Players of WoW have long desired “Sub Races” for their characters. Will they finally appear in the next expansion?
With the upcoming BlizzCon 2017, which will take place in a little over a month, rumors about the next expansion of World of Warcraft are piling up. On Reddit, “leaks” frequently appear, where alleged Blizzard employees spill the beans. This post is one of them (loosely translated):
There’s not much to discuss about the post – everything screams “Fake” and the probability that a truly angry Blizzard employee wrote something like this while intoxicated, only to almost immediately delete it, is extremely low.
But he still mentions a few ideas that can be speculated about. Especially the new customization options for characters could be imagined.
More Race Options – The Lore Provides a Lot
These “Sub Races” have been wished for by fans for many years. Players want to further customize their characters and especially the role-playing community has long been eager to better visually represent Nightborne (Horde), High Elves (Alliance), or Orcs of the Dragonmaw Clan.
There are many possibilities here, as the lore of World of Warcraft is full of different groupings of almost all species, which have also developed differently.
Here are just a few examples:
- Night Elves: Shen’dralar, Nightborne
- Humans/High Elves: Half-elves (“normal” eyes, smaller ears)
- Draenei: Lightforged, Man’ari
- Trolls: Forest Trolls, Ice Trolls, etc.
- Tauren: Taunka, Yaungol, Highmountain Tauren
- Goblins: Gilgoblins
- Gnomes: Mechagnomes
- Orcs: Fel Orcs, Dragonmaw Clan
- The Undead: Undead High Elves
- Dwarves: Dark Iron, Wildhammer
- … and many more.
With Patch 7.3, there are even new customization options in theory. Many Draenei on Argus have the new appearance and are “Lightforged” – meaning their eyes glow golden and they have different, particularly long horns. They are perfectly implemented and it would likely take only a few tweaks to unlock these options for players.
A Revamp of the Game World Would Be the Perfect Opportunity
Many players speculate that with Patch 8.0, the “old world” will be revamped again and then fully scaled. This would make it possible to unlock world quests and new factions everywhere in the world. For example, completing quests near Darkshore in Feralas might earn reputation with the Shen’dralar and could unlock new appearance options for Night Elf mages.
However, the question here is how much sense this really makes. Because unlocking new options for the character makes little sense from a “narrative” perspective. After all, our character has existed for years, and why would they suddenly be different? Whether and how this can be implemented so that it also appears meaningful would need to be discussed in detail.
It was already officially discussed about “Sub Races” at BlizzCon 2015. There, Chris Robinson from Blizzard revealed that they definitely want to introduce them, but haven’t yet found the best way to do so. At BlizzCon 2016, the topic came up again, and they promised that something “fantastic” was planned that they would talk about soon.
We can only hope that this “soon” will be in about 5 weeks – at BlizzCon 2017.
