{"id":875223,"date":"2026-10-08T14:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T14:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/875223\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T14:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T14:36:08","slug":"blizzard-is-changing-the-appearance-of-wow-forevers-new-skyborne-race-in-response-to-community-feedback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/875223\/","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard is changing the appearance of WoW: Forever&#8217;s new Skyborne race in response to community feedback"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>World of Warcraft: Forever&#8217;s developers have announced drastic visual changes to the game&#8217;s new Skyborne race following passionate community feedback. These include new in-game models that better represent the game&#8217;s early MMO aesthetic, much to the community&#8217;s delight.<\/p>\n<p>The World of Warcraft community first caught wind of these changes during <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uDRcv_w85j8&amp;t=4146s\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a recent episode of the official World of Warcraft: Forever podcast<\/a>, in which senior game designer Josh &#8220;Aggrend&#8221; Greenfield acknowledged impassioned feedback of the Skyborne humanoid and druid character models. While he didn&#8217;t have anything to announce then, he said the team &#8220;hoped to have something more substantive to say pretty soon&#8221;. And &#8220;pretty soon&#8221; now seems to have arrived.<\/p>\n<p>To see this content please enable targeting cookies.<\/p>\n<p>Manage cookie settings <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the World of Warcraft new race and class combo trailer.<a class=\"video\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8-PJaWoPzUE\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">Watch on YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com\/en-us\/news\/24302546\/world-of-warcraft-forever-the-future-of-skyborne-visual-updates\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">blog post detailing these changes<\/a>, published on the World of Warcraft website, starts by establishing the team&#8217;s aim to &#8220;uphold the original WoW era aesthetic&#8221; while offering more choice in how they experience Azeroth. It then admits that some of the team&#8217;s ideas around the visual fidelity of certain new additions missed the mark: specifically the Skyborne models. The blog notes: &#8220;The Skyborne are from an exotic environment, and their Druid forms reflect that, but we don&#8217;t want that to be dissonant with the visual language of other creatures in the world.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Both versions of the Skyborne elves in World of Warcraft: Forever will be altered to better align with the rest of the game. The blog shows side-by-side comparison before-and-after images, which highlight the models&#8217; softness being removed, colour saturation lowered, and more detailed fur textures added.<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"\" data-autosize=\"crop_lossy\" data-lightbox=\"\" data-uri=\"image_csyNG8b.png\" height=\"616\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"aspect-ratio: 2.0779220779220777\" width=\"1280\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Perhaps what&#8217;s more exciting, especially to World of Warcraft: Forever players who value retro visuals, is word of planned changes to the standard definition models. The blog agrees with feedback that the standard definition Skyborne models could feel &#8220;jarring&#8221; next to the game&#8217;s legacy races, and confirms that new standard definition models are in the works, with a planned release in early 2027. For now, an image of work-in-progress characters was included. Look at those sharp angles! You could cut an apple on those.<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"\" data-autosize=\"crop_lossy\" data-lightbox=\"\" data-uri=\"image_ktSRXW9.png\" height=\"720\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"aspect-ratio: 1.7777777777777777\" width=\"1280\"\/><\/p>\n<p>The response to this blog post has been largely glowing. Comments on the Blizzard forums have expressed delight at this shift in direction: Take Solforge, the level 85 Paladin, <a href=\"https:\/\/us.forums.blizzard.com\/en\/wow\/t\/world-of-warcraft-forever-the-future-of-skyborne-visual-updates\/2375330\/14\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">who wrote<\/a>: &#8220;So much better. Unbelievable how much of an impact this has. This gives me faith.&#8221; Alison, another Paladin, expressed their approval, <a href=\"https:\/\/us.forums.blizzard.com\/en\/wow\/t\/world-of-warcraft-forever-the-future-of-skyborne-visual-updates\/2375330\/15\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">writing<\/a>: &#8220;I think the new druid forms look Soooo much better! The colors stand out to me more but not in a loud bright neon way.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Shimmying over to the popular World of Warcraft Reddit, and the mood is similarly joyful. Notably, many players are expressing their appreciation at the WoW Forever team&#8217;s eagerness to respond to community feedback so quickly and openly. One popular thread is titled: &#8220;Ignore the toxic positivity. Disregard the brigaders. Keep giving feedback. Keep being vocal. Forever team is GOATed and they&#8217;re listening.&#8221; The thread highlights not only these changes, but also the recent decision by Blizzard to lower the rarity of dungeon loot so quest rewards aren&#8217;t devalued, and the decision to change the races&#8217; headshots in the character creator from Modern WoW&#8217;s headshots to those found in Classic WoW.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The fact that they tweaked these rather minor things and even changed the icons is honestly in my eyes monumental,&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/classicwow\/comments\/1wvukwn\/comment\/pdfum4u\/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">wrote user Ubberman<\/a>. &#8220;Who are these people? That is an exceedingly high response rate and for rather minor things that only add to the feel. If they keep this up for even a year, WoW Forever will genuinely be the best World of Warcraft version to date. Genuinely.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>World of Warcraft: Forever may still only be in beta, but it&#8217;s already proving mighty popular. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/world-of-warcraft-forever-beta-server-cap-increase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The server cap had to be increased due to player demand<\/a>, and early critique of this introductory version of the upcoming MMO &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/world-of-warcraft-forever-outstanding\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">including ours<\/a> &#8211; is largely positive. WoW Forever launches in full on 4th November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World of Warcraft: Forever&#8217;s developers have announced drastic visual changes to the game&#8217;s new Skyborne race following passionate&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[74],"class_list":["post-875223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}