暴雪应社区反馈修改《魔兽世界：永恒》（World of Warcraft: Forever）新种族Skyborne外观

Model matters.

World of Warcraft: Forever's developers have announced drastic visual changes to the game's new Skyborne race following passionate community feedback. These include new in-game models that better represent the game's early MMO aesthetic, much to the community's delight.

The World of Warcraft community first caught wind of these changes during a recent episode of the official World of Warcraft: Forever podcast, in which senior game designer Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield acknowledged impassioned feedback of the Skyborne humanoid and druid character models. While he didn't have anything to announce then, he said the team "hoped to have something more substantive to say pretty soon". And "pretty soon" now seems to have arrived.

The blog post detailing these changes, published on the World of Warcraft website, starts by establishing the team's aim to "uphold the original WoW era aesthetic" while offering more choice in how they experience Azeroth. It then admits that some of the team's ideas around the visual fidelity of certain new additions missed the mark: specifically the Skyborne models. The blog notes: "The Skyborne are from an exotic environment, and their Druid forms reflect that, but we don't want that to be dissonant with the visual language of other creatures in the world."

Both versions of the Skyborne elves in World of Warcraft: Forever will be altered to better align with the rest of the game. The blog shows side-by-side comparison before-and-after images, which highlight the models' softness being removed, colour saturation lowered, and more detailed fur textures added.

Perhaps what's more exciting, especially to World of Warcraft: Forever players who value retro visuals, is word of planned changes to the standard definition models. The blog agrees with feedback that the standard definition Skyborne models could feel "jarring" next to the game's legacy races, and confirms that new standard definition models are in the works, with a planned release in early 2027. For now, an image of work-in-progress characters was included. Look at those sharp angles! You could cut an apple on those.

The response to this blog post has been largely glowing. Comments on the Blizzard forums have expressed delight at this shift in direction: Take Solforge, the level 85 Paladin, who wrote: "So much better. Unbelievable how much of an impact this has. This gives me faith." Alison, another Paladin, expressed their approval, writing: "I think the new druid forms look Soooo much better! The colors stand out to me more but not in a loud bright neon way."

Shimmying over to the popular World of Warcraft Reddit, and the mood is similarly joyful. Notably, many players are expressing their appreciation at the WoW Forever team's eagerness to respond to community feedback so quickly and openly. One popular thread is titled: "Ignore the toxic positivity. Disregard the brigaders. Keep giving feedback. Keep being vocal. Forever team is GOATed and they're listening." The thread highlights not only these changes, but also the recent decision by Blizzard to lower the rarity of dungeon loot so quest rewards aren't devalued, and the decision to change the races' headshots in the character creator from Modern WoW's headshots to those found in Classic WoW.

"The fact that they tweaked these rather minor things and even changed the icons is honestly in my eyes monumental," wrote user Ubberman. "Who are these people? That is an exceedingly high response rate and for rather minor things that only add to the feel. If they keep this up for even a year, WoW Forever will genuinely be the best World of Warcraft version to date. Genuinely."

World of Warcraft: Forever may still only be in beta, but it's already proving mighty popular. The server cap had to be increased due to player demand, and early critique of this introductory version of the upcoming MMO - including ours - is largely positive. WoW Forever launches in full on 4th November.

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