#1 - Aug. 16, 2011, 4:50 a.m.
I love this game, but sometimes as a biologist it drives me off the wall. Now I get that 1. its just a game, and 2. its a fantasy setting, but could it really have been that much trouble to do a better job at researching all of the real-life animals that make it into WoW? A quick search on youtube could've saved the art team from making dozens of obvious and really quite glaring errors, such as:
1. Yes, some monkeys do swim. In fact, the crab-eating macaque, the monkey which serves as the real life model for the ones that Cat introduced to the game, are great swimmers. The problem is that they do not do the breaststroke. Crab-eating macaques doggy paddle, something you could have looked up in about five seconds on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQq69S0VNtE
2. Crab-eating macaques do not beat their chests. Only gorillas, and humans imitating gorillas, do that. I'll let this one slide because it is sort of fun that they do that in game, even though it is scientifically wrong.
3. The icon for Aspect of the Cheetah does not show a Cheetah, it clearly shows a striped Tiger of some sort.
4. Dogs and Wolves do not have three toes! They have five toes (counting the vestigial dewclaw) on their front legs, and four toes on their hindlegs, yet all wolves in WoW have three toes per paw. Does no one on the art department own a pet dog?! What makes this even weirder is the fact that they leave four toed footprints in snow and sand!
5. Giraffe horns are covered in skin. They in no way, shape, or form look like goat horns. This is something that most children learn the first time they enjoy a box of animal crackers.
6. The membranes of a bat's wings are not attached to their bodies that way.
7. The running animations of several mounts are plain wrong. Actually, I'm pretty sure that all of the "real animal" mounts do not move that way in real life. It is particularly noticeable with Horses that something is just wrong about the way they are shown to move in WoW.
8. Elephants cannot jump. In all likelihood, neither could Mammoths.
9. Your terrordax creatures seem to be a combination of species. Pterodactyl did not have that particular crest shape, and Pteranodon, which did have that distinctive crest, did not have any teeth. I'll give you a pass on this one because nobody ever gets dinosaurs right anyways, and you could use the "its a terrordax not either of those two species" excuse.
The same thing goes for threshadons, which have the head of a brachiosaurus and the body of a plesiosaur. Again, this gets a barely passing grade, only because you didn't name it either of those things.
10. There are no boars in WoW. Boars only have one pair of tusks, the creatures you call "boars" in this game are closer to peccaries, which are a completely unrelated species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary
11. Speaking of tusks, these species are not supposed to have them:
-turtles
-scorpions
-baby crocodiles
-lions (not shown in game models, but there is an item "Savannah lion tusk")
-dimetrodon
-wasps
-bats
-gorillas
Honestly, what is with the underbite fetish anyways??
12. Lion cubs have spots.
13. More species that are incorrectly labeled/misidentified!:
-Turtles: if it has webbed feet or flippers, its a turtle. If it doesn't, its a tortoise.
-Dishu, a rare spawn cat from North Barrens, is spotted like a Cheetah, yet she has cubs that appear to belong to a lion, and lives with a lion pride. Is there a very remote possibility that a lion could have spots due to a genetic mutation? Possibly, but they would look like the spots that all lion cubs have, not like the coat of a cheetah.
-The so-called lynxes that roam around Silvermoon do not even remotely resemble a lynx. Or anything real, for that matter.
-Several species in un'goro drop "dinosaur bones", yet they are not dinosaurs. The "diemetrodon" is based on a mammal-like reptile, and the "terrordax" was a species of archosaur, but not a species of dinosaur.
-Northrend's "penguins" are actually puffins. The two taxa are not related at all.
14. Worms do not have binocular vision, nor do they have jawbones. I like to pretend that you are using "worm" in the older sense, to mean some sort of snake-like reptile, just because that makes more sense than some of the so-called "worms" in this game. The polar worms get a pass, both because they kind of do look like some species of marine worms, and because the jormungar are supposedly an artificial species, but the Silithid varieties are right out!
15. A lot of animal sounds are wrong. In general this is acceptable, since you probably are relying on stock sounds, and those are notorious for being based off of "cool" sounding animal noises, instead of "accurate" sounding animal noises. But some are just plain wonky! Orcas do not sound like humpbacked whales (they click, like their smaller cousins the dolphins), rats do not squeak (or make any noise that humans can hear, really), and armadillos do not squeal like pigs!
16. Giant isopods do not look at all like cockroaches. This one is really confusing to me, because most people do not even know what a giant isopod is (so why would they care?), and those who do know what they are know right away that they aren't supposed to look like that. So why bother putting them in the game if you don't have the time to make a decent model of them?
17. Bats again! Bats do not have that many claws on their wings. The only claw they should have is their thumb claw, the rest of the wing is basically their finger bones stretched out. Yet WoW bats somehow have six fingers...
18. The jubling pet from the Darkmoon Faire makes no sense. Frogs do not hatch from their eggs fully formed, they come out as tadpoles. Also, giving a frog alcohol would probably kill it.
19. Here's another one that strikes me as bizarre - the six legged reptiles. I heard somewhere that the whole idea was that Dragons evolved from these things, which is why they can have four limbs and two wings. Surely such an assertion will stand up to scrutiny - oh wait, this is WoW, the game that makes biologists sad. This explanation would only make sense if every single thing descended from reptiles also had six limbs - this includes all mammals and birds! Also, where did the reptiles come from?? There aren't any six-legged amphibians slithering around Azeroth either, nor six legged fish. This leaves only two possibilities:
A. Early on in Azeroth's history both a six-legged and a four-legged species of amphibian conquered the land, and somehow the four-legged reptiles (with the exception of raptors...and pterosaurs...and thunder lizards....), all died out (but not before evolving into mammals and birds), while the six-legged reptiles stayed around and evolved into larger reptiles, while at the same time all of the six legged amphibians and fish went extinct. The odds of this happening are basically impossible.
B. A Titan did it...but if it was a Titan who made all of these six-legged reptiles (as recent new quests in Un'goro seem to indicate), then why did the Titan bother with evolution at all? Why not just make dragons out of thin air? This is why the whole "evolution" explanation is so silly - it isn't necessary! Just say that a Titan wanted six-legged reptiles and call it a day!
