WoW Dragonflight deletes “male” and “female”, calls them “body 1” and “body 2”

A small change causes a stir in World of Warcraft. Because characters are soon no longer just “male” or “female” when created.

The alpha of WoW: Dragonflight is now live and many selected people are already cavorting on the Dragon Islands and are diligently giving feedback on the new features. But in addition to the major innovations, such as the revised professions, the Drakthyr or dragon riding, there are also countless small changes to details. Some of them catch the eye and cause discussions because:

Blizzard has removed the “Male” and “Female” icons from character creation.

What was discovered? If you create a new character in the Dragonflight Alpha, you will no longer see the symbols for male and female in the race selection. Instead, you see 2 silhouettes of different body shapes, which are also simply named “Body 1” and “Body 2”. The functionality behind it hasn’t changed – it still leads to the same options as before.

Why is Blizzard doing this? For a while now, World of Warcraft developers have been aiming to give players more options when creating their characters. The possibility for many different characters should be created. Therefore, there have been numerous new cosmetic adjustments in the last expansions, such as new skin colors for humans and elves, new eye colors or adapted hairstyles and face shapes. All players should be able to hit the character to their liking. This also includes a possible representation of non-binary characters.

By the way: World of Warcraft is not the first game to say goodbye to the binary “male/female” designation in character creation. Even games like Monster Hunter Journey, Halo Infinite or Elden Ring only name their body shapes neutrally.

Is there more to come? It can be assumed. Lines of code have already been found in the game data that suggest a few more innovations. Although they haven’t been implemented yet – and probably won’t be – there are already indications that you can choose your own character’s pronouns, i.e. in English “he/him”, “she/her”, “them/ they”. Should this be implemented, it would probably have little effect on the game and would only come into play in some NPC dialogues (like quest texts).

One change, which has already been confirmed, should appear in the alpha in the next few weeks: it should be possible to choose the character’s voice, which was confirmed by game director Ion Hazzikostas in an interview (via wowhead). Then it would be possible to give a character with the – so far – female body a male voice and vice versa.

World of Warcraft is trying to be more inclusive and bring more opportunities for representation – this is just another step in that direction.