World of Warcraft: Forever's developers have announced drastic visual changes to the game's new Skyborne race following passionate community feedback. These include new in-game models that better represent the game's early MMO aesthetic, much to the community's delight.

The World of Warcraft community first caught wind of these changes during a recent episode of the official World of Warcraft: Forever podcast, in which senior game designer Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield acknowledged impassioned feedback of the Skyborne humanoid and druid character models. While he didn't have anything to announce then, he said the team "hoped to have something more substantive to say pretty soon". And "pretty soon" now seems to have arrived.

The blog post detailing these changes, published on the World of Warcraft website, starts by establishing the team's aim to "uphold the original WoW era aesthetic" while offering more choice in how they experience Azeroth. It then admits that some of the team's ideas around the visual fidelity of certain new additions missed the mark: specifically the Skyborne models. The blog notes: "The Skyborne are from an exotic environment, and their Druid forms reflect that, but we don't want that to be dissonant with the visual language of other creatures in the world."

Both versions of the Skyborne elves in World of Warcraft: Forever will be altered to better align with the rest of the game. The blog shows side-by-side comparison before-and-after images, which highlight the models' softness being removed, colour saturation lowered, and more detailed fur textures added.

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