Maybe they were followers of the Light who decided to jump ship and go full My Chemical Romance? I believe the easiest explanation for those new skin tones for them is they’re some of the “new recruits” you see at Telogrus Rift.
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I think it is okay to change named NPCs for hair styles and maybe other very superficial cosmetic changes.
For all the new IRL human race customizations I think these should just be used on new named NPCs.
Generic NPCs like guards I think it is fine to give them a distribution of all the customizations.
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Some of the NPC(like the one with asian names) should probably get a makeover.
That reminds me, do worgen humans get access to the new skins?
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I’d hardly call it a retcon and more just a graphical update. Like I didn’t think it warranted explanation how some Orcs suddenly got better posture or how some Belves had gold eyes now. I’m not sure how this is any different.
There are some fantasy worlds where there are analogues for IRL humam ethnicities like with TES or Warhammer where you do have fantasy Germans, Slavs, Moors etc where a change like this would be a retcon that should warrant an explanation.
But WoW humans don’t really have ethnicities. The Kul Tirans sort of do, but a lot of them still look physically indistinguishable from Stormwindians or Gilneans or Stromgardi. They were robots that got a skin condition from Cthulu and happen to resemble Earth ethnicities because why not?.
This is sort of a ‘don’t think about it too hard’ topic if there ever was one.
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Well this is nice. I can’t wait to see the new changes.
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Not a fan to be honest. These are pre-established characters, even if most of them never even featured in a quest. People who frequent the inn in the Mage District on RP servers would know Steven Lohan, for example, and would also know him from the Death Knight manga.
Generic guards? Great. Generic refugees from Gilneas? Great! Generic workers and civilians and mages in the tower? Great! But pre-established NPCs who’ve existed for over a decade? Not so great.
Just how much effort would it have taken for Blizz to add a dozen or so new NPCs to the city? If they wanted to change up Cordell’s Enchanting why not just change the sign and say Lucan retired and now Jessara and her new husband (or wife?) are working the counter? Or add a fourth mage to the gossiping mages instead of changing Suzanne. It’s not exactly difficult stuff.
What they’re doing with named NPCs is just lazy revisionism that’s more, in my opinion, insulting to the notion of diversity than anything.
And @Zerde Yes. Worgen humans get the same customizations.
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I think the Forsaken abruptly getting a bunch more flesh is a more jarring change than somebody elses simply getting more or less melanin and I don’t even want a tepid explanation for that. This is a world where changing into a bipedal wolf monster is fairly mundane - how is this that strange?
And in RP in particular - you have to hand waive a lot as is. Because it’s basically playing pretend with a bunch of strangers and some may abruptly leave or decide they want to do something else and you just roll with that. Because it’s pretend. Getting hung up because the enchanting trainer looks latino now or w/e seems like kind of an odd thing to get bothered by.
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Forsaken already have it rough with, regardless if you’ve been dead 30 years or 3 mins, you get the same decomposed look.
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We can agree to disagree. I like maintaining consistency (as much a struggle as that can be with WoW’s writers). And like I said before I consider this sort of revisionism to be be insulting to the notion of diversity more than anything. You’re changing pre-established characters to make them more diverse when you can add new characters. I even posed suggestions for doing so.
The way I suggested paints the world as a living one. Lucan retires. Jessara gets married. This is more organic than ‘oh they’re black now’.
Miles Morales isn’t Peter Parker. He inherited the mantle as that story evolved. That’s a better approach than changing Peter into someone he’s not.
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Yeah, but we’re talking about throwaway vendor NPCs. Not Spiderman. I’d wager a hefty sum that the lion’s share of players couldn’t tell you who these characters are with a gun to their head.
If this was happening to Shaw or Anduin or Jania I’d say you have a point. But if Jeremiah Payson turns up with the darker skin tone I’m not going to want or need an explanation on it. Much less a subplot about a long lost cousin or apprentice taking over the cockroach selling business. He can just be darkskinned now it’s fine.
