World of Warcraft will, in its 20th year of operation, implement an arachnophobia mode. It’s been developed for the new War Within expansion, which heavily features the spider-like Nerubian race, but it won’t be exclusive to it.
“We made it retroactive so it does everything,” associate design director Maria Hamilton told me during a roundtable interview during a War Within event in London earlier this week. That means you’ll be able to turn it on and off and spiders all over the World of Warcraft world will be transformed into something else – specifically, crabs.
It works very well; I was able to test it during an alpha playthrough of some early War Within content. The enemy models change seamlessly, and because crabs are not too dissimilar to spiders, the transformation doesn’t erase a sense of what you’re fighting. They look, if you squint, vaguely the same. More importantly, as Maria Hamilton explained to me, the crabs share the same hitboxes as the spiders, so positioning and reading attack animations is all pretty much the same.
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