This past weekend at BlizzCon, the World of Warcraft franchise took its latest step toward the future with the next three expansions for the game all being announced.
Fans have already taken it upon themselves to start theorycrafting and predicting what new features those expansions are going to have stuffed in them, including any potential new races. In a post on the WoW subreddit earlier today, WoW fans looked specifically at the second of the three expansions that got announced at BlizzCon—World of Warcraft: Midnight—and pointed at the possibility for a long-requested allied race to finally make its debut as a playable option in the game: Naga.
World of Warcraft players have been asking for Naga—the fabled serpent-like monsters who have been in the game since Classic WoW—as a potential new race for the better part of the last decade-plus as they’ve always fit the profile of what a playable race in the game should look like. With a humanoid structure and animations that are already in the game, Naga have been a go-to choice for players whenever new potential races are being discussed.
“Aquatic races get ignored so much in RPGs,” the original poster of the Reddit thread, a user named alexkon3, said in the comments. “I just really really really finally want one especially looking as monstrous as Naga do. Loved them since [Warcraft 3,] it’s a freaking dream for me.”
It’s possible that in WoW: Midnight, which is still several years away, the Naga could be at the top of the list as a new race. That expansion will take players back to the elvish capital of Quel’thalas, where the elven clans of old Azeroth will all be at war in an effort to fight back the oncoming forces of the Void. Since Naga were once Highborne elves who served under Queen Azshara, it’s possible they could be involved in the story of Midnight in a major way.
Furthermore, it was teased by WoW’s creative director Chris Metzen at BlizzCon that we’d be “uniting the elven tribes” in that expansion. If that’s the case, there’s definitely a chance the Naga (or other elven offshoots) join the ranks of the Alliance and Horde.
Still, WoW: Midnight is years away, and we have to play through the first expansion in WoW’s upcoming “Worldsoul Saga” before we can even think about what might be coming in the second chapter of that story. The first of the next three expansions, The War Within, will go live in the fall of next year, with one allied race—Earthen Dwarves—set to make an appearance.
