20 years later, World of Warcraft is getting an arachnophobia mode

eurogamer.net:

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.

Arachnophobia modes are not uncommon and have become increasingly popular in recent years. Lethal Company has one, Grounded has one and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has one, to name but a few. I seem to remember Satisfactory being one of the first games — if not the first game — to add an arachnophobia mode back in 2019, but it's more than possible someone else got there before it. Nevertheless, it all begs the question of why World of Warcraft hasn't done this before. Why, 20 years later, has it only now become a thing?

«I think we didn't realise it was such a big thing for people, honestly,» Hamilton told me.

«When we started talking about [the War Within] internally, like, 'Oh we're going to do Nerubians,' a lot of people within our team said, 'Oh, I'm really bad with spiders.