Info from the MMO-C summary of the Q&A, that I can’t link because forever untrustworthy.
I can’t imagine we’ll get anything new for 8.2.5, either. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the Goblin and Worgen models will actually get done, but I’m honestly skeptical that will actually happen.
If this is accurate, it’s disappointing.
It’s even worse when you go to the BFA sale page and realize that the big features for this xpac are allied races (not enough of them), island expeditions (unpopular), warfronts (unpopular), and azerite armor (unpopular). It’s like a murderer’s row of underdeveloped or just plain bad ideas.
We have to be patient and give feedback. They said no for 8.2 and 8.2.5 (since both would be covered in Rise of Azshara) but they also said feedback is important. Now they can refine story details, and other things on the ARs. Perhaps they’re looking at feedback and trying to see the best place to put certain allied races.
I’m frustrated too, but glad he said once again that they’re watching what we’ve been saying. It gave me quite a bit of hope. Perhaps they want to put more work into it now.
Anyone who expected to get new Allied races every single patch is delusional. There are plenty of things to have gripes about with BFA, this is not one of them. We have already gotten 4 since expansion launch.
I would expect 1 more for each faction this expansion, personally I expect Mechagnomes for Alliance and unknown for Horde.
Now we know that they’re able to look at player feedback with Allied Races and work on that. I have hopes we’ll see some of the ones with major support getting added in the future. San’layn/High Elves, and Vulpera/Sethrak. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Arrakoa pop up either.
My feedback is take this war around the world. Have us go to the Hinterlands and help the Revantusk (Horde forest trolls) and the Alliance aid the Wildhammer Dwarves. Have us go to Northrend and have us help there for, I dunno Horde Taunkas and Alliance Tuskar? Have us go to Pandaria and get Hozen and Jinyu. Have Jaina try to rebuild Theremore or something with the Alliance so they have a foothold on Kalimdor again, but give us Ogres and Alliance get something, I dunno, skinny human “Theramore Survivors”. Outland had races too like Sporelings and Arakoa. WoD had the Saberon and Botani. There are races all around Azeroth, many of which are already in our factions, but not playable, and many which could easily be in a faction, but are not.
I would add that my feedback for the devs is to focus on the races people already know and love instead of inventing new races from scratch and suddenly tossing them into our factions, please.
There are also other ways to do things, like this:
Personally, I think 8 new Allied Races is more than sufficient for the expack. Hopefully now that they aren’t messing with models 100% of the time, they can get around to fixing other outstanding issues in the game.
Allied races are a gimmick man. They’re not going to be a feature in the next expansion. Just like every other feature Blizzard develops on a per-expansion pack basis then abandons.
Lots of gimmicks keep going into future expacs. Artifact power, world quests, and mythic+ were originally Legion gimmicks that were brought into BFA due to their success.
Given that allied races are one of the most popular (not to mention profitable) things to come out of BFA I’d be very surprised if Blizz stopped doing them.
I like this idea. Add some conflict to all the old zones, even the ones in Outlands. Not sure if it work in mirror Draenor though. I think they mentioned something in the Mag’thar quest about the portals not being available.
I love allied races, but I would absolutely never criticize the game by saying there aren’t “enough” of them. As of right now we have 8 allied races whereas past expansions only gave us 2 (1 in MoP) new races to play as tops. Considering there are only 13 core races, 8 allied races seems like a great amount, although of course I would absolutely love more.
If you believe this, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Allied Races are easy money. Take an existing player character model, provide some different colors/hairstyles, maybe some extras like Tattoos, write a couple of quests, and plop them in the game behind a big Reputation Grind. The Hours Played metric goes up, microtransactions go up, etc…
It’s silly and unreasonable to expect allied races with every patch and expansion. Blizzard really shot themselevs in the foot by setting these expectations in people’s minds. Then again, it makes them crazy amounts money when new races are released. But now we have a portion of the community that has been spoiled into thinking there’s a vault of never ending allied races sonewhere.