Get ready for Dragonflight by World of Warcraft timeline (Opens in a new tab). Proletariat informed fans of the changes via a blog post, revealing that development of the four-year-old Spellbreak game has stopped and plans to shut down servers in “early 2023”. “While it is clearly a matter of personalization, it is an interesting inclusion, as historically the use of pronouns in referring to players in general is avoided by the game – even when it comes to NPCs and quest dialogue, it is often dealt with with player characters either directly or through some kind of expansion-specific homage (hero in the Battle of Azeroth, Maw Walker in Shadowlands, along with episodic hero or another generic term) rather than direct pronouns.”īlizzard recently revealed that it has acquired the developer of Spellbreak (Opens in a new tab)the magical battle royale game that will be closed next year.īoston-based Proletariat will see its 100-person team join Blizzard and start working on it World of Warcraft and the upcoming Dragonflight expansion (Opens in a new tab)which is expected to be released later this year.
“What we don’t know is how these options are used, as there doesn’t seem to be any place to actually specify this assignment, and neither gender nor pronouns are indicated in any of the players’ UI elements,” Wowhead explains. While this change has yet to reach an alpha release or be officially confirmed by Blizzard, fans are hoping the discovery will mean a change is on the way and that expansion will be more comprehensive. Wowhead also notes that some of the detailed strings also suggest that players “may be able to choose their preferred pronouns,” “he/she, he/she, or they/them,” as well as the character’s voice. “Because there is a text-only change in a large total of two menus throughout the game, this is a very small impact, but it is an important change in line with the developers Perspectives on inclusion”. Where it previously gave players the option to select either male or female body types, it now refers to them simply as Body 1 and Body 2 respectively. “The new body type labels are just textual changes within the character creation screen and barbershop,” explains a post in Ohid (Opens in a new tab).
It seems as if Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is removing the gender language from the game.ĭragonflight’s alpha testing began yesterday, July 15, to display the game’s new character creation screen, which now lists options like Body 1 and Body 2 instead of male or female.