WoW: That's why there were Draenei instead of Pandaren in The Burning Crusade

Trent Kaniuga was the concept artist behind the popular WoW expansion The Burning Crusade. On Reddit, the artist talked a bit about his anecdotes and answered questions from the community. We have summarized the most important findings for you below:

• Originally, it was planned for The Burning Crusade that the Pandaren would strengthen the Alliance side. Several locations linked to the Pandaren were also already planned. However, due to a deal with China, this plan was put on hold and the Pandaren would only play a role at a later date. The Draenei took their place, the Pandaren got their own expansion with Mists of Pandaria.
• Otherwise, the development of TBC was very efficient. There were hardly any planned features or content aside from the Pandaren that could not be implemented in TBC. The things that were not implemented ended up on the servers with WotLK.
• When designing the flying islands in Nagrand, the artists were inspired by the movie "The Neverending Story". Nagrand, as well as many other areas, were created through the collaboration of several artists. The final concepts then crossed the desk of Chris Metzen, who made sure the designs matched the lore in his head.
• Whenever something was to be designed for WoW that had already appeared in Warcraft, it had to look new and fresh. They didn't want to just take over the designs. Therefore, the art concepts were often created without the artists seeing the Warcraft originals beforehand.
• First, Trent Kaniuga worked on the Exodar as well as the Draenei starting zone. Later, he also had his creative hands in the Zanga Marshes, Nagrand, Terrokar Woods and other zones. He also designed other things like the devil cannons, some blood elf specific items as well as countless icon designs.

If you want to learn more about Trent Kaniuga's work on The Burning Crusade and see numerous TBC artworks, we recommend the following video of the artist:

Trent Kaniuga, by the way, still works for the games industry with his studio. In recent years, he has created concept art for Fortnite, Overwatch, League of Legends and many other games.

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