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As far as I know, yes.
Well that was what Blizzard called it.
Golden eyes wasn’t a retcon, but it did have a given explanation.
Someone else raised this, and I’m curious. Isn’t it more reflective on the fan if a minor NPC they recognized changed appearance and that bothers then? Fundamentally they’re still the same minor NPC.
I guess I don’t see the negative for such minimal characters.
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10 characters.
It’s not much of one. As per the Parker Morales thing - you kind of need two different characters there. Because, while it’s a more fantastical variant full of superheroes, Spiderman’s world is still New York City. You can’t divorce it entirely from our reality due to that setting. A WASP and Afro-Latino teenager just aren’t going to have a one for one experience growing up in Queens.
But in Azeroth racism seems mostly an Elf and Dwarf thing. Even the Trolls who actually did develop like IRL humans (isolated groups developing differing characteristics while adapting to different environments) mostly get along. To my knowledge the Zandalari never tried to genocide or enslave another Troll group.
Suffice to say I don’t think you need a different story for a black guy in Stormwind because I’ve no reason to believe there’s the sort of history that would make his experience different from a white or yellow or brown or red guy in Stormwind.
So yeah you can just make them w/e without it being ish writing because how would the writing effect anything? Instead of X the Alchemy Trainer now it’s Y the Alchemy Trainer but also they’re Asian? If anything that would beg more questions - like where did Asians come from? When the story seems to be ‘Yeah curse of flesh, humanity always looked like this just, accept it’.
Turning a character from white to black is technically a retcon, no matter how inconsequential some may claim it to be. It’s not a graphical update unless, as an example, they took all the human NPCs with the currently-darkest skin tone and gave them one of the varieties of darker skin tones coming in Shadowlands, citing that that those appearances were not available in WoD when the human model update occurred. Likewise with the ones who had more East Asian appearances prior to the WoD model update being given those new appearance options as well. Instead, it seems to be done entirely at random. That white skin tones are “incorrect” and need to be changed.
A remark from WoWhead.
Personally, I feel like it’d be an opportunity to explore the lore of humans who aren’t cookie-cutter Ye Olde Medieval Theme Park Stormwind humans.
We already have established lore about Makasa Flintwill’s family ties, in that Booty Bay was once a human settlement (and named Blackwater Cove) but they got ousted by trolls. It was later taken over by the Steamwheedle Cartel, to which Makasa’s family returned and started life on the seas.
No one in Stormwind, who for the most part are named things like “Johnny Stillwell” or “Tabatha Goldfield”, questions where Wu Shen got his name from? Especially with that one Pandaren-themed Island Expedition, It could’ve been the opportunity to be like, “Yeah there’s an island where humans lived alongside Pandaren and took on their customs and names, and Wu Shen, Shen Kang Cheng, and Woo Ping came from there”.
Then let Stormwind be the big melting pot where humans from all kingdoms and colonies get together under one banner after it was rebuilt in the Second War.
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What?
That doesn’t seem to relate at all. I don’t think anyone at Blizzard is saying or implying these individuals magically changed race in-game canonical. Which is rather distinctly different than a retcon.
In the same way any retcon is erasure, and not inherently a bad thing. Which is whatever when the character consistency and continuity for such minor NPC’s is unimportant.
There’s a weird amount of loaded language to make it seem worse.
This is a world where Kel’Thuzad and Steven are equally normal names. So, no, they probably didn’t.
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I actually had that thought the other day when trying to think up a new character name.
We have names like Turalyon, Anduin, Tyrathan, and Genn. But also Katherine, Derek, Vincent, Edwin, and Taylor.
I always thought that was weird. I thought it’d be like, “I am [old name] no longer. In this Cult of the Damned, I shall be known as KEL’THUZAD.”
The name screams evil necromancer.
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I mean, we live in a reality where X Æ A-Xii works so…
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That works because of wealth, power and a HUGE amount of ego peppered with narcissism.
It happens in a story when the writers don’t care about consistency.