Since the open letters and incriminating surveys published on the Net in recent months regarding Activision-Blizzard, employees still present have expressed their desire to change things internally and in their games to make them more welcoming and inclusive. The teams of World of Warcraft have, over the past few weeks, been working on many small changes to their MMO. Let's take a look back at what was changed or removed with the PTR 9.1.5 patch released a few days ago.
Blizzard's goals are clear for World of Warcraft: to encourage positive and caring behavior, to reduce aggression, to ensure that as many people as possible feel in a safe, welcoming and non-oppressive place.
Farewell the beauties
World of Warcraft was released at the end of 2004. In 17 years, the world has changed a lot and continues to evolve. What was accepted, or at least tolerated at the time, is perhaps no longer so today and mentalities are changing. This is why, after weeks of consultation internally and with players, Blizzard, with its patch 9.1.5, has decided to remove no less than 73 borderline jokes and flirting phrases from its game, deemed outdated and contrary to its values.
For example, the Female Blood Elf can no longer say "I normally only ride epic mounts... But, let's talk"; male Draenei can no longer make the following joke: "When we got here, I lost a lot of jewelry that had been in my family for generations. If you could find my family jewels I would be very grateful”.
Just as the character of McCree will be renamed, quest names have been changed to remove any allusion to the developers incriminated by the investigations, but also to remove sexual innuendos. We note in particular the change of quest names for the Sons of Odir faction with the example: “Blowing Hodir's Horn” which turns into “Hodir's Call”. At the same time, emotes have been removed or modified, because they motivated aggressive use of them (coughing in the face, showing your buttocks, whistling at a person, etc.) and new ones have been added to encourage benevolence towards each and everyone: Magnificent, Impressed, Hooray, Grinning.
Less sexualize the game
Along with these changes directly aimed at World of Warcraft players also come changes to the game world around them. For example, in Karazhan, undead enemies that only had a female model now also have a male model, as well as genderless names and transformations.
In another register, some paintings dating from the Vanilla version of World of Warcraft have benefited from an HD facelift, but above all from desexualization work which may have even led to a total change in the painting (a neckline is replaced by a shirt, a woman posing in undress is replaced by a bowl of fruit).
Blizzard teams explained these changes: "Over the past few weeks, artists and scriptwriters on the WoW team have updated a small number of old quests, art assets, names and dialogues that we have identified. as outdated and contrary to our values ​​as a team. These changes are a very small part of an overall company-wide effort to improve the WoW team and Blizzard as a whole, but they are important to us as developers.”
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