World of Warcraft to Add Diverse Character Skins

After decades in operation, World of Warcraft will be implementing multiple skin colors for your characters.

The popular MMO game has an expansion coming soon called Shadowlands. One of the smaller changes the expansion brings is the option to change the skin color of your characters, regardless of race.

This feature was announced this weekend during BlizzCon, a weekend-long convention dedicated to Blizzard games. The same event where Overwatch 2 was announced.

According to senior producer Michael Bybee, quoted by Gamesindustry.biz, this addition is primarily due to a need for resource balancing. Blizzard invested tremendous time in the past toward adding HD models and now they want to invest equal effort into diversifying what options the player has.

"What we really didn't want to do is just slap a new skin color on there and say, 'Yep, done, we've got diversity. Instead what we're doing is we're actually remodelling the faces of these characters to match what might actually make sense for that particular ethnic background. Which takes time -- but we wanted to do it right."

It's nice to see a greater effort be put toward adding diverse options. It does add some good light toward Blizzard, which has been under consumer and sponsor fire for its anti-Hong Kong behaviors lately.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will release sometime in 2020.