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One interesting feature coming to World of Warcraft‘s next expansion – The War Within – is an arachnophobia filter. Whereas other games have taken on this problem and swapped out models for vague geometric shapes or other less creepy alternatives, the World of Warcraft team have gone through and swapped out all the game’s spider models with… crabs.
Which makes sense! This upcoming expansion focused heavily on Nerubians, a race of spider-like creatures which tick all the boxes when it comes to spooking those with a distaste for eight-legged crawlers. Blizzard, having brought in all manner of experts and team members who suffer from the phobia, decided this was the right time to take action. The lengths they’ve gone to are not only widespread, but also oddly respectful of legacy content.
So starting with The War Within content, all Nerubians are swapped out with a variety of crab models re-used from prior World of Warcraft content. However, if you hop back through portals to Northrend and fly into Naxxaramas, all the spiders there are changed. Maexxna – the final boss in its spider quarter, has a massive model with similar colouration to the original boss. If you go to the Outlands from The Burning Crusade, a massive red spider in the Terokkar Forest called Terokkarantula is originally a vibrant red monstrous enemy. With the arachnophobia filter, it’s a giant red crab. Perfect.
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