If you were wondering why World of Warcraft wasn’t adding a new class with its upcoming Shadowlands expansion, you are definitely not alone. After all, it feels like time for one, especially seeing as the last new class, the Demon Hunter, came out two expansions ago.
The answer to this, as revealed to Polygon at BlizzCon, was that Blizzard made a deliberate choice to focus on greatly expanding character customization at the expense of a new class to play. Each of the races will be getting a slew of additional visual options that players can select when making their characters or at the in-game barber.
“We’ve done this before with Draenor, when we decided we were going to put a lot of effort into the characters themselves, and into the character models,” said technical director Frank Kowalkowski. “We did the HD character models for Warlords of Draenor. Similar to that. We’re focusing more on giving more character customization options.”
Senior Game Designer Paul Kubit added that possible new classes were always informed by setting and story: “Looking at the setting of the Shadowlands, there wasn’t a class that jumped out like the Demon Hunter did in the past with Legion for example. So a lot of our focus is more on building the world of the Shadowlands.”
