project for the past 7 months,” writes Hurricane in the video description: “and it’s the result of the work me and my team have been doing to further our 3D skills, and to test various 3D pipeline tools and scripts to aid WoW machinima creation.”
Hurricane also shared a making-of video, which gives a little insight into the production that goes into something like this. Spoiler: It’s a lot of effort. What impresses me most is how several of the game’s chunkier-looking assets were straight-up remodelled by Phorge, who Hurricane shouts out as “remodelling all the vehicles to cinematic quality,” and “helping [get] this project off the ground!”
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While The War Within might be turning WoW’s focus to more character-driven stories, I can’t help but be charmed by the idea thrumming under the hood, here. Maybe rather than putting their tensions aside, the Horde and Alliance could duke it out in a controlled environment. That is, by blowing each other up on the tarmac. It’s probably more productive than setting a tree on fire.