Long answer… I love every single race in the game. Allied races included. All original ones, all added ones, and I hope they add the half elves and whatever troll species that dancing lady that made me feel funny was part of.
I hope they add furlbogs and quillboars and tuskarr and every flavor of elf they can think off and those guys that are only bandages and maybe redeemed demons from the former BC (eh…maybe not… I dunno…Sell me on the idea) and more undead factions. Let the scourge be a playable race now. They’re all under good guy lich king. Who cares! Why not! Add literally every race ever!
They did add blood elves though to get more people to consider the horde beccause the only options were ugly monsters.
“One reason for the Blood Elves choice was obviously looks. You’d be amazed how many people will not play the Horde based purely on the fact that they’re monstrous. So by giving an attractive race to the Horde, we feel like we’re opening a whole new part of the game to the people who wouldn’t experience that half of the game.” - Jeff Kaplan
It was because the chinese fanbase, people went horde EXACTLY BECAUSE IT HAD UGLY MONSTERS, why would they go with the faction of monsters, not wanting to be a monster? LOL
The main point i made was that the horde was not struggling with low number of players because of it, if anything less players played horde cause bad leveling experience
Sure, but there was no way they could have made that decision far enough after WoW had launched to be able to gauge any sort of population imbalance and still gotten blood elves out the door in time in the high level of quality they were in. Blizzard’s dev pipeline just doesn’t work that quickly and never has.
They had to have already had the idea in the works by the time vanilla was already out, because TBC is built entirely off of scrapped vanilla ideas they had to cut to meet the release date. Outland was in the works in like alpha. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t add them for the very reason of giving the Horde a pretty race to appeal to a wider audience, it just means they knew they had to do that from the jump but they’d have to keep it on the back burner until the first xpac.
It just couldn’t have been a reaction to faction populations or having anything to do with “China.”
Also, and this might be me talking out of my…not mouth (no swearing on the forum xD), but like if I remember… BE’s were already a part of the Horde as far back as WC3:TFT? I didn’t play WoW back then, but like I remember hearing that they were added as a horde race and thinking it was strange that they weren’t there from the start. Like I always just assumed that BE’s would be a horde playable race…because they were already in the horde.
Not true. They didn’t have to have the idea of Blood Elves on horde in the works at all until near the end of development for BC. Blood Elves may have been planned for Vanilla and partially worked on before they released the game, but that doesn’t mean they had to already have them planned as a Horde race. A large amount of the blood elf starter zone actually enforces and implies that they were originally intended to be Alliance, it was a late development decision to make them horde.
Heck Draenei weren’t even a thing until about halfway through development of BC. Krokul were being developed as a player race originally, but they scrapped them about halfway through production of the female model. Had they not changed gears on Blood Elves when they did, we would have had Blood Elves on the Alliance and possibly Krokul on the Horde… not sure how they would have manipulated the lore to make that happen though…
My issue is how gear fits most of the races. Dont get me wrong, blood elves have some major clipping issues but it’s still 1000% better than can’t wear boots, belts stretched super thin in the front, or whatever helms are on worgen and Tauren.
Not to mention the huge amount of clipping that occurs on dwarf beards. My beard darn near swung through my body once I swear.
For me it used to be that belf was the only way to be a paladin in the horde, and to be honest I don’t see the point in race changing now that more of them are available, but yeah, transmog fit so much better than any other choices. Tauren and trolls are terrible transmog frames imo.
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