// KOTAKU — GAMING
Blizzard Is Making WoW Forever’s Controversial Skyborne Race Look Worse On Purpose, And That’s A Good Thing
Blizzard has announced that it will give its somewhat controversial new World of Warcraft: Forever race, the Skyborne, a significant makeover early next year, in order to bring them more in line with the “worse”-looking older models from the original game. And most people are happy about that!
In a blog post, Blizzard said that in early 2027, it would be redoing both the standard-definition regular models for the Skyborne, as well as both the SD and HD models for all Druid animal forms, in order to bring them more in line with the look of the rest of the game.
As it stands now, all of these models look a little…dissonant within WoW: Forever‘s overall presentation. WoW: Forever is based on the original, vanilla World of Warcraft, so everything’s a little polygonal. A little spiky. A little…aggressively textured, at times. That’s part of its charm (just look at the humble prairie dog)! Now, WoW: Forever does offer improved lighting and water effects and other graphical improvements that give the whole world a really interesting, updated look while still preserving the wonderfully retro feel of it all. And you do have the option to toggle on HD character models instead, if you prefer to play as the more modern-looking version of your character.
But through all this, the Skyborne still look distinctly out of place, in both elf and druid animal form. Their colors are extra-bright, they’re missing the sharp edges and textures of the older models, and just overall look too smooth and modern. For example, please behold my Skyborne in the beta right now, in her SD model:
If you’re saying “SD, no way!” you’re correct. That’s just the HD model. The Skyborne only have an HD model. So if you turn on SD graphics and stand in Orgrimmar with all the orcs and tauren and trolls, you look ridiculous.
Just different vibes! So Blizzard is currently working on an update for that.
We also got a preview of what’s planned for the Druid forms, which currently have a similar sort of problem not just in that there’s no SD version, but in that even their HD versions really stand out.
People seem genuinely pretty happy about this! The comments section below that post on the Blizzard forums is admittedly a bit mixed; a few people hate that the models are going to look “worse,” and some are just still mad about Skyborne existing at all. But a lot of others are pleased with the change; even some who admit they don’t care for the Skyborne race as a whole think it’s a step in the right direction.
Uh, hello? Yes. Keep posting your feedback cause it is clearly working. byu/KEN_KAI0 inwowforever
I’ve been playing with SD models on and it is kind of remarkable how much all the Skyborne stand out, so I’m stoked for this change, even if we won’t get it until months after the actual game launches in November. This seems to come as part of a larger effort on Blizzard’s part recently to rehabilitate the Skyborne somewhat after players complained about everything from their appearance to their general existence to the fact that they aren’t just regular Highborne elves. In a recent interview, the devs attempted to explain why the Skyborne were in WoW: Forever at all, telling TechRadar that it was partially out of a desire to bring back the underused Air Elemental architecture (which, hell yeah) and that having the Skyborne be cross-faction was an effort to prevent a major skew of players to one side or the other, as happened with Blood Elves when they were added in The Burning Crusade.