You look at almost any of the Nightborne NPCs - Thalyssra, Oculeth, Victoire, Vanthir, etc.
and they have normal Elf proportions, regular sized legs, etc. They have a similar body type to playable Blood Elves and Night Elves
But then you go to create a Nightborne character and they are comically, hilariously skinny. Like, emaciated, “haven’t-eaten-in-30-days” skinny, “wasting away to nothing” skinny “i-always-skip-leg-day” skinny.
Why are the playable Nightborne so different from the Nightborne npcs?
or am I just tripping about this?
Currently, my biggest cosmetic wish for the game is a normal Nightborne body type, and brown skin tones for Nightborne.
because I like to play regular humanoid (i.e. not “monster” or “beast” race) elf/human type characters with similar skin tones to me, I like Nightborne, and it would give me a 2nd Horde option to play what I want.
Because NPC rigs/animations and player rigs/animations (which also need to support armor) are different. That’s why Nightborne copy NE rigs/animations and Void Elfs copy BE rigs/animations.
understandable. but why the drastically different body types then? Void Elves have the same body type as Blood Elves, but different/additional customization options. Why don’t Nightborne then have the same body type as NEs?
and it’s fine that you don’t understand. let’s just stick to the original subject of Nightborne body types.
most of my characters are Blood Elves, mainly for this reason. It’d be nice to have brown skin tones for Nightborne. that’s all I am saying.
moving on.
right now, I like everything about Nightborne except their male body type. It’s just too skinny, it looks awkward to me. I think it is mainly the arms and legs though, if their arms and legs had regular proportions like NEs it’d be all good.
I am 99% sure i’ve read somewhere that playable Nightborne were all part of the Nightfallen. So them looking emaciated is intentional, because they recently were. The reasons NPC doesn’t is because most of them reuse the non-emaciated models, or were never starved at all.
Thalyssra and Oculeth and some other notables who now have normal body types were Nightfallen until you get to a certain point in the Suramar questline. in fact, there was a weekly quest where you had to feed them Mana Crystals in order for them to even function.
Sometimes Blizzard intentionally increases the size of important NPC’s to make them easier to interact with or see. It is why the Lich King is the size of a vrykul despite being a human.
I really wanted to make a Nightborne DK, I really like everything about Nightborne, except their Male body type. everything else, lore, aesthetic, racial armor, weapons, mounts, etc. are all fantastic. and Suramar is probably my favorite city in the game, aesthecally. I just couldn’t get over how comically skinny they are, especially with the oversized shoulderpads. I literally just sat in Orgrimmar staring at my Nightborne character before deleting him.
I ended up making a Zandalari instead. I’d seriously consider dropping the $25 to do a race change to Nightborne tho, if Blizzard ever gave them regular-sized body types.
Yeah, the male Nightborne has some issues. My biggest pet peeve is that our shoulder pieces are not symmetrical/out of alignment with each other. On some pieces you can hardly tell, but on others it’s very noticeable. Especially pieces that have long hanging elements. Just a few examples:
They typically float quite high above the body also:
It doesn’t stop me from playing NB, but it does bother me. I still manage to make some decent looking mogs anyway. Wearing cloth probably helps with that. This is my current getup:
By the way, I think all races that can be warlocks should have a green option for their eye color. I would also love an option to change the color of my magic body runes as well. Imagine a green-eyed NB warlock with green runes on their body… that would be nice.
I imagine it is because there isn’t just one Nightborne NPC model among all the ones that existed. There were dozens of them. All the different outfits you see Nightborne wear are all distinct models. So they had to make one from scratch that works with player armor and the result is they look weird.
And the reason they look more like Night Elves than Nightborne NPCs. It’s my headcanon the nature side of the Arcan’dor reverted their nightwell transformation back to the “natural”, night elf forms
That’s a testament to them having the same skeleton as male night elves. They’ve always had wonky shoulder armor. Nightborne were actually much better in that regard, but they thankfully adjusted night elves’ when they got their heritage armor. It’s still not perfect. But it is so close that I can finally live with it.
