Dear blizz, you’ve done some awesome work for night elven art since Legion and BFA, now please combine the best aspects from all of these to make an awesome night elf city.
If I may must haves:
- Beautiful architecture buildings - night elves loved doing this, started with the temples to Elune then lovely buildings
- Great temple of Elune - must have of any night elf city
- Glowy star and moon effects - showing Elune and arcane power
- Wisps, treants, critters and animals - nature is welcome in the city too (less in the highborne section.
- Gardens and parks - the night elf nature love is shown by beautiful marble buildings having lots of flowers, but the city also has parks - don’t want rural style wooden buildings though, please leave those for the villages and forests. Reflect nature love through
- Constellation roofs like in Zin’Azshari.
I would love
- A city centre like the Zin’Azshari in Warbringers
- Residential homes like in Suramar’s lower east side
- Temple of Elune tha’ts quite special like the Cathedral of Night in proper colours.
- Difference between highborne section and normal section is not architecture but ornamentation. One half of the city has lots of flowers and gardens, but reduced ornamentation, the other half has a lot more jewels and ornamentation heaviest in the highborne section
- Magical effects: arcane ones and nature ones. stars and moon for Elune and the arcane, wisps and spirits for nature.
- Building stonework for the non-highborne area to be like Darnassus and Zin’Azshari - having nature interwoven into it.
Lay out.
Huge park in the centre, with one beautiful tree home (new design). This is the only druidic looking place - because druids don’t do cities remember, they do forests. nature is reflected in the creatures, garddens and parks.
Parks at the back of each city quarter but behind a beautiful marbled wall that marks the boundary of the city.
Lore:
- Night elves need cities too, let them have the best their race can provide.
- Priests wanted the best temple to honour Elune,
- Highborne wanted a remarkable looking city to reflect the best of their people to the world and also boost their value and esteem amongst their kin (rep rebuilding).
- Druids don’t do cities, but prefer to have large population centres in them so the forest is least disturbed, their contribution is the beautiful gardens and parks.
Method:
- All the models are in game. Just cut together the best versions and bring them to life with the right colouring and lighting.
- Moon white symbolising the moon and the stars, glowing in the night for the building walls
- Rooftops: Constellation ceilings like in Zin’Azshari warbringers, and some buildings have rooftop gardens.
- Restored ruins: All the ruins from legion onwards have pristine versions because they were designed first then converted to ruins so:
- Restore Nar’thalas, Meredil, Tel’anor, Temple of Falanar - also use those buildings to rebuild cities for Mathystra, Lornesta, Bashal’aran, Ameth’aran and some of the ruined places in Ashenvale, Desolace and Feralas.
- Repeat the formular of adding arcane glowy star and moon effects, glowing symbols, wisps, critters, treants , glowing gems and jewels.
Images:
From the very best of what was designed for night elves in game.
According to lore, night elves greatest wonders are built by highborne mages, Ancients druids and priests working together (just like in the first era of the night elves)
(recolour by goddess of light) - notice night elf architecture, glowing moon symbols and effects) (copy paste the CoEN to new city)
The original night lf capital, the new one should be based on these colours, look at the gardens and roof topgardens, also observe some of the constellation style roof tops
Suramar was built by the night elves, it’s where most of the Darnassians you play on the alliance come from, and all the nightborne there are a sub race of the night elves they once were. A highborne section would have less nature, and more jewelled ornamentation, natre is more ordered here.
Again, copy paste this fabulous artwork for homes and business, but with Zin’Azshari colours in the residential and commercial districts of the new night elf city
This artistic impression is an idea of how flowery and garden numerous the night elf city would be, especially in the residential area , this along with the parks is how you reflect nature love.
Lots of nature amids beaitful architecture, notice how compared to Thalassian elf cities, this is a lot more flowery, and you don’t need wooden tree homes or rrual buildings to reflect the nature love in a capital city.
While these are the old models, note how the walls have beautiful patterns, and vines interwoven. in the stone work of the buildings and the marble bridges. This should also be a part of the new night elf city. Highborne sections can replace vines with jewels and runes of gold and silver, priest section can add star constellations to the vine interwoven section on the stones.
Also notice how outside the marble work ways is grass - this is similar to Zin’Azshari.
See there is a non-ruined version of Nar’thalas that can easily be restored to give us more kaldorei smaller cities and towns, just brighten the colours and add glowy magical effects, population, wisps, etc and beautiful colours. Can you imagine the Crumbling palace restored? It’s largely a recolouring to restore night elf smaller cities and towns.
HEre is Meredil restored…all the restored files are there.
Another angle of Nar’thalas, you can basically rebuild the entire night elf zones that have ruins, by replacing some of the ruins with the pristine versions, for places in Azsuna and Suramar zone, but also have some new ones using these models to restore places like Ameth’aran, Mathystra, Bashal’aran … not all ruins should be restored though, just some
Tel’anor just needs a repaint and populating and it’s good to go as a night elf town.
Temples
You saw the big Cathedral restored for the capital, but we have temples all over, and they can be restored where they are.
Priests have temples both for forest communities like in Val’sharah and urban communiteis too like in Azsuna and Suramar. While these are in ruins, they can be restored to look amazing, glass roofs, glowy effects of stars and moon.
A temple in Zin’Azshari
The one in Val’sharah - needs to be restored
Here is the old model version in Azshara zone.
Forests
While this post focuses on the Night elf city and restoring urban centres to look good. Forests also need restoring.
forests are vast plains of nature, and the night elves had 4 major ones in game.
- Teldrassil - now destroyed, I hope shaladrassil can be replicated
- Ashenvale - marred by the crap that happened in Cataclysm, vast forest land, but notice how it has both forest homes and some urban ruins which can be restored (city of Zoram was/is one) - can be a great example
- Feralas - this is a great forest, but also has urban elements in the city of Eldre’thalas and 2 others in ruins, but lots of forest
- Hyjal - Hyjal is fantastic, but Cata burnt most of the forest by that gaping fire lands invasion, woudl love to see it properly restored
- Val’sharah - the most beautiful of them all, it was gorgeous, even the nightmare bit, I would love a recolouring of that, the nightmare is driven back so it should change, have maybe a white and red and purple colour range compared to the natural green of the rest of the forest.
Notice also the rural forest homes. Night elves, like most big races in warcraft have architecture for rural areas and for urban areas. Now it appears al elves share this architecture. It was pre-sundering and both night elves and high elves use it.
Winterspring has a pre-sundering lodge of this style
Astrannar, Auberdine, Moonglade and Lor’danel have these style buildings in their village
The High elven hunter’s lodge in Loch Modan uses this
The high elven lodge in Hinterlands and Eastern Plaguelands (Quel’lithien) also uses this
This style is not used in either the cities of the night elves or high elves, but is common in the forest homes and rural villages.
Forest homes and forest village - different architecture to town and city for night elves. You should see this deep forests, not many homes, they don’t like distrubing the forest to make homes -which is why they would prefer population centres in cities, and less in forests. IT also means night elves are likely to rebuild ruins rather than take up more forst space to build new cities or towns.
Forest home building
What Hyjal could look like
Especially with the current Sylvanas storyline, would be nice to see her go back to her homeland and see a remade version.
like in LOTR elves living in woods, glowing blue-white lights everywhere so magical.