World of Warcraft Forever has its full launch a week from now on November 4, but ahead of time, Blizzard principal game designer Kris Zierhut shared a little bit of insight on why the new Skyborne race was added to the game.
When I asked Zierhut about Skyborne’s addition, he told me that the goal was to add more elves to the game but to maintain the faction balance in the process. “We knew that we wanted to bring in more of the elves into the game. We know they’re the most popular races in World of Warcraft historically. And in particular, the current alliance and Horde races from the Classic Era have the unfortunate feature that they tend to cause a faction imbalance,” he told me.
As for why Blizzard needed to add elves specifically, it’s because there’s a segment of the player base that doesn’t want to play some of WoW’s more unique races. Zierhut explained, “There’s a certain… a lot of players who don’t want to play a monster, to put it really honestly. They don’t want to be an Orc or a Troll or a Tauren or Undead. They want to have something that looks prettier. It’s not everybody.”
There are other possibilities for elves in Azeroth, like the Blood Elves, but the Forever team doesn’t want to step on the retail team’s toes. Elsewhere in the interview, I asked about Silvermoon, the home of the Blood Elves, and Zierhut referenced that, saying, “You mentioned Silvermoon, and this is a story that Retail had recently told, and we didn’t want to get in each other’s way of telling that story. We want to give them time to let their Silvermoon story breathe and do everything they wanted with it. And then once they were done with it, we could maybe then go visit Silvermoon.”
So, it sounds like there’s a chance that the Blood Elves could come to the game in the future, but for now, players will just have to make do with the Skyborne if they want a Horde elf race.
Ahead of Forever coming out next week, Blizzard has also detailed how often players can expect new updates, which will be added slower than the quick eight-week patch cycle of the modern game. Zierhut has also told me that the Forever team is looking at visiting some of the locations we’ve been to in expansions, like Northrend and Pandaria, in future updates.