Alright Blizzard. C’mon now. We’ve got 4 furry races. Tauren, Pandaren, Vulpera, and Worgen. We’ve got 4 kinds of elves, and 2 kinds of humans, orcs, draenei, trolls, tauren, dwarves, and gnomes.
It’s time to branch out a little. Yeah, I’m talking reptilian races.
Most fantasy settings have one.
Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder have the Lizardfolk, Dragonborn, and even the Yuan-ti (of varying levels of abomination). Magic the Gathering has a plethora of creatures, including snakefolk. The Elder Scrolls series has the Argonians. Even Warhammer has the Seraphon/Lizardfolk!
There’s precedent for it, and more than that there’s a section of the playerbase that really wants it. There’s a whole Discord server dedicated to Sethrak, there’s the #Sethrakplz hashtag on twitter, and more besides. You HAVE a reptilian race that’s ready to be pulled in as an allied race!
When Sethrak were first revealed, the hype for them was real. Yeah, it’s calmed down by now, cooled off, and with no news about a reptilian race in Shadowlands, most people don’t really have any hope whatsoever. I also understand very well the challenges of rigging a new body shape, fitting the tens of thousands of armor pieces and outfits onto a new shape, and voicing and animating two new genders of a race on top of creating all of the customization options needed to give players the variety they’ve come to expect in WoW. All of that means money, money that doesn’t really need to be spent to keep WoW going.
But even if it’s not Sethrak, I REALLY want to see a push for a reptilian playable race of some kind. There’s easier ways you could do it, by reskinning the Tauren or even the Kul Tiran into an alligator-like race. Their hunched over form would be perfect to represent a hulking lizardman type creature! Replace hooves with claws, add a stubby lizard tail on the back end (or ideally a longer one, but let’s go with what’s easy). Or you could reskin the draenei for the back-jointed legs of some springy lizard creature, and again, the bigger male is perfect for a broad-chested lizardfolk-like creature!
It would add a fantastic level of variety, help fill a hole in the fantasy setting, allow for additional lore to be explored, and give us something new to hope for the future. Heck, we’ve already seen that the Warcraft universe has tons of different planets, mutants, corrupted things coming out the wazoo, and now we’re heading off into the realm of the dead. SURELY somewhere in there is room for a reptilian race to make their presence felt in Azeroth!
Let me know what you guys think. This is just me casting my vote, though it feels like screaming into a heartless void. I can hope and pray, and I’ll even wait for the next expac, but I really want to see this happen.
