Yes, Even I saw a white tauren with Highmountain horns (Antlers)
Still another failure, even they did not get 3 unique skin colors for Death knights
oversights happen when a product is rushed and the time given to do content is limited…
my guess is allied races was late addition to BFA to add something appealing to the expansion, because they prob realised what they had wasent enough to keep people interested…
you ask people now what do you remember about BFA… highly likely they will say allied races… and warfronts/islands
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why not,they continue to make a lot of money.
During good expansions like cata and legion yes, they got a lot of money
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Is it weird that they made female dracthyr a human and male dracthyr a blood elf? Definitely. It doesn’t add up at all and as someone who wanna do a female but don’t like humans, it quite literally stinks lol
However, should it be called “lazy”? No. As much as it is a bit questionable, lazy ain’t it.
You can literally see how much they’ve spent on the Dracthyr race, the quality and design is insane.
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It is really about the fact that Drakthyr are suposed to be fresh and new and add new things and feel like they have worked on those for some time. They just feel lazy and I liked the previous races like pandarens, worgens even goblins that existed in game. They felt more unique and i always have appreciated them. With the allied races I dont have such huge problem sure they just used old rigs from the factions and made “skins” for those but they still added the Kul tiran and even Zandalari which still felt more cool than drakthyr. Now drakthyr are like 1 gender both male and female have the same dance and as I said one of the biggest problems are that they dont even show mogs
And to be honest they did 100% better job with demon hunters than with the drakthyr.
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problem is … they have plenty of opportunity to open opinion polls with the community for design insight and popular opinions…
that was not done at all during the design process of drakthyr…
this is another classic case of “Blizzard know best” …
and it shows how blissfully ignorant they still are till this very day to the power they have at their finger tips involving community insight.
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And yet they dont show up mogs not even for their own tier set which should be a no brainer for a race that has a unique class designed around it. Maybe not lazy but then bad aproach or not skilled (or not enough) artists to come up with something better?
The female humans are a stupid call. Blizz does not know their own game?
About the male visage, elven races in wow are amazing but I think we have already enough of those.
Feels off nonetheless…
There’s no denying that it seems hella sketchy with the tmog, I do agree with u.
The whole blood elf and humans situation is like I said, questionable but let’s be real here, how much time are u gonna spend in the “humanoid” form? Besides, if we look into the details, dracthyr “human” form and “blood elf” form are not entire like the OG once.
the different customisation options are nothing alike, both have elf like ears and scales scattered across their bodies.
i would find being a human female in a horde city… more fun than a dragon personally.
but then i have odd tastes apparently compared to the masses.
Its not lazy its about getting the max money from the least amount of work for the margin on the bottom line for the shareholders. Its just business.
The players are not the customers they are just the source of money send to the real customers the shareholders.
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It helps that Demon Hunters have been anticipated literally since vanilla. Back then it was rumoured that DH would be a hero class available only to Night Elf Hunters. I think DH might be the longest hyped class in the entirety of the game.
I still would agree with you on the point that the DH feels a lot better done than the Dracthyr.
In no particular order, my incoherent thoughts about why I think Evokers are bad:
- The first “real” race to not be built from ground up. From BfA we’re already used to having allied races almost pumped out by the dozens because they’re mostly relatively low effort reskins of existing races. But the flagship feature of the new expansion - new class/race combo should feel special. Evokers are kind of like a reskinned Worgen with a BElf/human Two Forms ability. So, coming from BfA, the Dracthyr feels a bit lazy.
- To go into details on the Dracthyr model:
It doesn’t really resemble a Warcraft dragon. Because the loan model used was a female Worgen, the “base” model looks scrawny and weak. Female Worgen also have the issue that without the oversized shoulder pads they look like a wet poodle. The head is too small, especially for the “bulked up” bodies. I think it’s mostly because they’ve been increased in size “after the fact” because they didn’t anticipate this much of a negative feedback at the race reveal. Add time and resource restraints and there is only so much you can do.
I would have loved to have the Dracthyr to be more in line with other Warcraft dragon designs. Strong, pronounced jaw. Rounder eyes. But I’m sure someone will respond to me with the usual “but in lore they are not dragoooons, that’s why they can look like this!”. Yeah whatever, they look silly next to the actual dragons and dragonkin in Valdrakken. - To keep on picking on Dracthyr, the visage forms are another mind boggling design decision. I have been vocal about this for a long time, I still don’t know why they had to go for the human female model. The designers have been so proud with the 10.000 facial customisation options they put in, and yes, the face looks cute. But for the majority of the time you are way zoomed out behind your character, so the important things are model outline and animations. Have you ever seen human female running animations? It’s this weird trot like they needed to go somewhere about 30 minutes ago. Combat/cast animations are extremely minimalistic. The body itself has kind of weird proportions. The head - again - feels too small for the body (almost as if it belonged on an Elf body!).
