Characters that are outliers or cultural oddballs are my favorite. They can be literally anything. Here I am hoping that we wont have to wait much longer to play what we want. I really want to play Worgen as a paladin and monk. A vicious race like the worgen learning to master their bloodlust through meditation or dedicating themselves to protect the weak and innocent with the power of the light is to cool to pass up.
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Taruen Rogues depopulated half of Thunder Bluff back in Cataclsym slitting their throats in their sleep.
Anyway, peopkle often confuse lore and Aesthetics when it comes to finding the pain points in these things.
If WoW Behaved remotely like a beleivable world. we’d be blasting each other with mana based weaponry and using some weird kitbash of Draenic and Nightborne tech as the front runners that everyone would be vying for, with some other developments in trade and commerce.
But that’s not the world we live in, we live in a world where wood and stone and sorccery compete directly with iron, steel, and flintlocks with relative parity becaues we gotta stick to their asthetic camps.
Let’s not forget how sitting dfown for 5 mintues thiunking about how each class could fit each race is a trivial affair while coding different spell names and effects for each of them would be an absolute nightmare.
I agree with every single word in your post, but unfortunately people today (including even modern blizzard) don’t appreciate the lore that went into the world of Warcraft. A lot of the new class/race combos make no sense to me either. Restriction was good.
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Blizzard put as much thought into their lore as they’ve always have.
Good in the borad strokes but not so much in the details.
The game’s evolved quite a bit since the launch almost two decades ago. The world it inhabits should evolve with it.
Like, the idea that there’s no one out ther doing cross-disciplinary research is just…lmao.
The problem will always be the lack of wanting to code all the different cultural flourishes for the same basic class. The Ideas are practically free for anyone who can stop and think for 5 minutes.
You feared this? So, what’s come to pass? Does it diminish your enjoyment of the game while you’re playing it? Do you want to quit? I just don’t get it beyond a personal emotional issue.
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Arguably you would get more races. I would stop being forced to play blood elf for demonhunters for example. And more races to get paladins, like mechagnomes, gnomes and goblins would be awesome.
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I have to agree,as in the real world races mix their cultures to the point they are lost through time,this has been the case .Preserving a culture is a hard one to master the ways of tradition whine down because no one is left to pass them on and records are physically destroyed .
It would seem that would be the case also for this world.
Out of all the things that went wrong with the lore over the last couple of years I find it ridiculous that this would be something, which angers people and “breaks their immersion”.
This game has way too many frustrating restrictions and limitations for players. A person, who wants to play a gnome shaman for example should not be something that makes your personal gameplay worse.
Just give people finally the freedom to express themselves in this game without forcing them to make unnecessary compromises all the time.
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Restrictions are good else we’d be playing Goku because… idk, anime is cool?
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It’s better to have restrictions in games because it gives it flavor.
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I do blame Blizzard for the cause. It became obvious with the Void Elves back in Legion, for me at least. Nobody wanted them and soon after people begun to question why a purple elf cannot look like their High Elf leader and how everything is forced into playing something what goes against the established WotLK-lore.
Ever since then people have been very, very vocal about limitations, unfair shoehorning moments and unfair race diversity (Alliance/Horde). It didn’t take that long until even classes weren’t safe and I don’t blame the community for this stance. Everything went downhill after Legion ended.
If it wasn’t for the complete mess, which is bfa and shadowlands lore, I might even be team “not all classes for all races”, but as it stands now, I can’t take anyone serious, who complains about people, who just want to play their favorite class and their favorite race together. The lore can’t be broken since it already is broken beyond repair. It would need several hard retcons in order to fix it.
Might aswell make the game more fun for the remaining players despite the messy lore.
I was always team all races for both factions though. I don’t like this hive mind mentality system for playable races at all.
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I appreciate OP and his posts. There are people who appreciate the uniqueness of the races in Warcraft.
I’ve tried to post about this topic before and it was removed for trolling. So it does feel that even the developers want to silence anyone who doesn’t share the all races all classes opinion.
P.S. I’m sorry mods if I am breaking the rules by talking about one of my posts being taken down.
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I don’t play WoW for “other players’ expressions”. I play WoW because I want to be immersed in the rich fantasy setting that Metzen and other folks built, presenting us a wide variety of cool options, all of which were firmly grounded in the setting they’d built.
I enjoy how Night Elves are this super unique interpretation of elves, not really firmly committed to being “Dark Elves”. How being a Druid implies a very particular and specific connection to nature, which is different even to Shamans. Things like that.
If race and class are completely without any sort of meaning, then the ONLY things that will matter are “tier-lists”. Or, at best, “how they look”.
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Cultures evolving and branching out does not deter uniqueness of a race.
If your idea of unique is hard forced race/class combos then you’ll be happy to know classic exist.
