Friday, May 18, 2018

Per-Server Characters Slots Rising to 18 - More Allied Races Incoming?

We originally got ten character slots per server, which was actually enough to have duplicate classes and races per server, even with both factions. Once we got Blood Elves, Draenei, and Death Knights, things evened out very nicely with ten races and ten classes. We then got new character slots with each additional class (Monk and Demon Hunter) so that you could have one of each per server.

We didn't get new ones for Worgen or Goblins, and if you had a full server, you were really incentivized to go with a Pandaren Monk if you wanted to play both a Pandaren and a Monk.

With Allied Races, however, we've gotten a new slot for each race added - if you stick to one faction per server (prior to Cataclysm, I had all my toons on a single server, but transferred by Hordies to a different one to make room for new alts, some of whom are my class-mains now.)

With the current live patch, we now get sixteen slots per server, allowing you room for one of each Void Elf, Lightforged Draenei, Dark Iron Dwarf, and Kul Tiran Human if you're Alliance or Nightborne, Highmountain Tauren, Mag'har Orc, and Zandalari Troll if you're Horde.

But on the Beta, we're not getting eighteen slots. Por que?

Well, it could mean we're going to see four new Allied Races added beyond the eight that are currently announced.

Allied races are of course far easier to implement than traditional new races, as they tend to use the skeleton and animations of existing races and their "starting zones" are really just a static area (usually one that already existed, Void Elves having the exception, though it borrows some assets from elsewhere) where you get a quest essentially saying "hey, go be an adventurer." Only Zandalari Trolls and Kul Tiran Humans look geometrically distinct from their base races, though I suspect they still use the same basic skeleton (indeed, female Zandalari have the same posture as their Darkspear antecedents.)

So what might we be getting in 8.2 or whenever?

This is all speculative, but given that it's based on somewhat spoileriffic content, I'll put a cut here:


The recent preview chapters of Before the Storm suggest that there's a faction within the Forsaken that would prefer to go back to their lives as humans, and with Calia Menethil's death and resurrection, it seems there's a path to some sort of Holy-compliant undeath that I imagine many of the Undead would eagerly hope for. And with Lordaeron falling to the Alliance, these would be the ideal people to populate it.

So we'll say "Alliance Undead" as a strong guess for one of the Alliance races.

There have also been some datamined quests and events in which the Horde has been using the San'layn - those former Blood Elves turned vampires. The only real problem I have with this is that we already have Allied Race variants of both the base elf types. This would be a fifth elf race, and the second Blood Elf variant. On the other hand, playable vampires. I leave it to you to decide how cool that is.

That would leave, of the non-Allied races, Goblins, Pandaren, Gnomes, and Worgen without any allied variants.

I might assume that if the Alliance gets a variant of the Undead, the Horde might get an Allied variant of an Alliance race. I could actually see the original Worgen (the Night Elf variety) fitting that bill (Sylvanas had gotten Alpha Prime to infect Gilneas in the first place to weaken them for eventual conquest, which seems to have worked short-term but really backfired long-term,) or the Leper Gnomes both joining the Horde.

For the Alliance, it might be a stretch, but Mechagnomes could work. Or, if San'layn are repeating a base race, you could do Earthen or Wildhammer Dwarves, or perhaps Broken Draenei.

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