New World of Warcraft expansion Shadowlands will, finally, allow players to choose characters with ethnic diversity and darker than tanned skin. It’s only taken 15 years.
The new customisation options will come as part of a major customisation overhaul for all races, which will allow trolls to have all kinds of body tattoos and the undead to have no exposed bones. But why has ethnic diversity in player characters taken so long?
I asked Blizzard duo Michael Bybee, senior producer, and Patrick Magruder, lead gameplay engineer, at BlizzCon 2019.
“One of the things that’s just a reality of making video games is we have to figure out exactly where we spend our resources,” Michael Bybee told me. “We have time that we can spend on characters and art, and we have to make decisions about that.