20 years later, World of Warcraft is getting 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.

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.

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.

I stupidly misplaced a picture of the spider enemies all turned into pinkish crabs, but this image helps set the scene.

Its headline feature is that it begins a new trilogy of Worldsoul Saga expansions and a three-game story arc running through them, and the message I heard a few times at the WoW event was that it would be ambitious in scale.