Blizzard Makes More Changes to Change Insensitive Older World of Warcraft Content

Blizzard has continued making changes to World of Warcraft to make the game's content more inclusive. Several new updates have been spotted, each falling in line with the rest of the recent updates that changed content named after employees fired for misconduct, old tasteless and sometimes discriminatory jokes and voiced lines, and changes to emotes to make them less usable for targeted player abuse.

The new changes, as noted by WoWHead, include renaming the NPC Finkle Einhorn to Pip Quickwit, a change that was also applied to the corresponding card in Hearthstone. The old name is a reference to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and a character revealed to be transgender in the film and considered to have been handled in a transphobic and offensive way. This change is another one made in rethinking the content and what might be considered unwelcoming or hostile to a wider group of players. Other items that were referring to the previous name have all been renamed to reflect the change to Pip.

Some other renaming has taken place, including renaming Mac'Aree to Eredath, which required updated voice lines with the new name. Additional changes include removing most instances of the term "Greenskins", which some may see as a reference to the Orcs. Others, however, think the term may be removed as it conflicts with Games Workshop's trademark for Warhammer. 

A series of other changes seem to reflect an effort to clean up risqué jokes, sexual references, or in the case of the NPC Theresa in the Undercity and the involvement with Gerard Abernathy, references to a lack of consent, domination, experimentation on her, mind control, and other elements of the dialogue in these related quests were changed to remove lack of consent.

Overall, the work seems to continue to be ongoing for Blizzard. World of Warcraft is a huge game, running for over two decades now. The changes to the game come in a time when Blizzard is under legal scrutiny for a number of reasons related to hostile work environments and discrimination, but at least in WoW, there's plenty of evidence of change already apparent.