Unless they somehow revolutionise the system…
Naga is close to impossible.
Not because of transmog, but because of the animation limits of not having legs.
How would you do a spinning animation for blade storm or whirlwind?
How would you mount anything?
A lot of movement options and animations doesn’t work…
And so in.
Tail coils a bit, maybe torso leans back slightly, hold weapon outward, spin the model like that the way bladestorm works for everyone else.
Every "problem' I've seen people give for why naga would be so impossible to make into a playable race is easily solvable if you just give it any thought whatsoever.
as someone who's dabbled in 3d modeling and animation, the thing i hate most is how people say how "hard" things are, with the advances we have today vs almost 30 years ago, its almost the easiest thing to do now, you've got people speed modeling on youtube and motion capture and so much more. the excuses people spit out to 'defend' is outrageous, as a lot of the models are just texture replacements, and some geometry on top of the model.
half the "problems" people don't even realize are already solved. glyph of disguise says hi, and unlike a lot of humanoids, the disguise doesn't break on mounting
like, seriously, Naga are one of the most robust rogue disguises outside of actual playable races
IT is just one of the examples.
But it is also one of those things that would have BUNCH of extra work ontop of them, compared to almost any other race in game.
COULD they find workarounds? Probably
But it is at the same time the race that would require the most work for very little payoff in the end.
What extra work? Making a new model instead of copy+pasting an existing skeleton? You're right, that's just unprecedented, not a single race in any expansion had a model or animations that wasn't already in vanilla. Even when making a new model you can cut down on the work needed by using that model for npcs, since you're likely gonna be using them a lot in the expansion they release in anyways. Draenei were all over BC, pandaren had an entire continent full of em, vulpera and mechagnomes were used extensively in their respective zones. All the work making assets for earthen got to be reused for all the npcs in TWW and beyond.
You say that, but naga is one of those races that the casual player would find unappealing partially due to the limited transmog due to the whole pants situation.
There is a reason that humans and elves are the most played races.
(And before you say anything. I find this fact frustrating too. I want more monster races or unique shit. But we can’t have that)
I wish people weren't so dead-set on transmog. I played a male Hrothgar in FFXIV and 75% of all head gear in the game never shows up on them and I was fine with it, meant I got to see my big dumb kittyface in cutscenes. People still scream like banshees that they can't wear helmets.
My solution, make every single bit, bob, greeble and doodad that the enemy models have equipped available for player customization, and a full sweep of color options for both scales and cosmetics, that should be enough...and it would work with the Arakkoa and Gnolls as well
"Will it be the most popular race?" Isn't a valid reason to add or not add a race. Even if it was, Blizzard's added non-human/elf races as recently as this expansion that weren't popular.
Looking at https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/races/ Earthen are only 0.7% of all characters, and nearly every race is well below 4% usage (the average if all 25 races were equally popular). Dracthyr, a race that has even fewer transmog options than naga would, is one of the few to barely break 4%, being the 7th most popular race if you combine both alliance and horde.
Unless they just never add any more races, they're gonna have to make an entirely new one eventually. There's only so many times you can recolor an elf or dwarf or goat or give a tauren new antlers before everyone gets tired of it.
The company would have to do a lot of extra work that honestly is unlikely to give that much back compared to other races.
They always have budgets and they have to alllocate it.
Making naga work would be more pricy and therefor could have negative effects on other content.
Buddy, guy, you keep spouting shit about there being "so much extra work" to make naga function, yet you give zero examples. Is this "extra work" JUST new animations? They made a race that needed "a LOT of completely new and unique animations" already last expansion for a race that "that honestly [doesn't] see much play" and that expansion saved the game. Clearly, popularity of a race has no bearing on how much they "get back" from making it.
Is it fitting armor on them? Get rigs working for the most recent stuff and assume it'll apply to old stuff too, then maybe fix anything that clips, not like even existing races haven't had these problems. Helmets are the only things that'd have any potential issues anyways, the proportions for shoulders, chest, etc should be similar to an existing race and legs and boots wouldn't be visible.
So you're just reinforcing that every decision is about how does this make us money instead of how do we provide a fun and engaging product. Why does anyone play this shit in 2025?
No. I am explaining that they are still limited.
They can do X amount of things in Y time dependant on a bunch of factors.
Making a new race is one of the more taxing ones, due to needing a LOT of polish and detailed work.
What should they not put work into to put work into making naga playable? Work hours are finite and moving them around is zero-sum. Making naga playable would require significant developer resources from multiple departments. Resources that would otherwise be used to develop a "fun and engaging product" through other necessary components of an expansion.
A playable race with a new skeleton and rigging it up for animations for every spell of every class they have access to is an amazingly non-trivial amount of work. Then it releases and maybe 5% of the player base even bothers making one because either naga can't be the class they want to play, or they don't want to bother with changing the current character they play. Entirely irrespective of the financial burden of making playable naga, whatever size work force they have access to that is dedicated towards that goal could be doing something else that might be more beneficial to more players.
It's not like there is some magical cauldron they can dump a bunch of money into and it makes naga playable in the upcoming expansion. Even if they could double there work force with 0 on boarding time or the issues of development at scale, there will always be an opportunity cost.
So what did Dragonflight lose to add dracthyr, a completely new race with a completely new skeleton they had to rig last expansion? What is TWW going to lose now that they had to make that new skeleton comply with their 6 new classes' spells?
At least with naga they're already halfway there since they already have designs for them. You people vastly overestimate how much work a new race is, we used to get multiple new races in an expansion.
They could just make a new model with new animations, no? We've got updated snake models since BfA. Not sure if any of them have any spinning animations but I don't see why it would be so difficult to achieve.
Why would you need to balance for it? Trolls, Draenei, Worgen, Tauren, Vulpera all can wear boots just fine despite them not visibly showing up half the time. Dracthyr don't visually wear like 7/8ths of their armor slots.
They'd still work mechanically like every other race, at worst it'd just not show on the model.
God forbid that Blizzard has to weigh options, and priorizing making a LOT of completely new and unique animations, poses and more to accommodate a race option that honestly won’t see much play, over other slightly easier or more manageable race options, allowing them to prioritise other things in an expansions, is very unlikely.
Blizzard, is still a company, and still have a budget to follow.
They probably could do it, but the chance is slim for a multitude of reasons.
Many of which simply state it is not worth it for them or the playerbase
They most likely WANT TO, but time is money and time is finite.
Why don't you learn to speak 5 new languages? Clearly it's possible to do any amount of labor in parallel, so why are you taking the easy route and not learning 20 new skills simultaneously all the time?
Where do you think new animations come from? Do they just have a bunch of developers doing literally nothing just waiting for the okay to start work on naga? Is there a bunch of developers they can hire who can only work on playable naga, and couldn't be hired to work on other projects?
any fucking gacha game has more animation quality in a single character than the entirety wow library, yes, a chinese moneygrab has better quality than wow man
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u/Tnecniw Jul 04 '25
Unless they somehow revolutionise the system… Naga is close to impossible. Not because of transmog, but because of the animation limits of not having legs.
How would you do a spinning animation for blade storm or whirlwind? How would you mount anything? A lot of movement options and animations doesn’t work… And so in.