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Night Elves aren’t…reallly a unique take on elves my guy.
Sure, maybe the specific details of them are, but Forest Bound wardens of nature is about one of the most quintessential Elven archetypes that you can find.
Good.
Aesthetic choices should be that-aesthetic. Blizzard broke worse boundaries for less when it comes to immserive world building, and the Red Shirt Guy exists because they couldn’t even keep track of whether or not one of their major lore characters was dead or not.
Opening up all classes to all races is just a matter of threading a needle that should if anything prsent a greater opportunity, and also reflect the change in the factions as the game world has evolved since it was first created.
Gnome Druids, Orc Paladins, this and moire are within your grasp if you have but the courage to simply think of hjow it’s possible instead of going “NO, THAT DOESN’T WORK!”
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Hell, I could easily justify every single race-class combo in the entire game. That includes Dracthyr and Evoker. The secret is you don’t have to dive into racial specifics; you simply open new pathways into the class (or allow races to explore current pathways into the class, like Tauren Mages).
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Meanwhile the restoration artifact was for Queen Azshara who spent half of her life as an High elf… and lore. Much of the highborne lore showed much of how night elves controled the elements. It is lore that explains why Nagas were naturally shaman. That connection is still seen in night elves to control elements. Even being former dark trolls. Learning to forget shamanism is actually the weird quirk about that culture. It can be interpreted they evolved there look and connection with the elements.
Your limited view of the lore and interpreptation can be limited by your own choices. It need not dictate other people’s choices.
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It’s not “my” limited view; it’s Blizzard and Metzen’s “limited view”. They made these factions distinct for a reason, it’s why their RTS games were such a hit, because every faction would be completely unique.
There’s no way Blizzard could’ve have unique classes for every single race, but they effectively captured the same thing by having somewhat more broad classes, but still defining what classes did and didn’t suit each race’s culture.
Dwarves getting Shamans wasn’t them “changing” Dwarves; it was them re-evaluating that “hey, Dwarven culture actually does have a connection to the wilds”.
I think Gnome Priests are an unfortunate example that just isn’t really compatible. Gnomes have never been shown to be spiritual or religious, and a Priest is absolutely nothing if not religious. They try to “mask” them as “medics”, but doing so fundamentally denies that Gnomes Priests are, in fact, Priests at all.
And that does a disservice, both to Gnomes (eroding one of the aspects of their culture that makes them relatively unique from Humans and Dwarves), and to the Priest (implying that “faith” is completely irrelevant).
Gnomes very much are priests. Some are medics, because using tech to heal is a thing a medic does. We also have seen gnomes get influenced by the old gods such as the gnome shadow priest during the priest campaign.
Extending the priest fantasy to include technology isn’t something new either. In fact Tyr is a titan construct. And very machine like, and he represents the whole paladin order on Azeroth…
He’s a titan order being representing the light. Gnomes also are titan descendent beings. You also see night elves using shaman spells in wailing caverns a dungeon since vanilla - metzen view as you say. Night elf shamans I think are more justified since they even explain why Naga suddenly became, shaman, hint, a group of elves always had some knowledge of shamanism or elemental control.
You have the personal choice of sticking with the old race/class combos.
In past interviews they discussed adding some more race/class combos in Cataclysm as well (when Metzen still ran WoW). There deciding factor was on race popularity such as trying to get more players to play trolls and dwarves. For example.
Stuff like Gnome hunters make sense, since All the gnome guards used guns. And hunters are the class that primarily uses them. All the guards shot you with guns when attacking the gnome part of the cities.
Also I would be interested if Metzen even opposes this or not. He had a bunch of influence of the creation of WoW. And other titles like Overwatch. Soldier 76 was an old concept of his for example. He’s a decent guy from what I hear and has stayed working with blizzard as the voice actor for heroes like Thrall or Bastion. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s open to adding more race/class combos if that could amplify player choices and other fantasies.
They are adding npcs of the new race/class combos in the next patch as well. So it is moreso evolving of the game and culture inside.
For stuff like Tauren rogues, that has also been in the game since Vanilla… I have seen Tauren Mages since BC in the questing as enemy units.
There are highmountain warlocks, etc. Those choices being available to playable characters is nice. I have even seen blood elf shamans since Catalcysm.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/wowpedia/images/b/be/Tyr_Art_of_Dragonflight.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1200?cb=20221108120349
Here’s tyr btw.
Meanwhile gnomes are children of Mimiron.
Both are robotic in nature. Both titan keepers. Tyr represents light and is still robot like. Mimiron is more so tech based/innovation/lighting influenced.
Yet gnomes never got shamans although you’d think Lightning Magic would fit them well. And Paladins order is based around an arcane creature’s teaching of the light.