Nightborne, Void Elves, Highmountain Tauren, and Lightforged Draenei. Concrete evidence suggests new WoW races!
Ian Bates, known to the community of World of Warcraft mainly as “Red Shirt Guy” from BlizzCon, has been the source of many revelations. When he’s not throwing the developers’ own lore errors back at them, he writes insightful columns and makes predictions about the future of World of Warcraft based on datamining information.
In his latest article, he describes solid clues indicating that we will get subraces in the next expansion – variations of existing races.
Datamining finds 4 “new races”
The assumption is based on the datamining of Patch 7.3. In the game files of World of Warcraft, there is a list of all major races in WoW. This includes player characters like humans, orcs, and night elves, but also NPC races like nagas, vrykul, or taunka.
In addition, there are a number of parameters that also appear in the list. Among them are values for “CreateScreenFire” and “SelectScreenFile“. In the case of NPC races, there is only the variable “0”, but for player races, there is a code. This code determines which background image is displayed at character creation and in the login screen.
And now comes the exciting part: Since Patch 7.3, there are 4 new entries in this list of races, each having a code for “SelectScreenFile” and “CreateScreenFile”!
And it gets even better. The codes suggest that these races already use existing background images, meaning they likely belong to already existing races. If these assumptions are confirmed, we will have the following subraces with the next addon:
- Blood Elves – Nightborne
- Tauren – Highmountain Tauren
- Night Elves – Void Elves
- Draenei – Lightforged Draenei
It is particularly interesting that the Nightborne do not yet have a proper model that suits equipment. The current armor items for the Nightborne have always been part of the model. So there is still much more work needed to truly realize this subrace.
What exactly the “Void Elves” could be is also still uncertain. They could be direct servants of Alleria who has passed on her teachings to others. However, why they should specifically be night elves is questionable. It is possible that the “Void Elves” are a kind of high elves – which has been long requested.
What do you think of these findings? Do you believe there could be something to the data? Or is Blizzard deliberately trying to mislead us?
Why we do not think much of the Timewalking Black Temple in WoW, you can find out here …
