Yesterday saw two upcoming MMO teams with announcements about classes and races, complete with trailers and fun stuff to download like wallpaper for your PC.
Guild Wars 2 presented a video showing their races. This is fantastically atmospheric stuff with great voice acting (Dragon Age players may recognise Oghren, and fans of The Guild will recognise Felicia Day), and the stunning art direction we’ve come to associate with Guild Wars.
There’s a website also, which is where you can check out what a female Charr looks like and download wallpapers for each race. It certainly did the job of making them all look fun to play, I think I’m torn between the Charr and the viking shapeshifter dudes. I can’t decide also whether people who come from the frozen north should be wearing more clothes — I remember seeing girls walking around in mini-skirts in Newcastle in Midwinter when I lived there, so maybe they just get acclimatised.
The Star Wars team ‘announced’ the Jedi Consular (well, announced in the sense of making official what everyone already knew), a class that looks to be taking silly hats to a new height.
They also offer a wide selection of wallpapers on their site — a couple for each announced class and some pretty landscapes from different planets as well. Although their style is not as high art as Guild Wars, the Star Wars team make up for it with some amazing flash animations of the different classes in action on their class pages – the Jedi Knight is a particular favourite.
So, game themed wallpapers, do you like them or hate them? I am one of the people who rushes to download these things when I find them, and I love having cool game related art on my PC.
But despite the artier Guild Wars pictures, it’s the smuggler who sits in pride of place on my wallpaper at the moment. I admit this is mostly because I find it easier to locate my icons on a dark background.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
I also prefer to use wallpapers where not so much is going on, at least on the left side where my icons are.
P.S.: I can recommend this page, lots of gaming and general wallpapers: http://www.zastavki.com/eng/Space/wallpaper-11280-18.htm
I became rather fond of the wallpapers offered by Greg Martin a few years back. For a while he stopped offering them, though. The current galleries look to have some nice stuff in them, but nothing like the folders of his stuff I’ve got saved on my hard drive right now. I periodically switch up, but mostly leave shots of “life bearing worlds” with a star behind them as my desktop wallpaper — as you say, it’s easier to find icons on the darker background.
And they’re awfully purty too 😉
Normally I don’t care what game is on the wallpaper, as long as it looks nice. The white ones for Guild Wars 2 was pretty nice, so I’m currently using one of them despite never going to touch the game.
I love game wallpapers, espeically WoW ones.
HOWEVER; my favorite ones are about dragons and stuff, because then I look at my desktop in awe and generally dragon wallpappers aren’t too busy so it doesn’t make the desktop look untidy. 🙂
I’m an artist. I LOVE seeing what these other artists are coming up with.
Thanks for the links! (You, too, Magson; Martin’s stuff is fantastic.)
@Tesh — I wish he had his older stuff up still, not merely back a couple of years. I’d post what I’ve got up at flickr and link you to it, but those pics were copyrighted when I go them, and I doubt that he’s released his copyright on them to allow sharing via flickr, ya know? Still — at home, I’ve had a Martin wallpaper for years, but at work I tend to like to use astronomy backgrounds. Here’s the one I’m currently using: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/galactic/index.html
I like to look but I almost never use them