The Nerubian race was described by WoW<\/a> <\/em>director Ion Hazzikostas as a \u201csuperpower of Azeroth\u201d in a developer update released earlier today, and the game\u2019s narrative designers are doing everything they can to ensure the Nerubians live up to that designation.<\/p>
Despite the fact the Nerubian race should be familiar to players with extensive WoW <\/em>lore knowledge\u2014especially those who are brushed up on their history\u2014these Nerubians we\u2019ll be fighting in The War Within<\/a> <\/em>are not carbon copies of the undead Nerubians we\u2019ve seen before in expansions like Wrath of the Lich King<\/em>.<\/p>
While the Nerubians you might be familiar with from that expansion are closer to \u201cundead thralls,\u201d as described by WoW <\/em>senior narrative designer Abigail Manuel, The War Within<\/em>\u2019s Nerubians are complex, civilized, and have a deep-rooted history<\/a>.<\/p>
The biggest way the narrative designers are making the Nerubians stand out as The War Within<\/em>\u2019s keynote villains<\/a> is by leaning into that \u201cunderlying culture\u201d and making them appear as actual imposing threats and not just a group of enemies you need to topple over on your quest for better gear. When designing these Nerubians, the devs asked themselves stripped-back questions like “How would spider people build a civilization?” and “What are they doing on a regular Friday?” Those hypotheticals helped the designers make the spiderfolk more human in nature. That would, in turn, make them more of a chilling, relatable villain that\u2019s arguably harder to dispatch than the usual standard \u201cbig bad\u201d that\u2019s nothing more than a loot pi\u00f1ata.<\/p>