I feel like there are two options. Stick with all the little “multi-tone eyebrow dyes” options and stick with what is popular. Both genders get a High/Blood Elf model and that’s that. Or cut back on some of the more detailed facial or underwear customisation and add more models to choose from, like the respective faction’s core races (including BElf/Draenei). But I will never understand what made them go with the female human model, out of all the good choices on the Alliance. Dwarves have better/cooler animations! - The class gameplay feels really basic and convoluted at the same time, which - at least in my opinion - is not a good sign. DH was often ridiculed for being so simple, but the overall flow of the gameplay felt nice. Evoker, at least for Devastation, just feels odd and often counter intuitive.
Overall, I don’t even think it’s “laziness”. I think I’ve already said this somewhere, but I think it’s that they have too little time and too few development resources to handle the tasks in the given time schedule. So it’s not a matter of wanting to cut corners, but rather having to cut corners to meet the severely restrictive release date. And this is a corporate issue, not a dev one.
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Sadly this is true , monetizing with as few resources as possible it’s a main thing in most companies ( company policies ) and all the meetings with bosses employees go the same way =
produce more
be more efficient
step up
find solutions that don’t cost money to improve our products
Pie charts etc
When u have to create quality and your bosses tell u this psycological bs at meetings i’m pretty sure it doesn’t work for the actual customers it works for the company .
How much money they make it’s far more important then anything else .
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I just dont get why they went with female human TBH. None of the dragon aspects are female humans and I dont think its a particaularly popular choice for dragons in general!
Male belf makes sense but wouldnt nelf or belf be more sensible for female?
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Good points, and seems like everyone agree on this one. But then as u mention people will still play it and alas they will get their money for less work done. I personally did not buy dragonflight yet. I love warcraft universe and the races but I dont think the game or the players playing wow should be handled this way.
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Blizz traditionally adds races that only need minor rework, taking existing frames and animations. Also for the dracthyr they used the well-known rig and some animations (female worgen). They didn’t even bother to make armor or tmog visible in dragon form, and we’re hoping for completely unique races like forest trolls, vrykul, ogres, venthyr, etc. Lol… Anything over 3 minutes of work when it comes to new races seems like too much work for today’s blizz. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get saberon at some point because they fit perfectly into that 3 minute ideology considering they’ll just need to replace the worgen head and that’s it.
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At this point they might as well just take the next big step and remove all premade models, and let players create their own character from base assets.
Just sliders for everything; pick a size, from tiny noggenfogger gnome to giga giant ogres, super fat to stick thin. Could be goofy but hey that’s what you all want anyways, no?
Imagine a 3 meter slenderman with stick tauren legs, but a giant fat upper body, and gnome head. And stick in a vulpera tail for good measure. mwah chefs kiss.
suramar didn’t exist in wc3 lore
Personally, I think you should have been able to pick from any of your faction’s races for visage form. That would make the most sense considering that the visage form is something the Dracthyr actively creates in order to be seen as more approachable by the other people of Azeroth.
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I think this is only true of post Legion Blizzard. Blood Elves, Draenei, Goblins, Worgen and even Pandaren had bespoke models that looked much higher quality than the previous ingame examples of either race.
I think they started cutting corners when they reworked the models to use a “multipurpose” skeleton. And I’ll even admit that for BfA it wasn’t even a bad thing. We got a whole lot of races that have added some diversity to the mix. I love Zandalari Trolls, even if they’re just sized up normal Trolls (f) or reworked Night Elves (m). I absolutely adore Vulpera, even if they’re just furry Goblins. But with BfA, it was a “quantity” approach. You accepted that the models weren’t bespoke because we got a decent number of new races out of it. I hate the Void Elf lore, but I’m still grateful for having the Thalassian model on Alliance.
But now that Dracthyr are the unique feature of the expansion, this approach feels worse than it did with BfA. This is exacerbated by Evokers only being playable as Dracthyr.
One thing I forgot to mention in my rant was the lack of ability to fly. You can “mock dragonfly”, but it’s locked behind a 5 minute cooldown. Why do Dracthyr even have wings if they need a mount to fly? They should have gotten a “Running Wild” equivalent for the old world and actual dragonflying in new zones. You can keep Soar as a cooldown for the old world, but in the new zones you should just have access to “mountless dragonflying”, like Worgen can run at mountspeed.
I get why they’d want to go with the core race of a faction, but they should’ve at least made the effort and go with human male and female for Alliance and Orc male/female for Horde. If you give Horde BElves, you need to give Alliance HElves IMO. Otherwise it’d be unfair.
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