WoW players will face off against a ‘superpower of Azeroth’ in The War Within’s first raid

Right from the onset in World of Warcraft: The War Within, you’ll be exposed to the threat of the Nerubians, a race of spider-like creatures who have lived in the darkest recesses of Azeroth for seemingly millennia.

Throughout the initial stages of the new expansion, players will learn about the Nerubian civilization before they dive into the first raid of The War Within—Nerub’ar Palace—where a battle with their queen awaits.

The Nerubian race was described by WoW director Ion Hazzikostas as a “superpower of Azeroth” in a developer update released earlier today, and the game’s narrative designers are doing everything they can to ensure the Nerubians live up to that designation.

“We went through a lot of early visual exploration for how we wanted to push them or re-modernize the look for this group of Nerubians,” WoW’s lead visual development artist Gabriel Gonzalez said of the race. “One of the monikers for the flavor we’re going with is ‘dark elegance,’ and there are a lot of interesting, beautiful elements of their culture and architecture that make them feel unique and stand out from other evil or darker cultures that we fought against in the past, but still have that edge and ‘cool’ factor.”

Despite the fact the Nerubian race should be familiar to players with extensive WoW lore knowledge—especially those who are brushed up on their history—these Nerubians we’ll be fighting in The War Within are not carbon copies of the undead Nerubians we’ve seen before in expansions like Wrath of the Lich King.

While the Nerubians you might be familiar with from that expansion are closer to “undead thralls,” as described by WoW senior narrative designer Abigail Manuel, The War Within’s Nerubians are complex, civilized, and have a deep-rooted history.

“They have a very interesting striated society, they have their own traditions, and ways of speaking,” Manuel said. “We really wanted to go beyond ‘they’re the bad guys’ and show the underlying culture of who the Nerubians were before they were the undead thralls we’ve seen before.”

The biggest way the narrative designers are making the Nerubians stand out as The War Within’s keynote villains is by leaning into that “underlying culture” and making them appear as actual imposing threats and not just a group of enemies you need to topple over on your quest for better gear. When designing these Nerubians, the devs asked themselves stripped-back questions like “How would spider people build a civilization?” and “What are they doing on a regular Friday?” Those hypotheticals helped the designers make the spiderfolk more human in nature. That would, in turn, make them more of a chilling, relatable villain that’s arguably harder to dispatch than the usual standard “big bad” that’s nothing more than a loot piñata.

The Nerubians will be explored in full in the early stages of The War Within and be tackled head-on in the game’s first raid, Nerub’ar Palace. That eight-boss raid will take place in the underground zone of Azj’kahet and will likely be available to enter several weeks after the launch of the expansion.

First looks at the raid will drop when it goes into beta testing later this year.