It is happening again.
At 10:47 am UTC on Sunday, February 8, a user named Woodwardo posted on the World of Warcraft subreddit to share a curious discovery: After making a new orc rogue, they had detected—through an unlikely pairing of camera placement and character highlighting—the presence of an invisible bunny aboard the vessel shepherding their new character into Azeroth.
Woodwardo didn’t realize it, but like generations of WoW players before them, they had inadvertently stumbled upon the hidden cosmic principle underlying the very metaphysic of Azeroth: World of Warcraft is powered by invisible bunnies.
I started a new character, why are there invisible rabbits on the boat? from r/wow
This isn’t an exaggeration. Behind the orcs, wizards, dragons, and Lich Kings, WoW lives, breathes, and functions according to the unseen influence of omnipresent phantasmal leporidae. If something is moving through the environment, an invisible bunny might be piloting it. If fire is falling from the sky, an invisible bunny probably called it—or was hit by it. If a sound is playing or the screen is shaking or lights are shining, an invisible bunny likely made it so.
It’s bunnies all the way down, because when WoW was being built, bunnies were often the easiest solution.
As we wrote in the ancient past of 2015, WoW’s invisible bunnies are just one example of the ingenious (and often absurd) solutions that game developers concoct for achieving the near-miraculous task of making a videogame function. Games are moving museums of smoke and mirror problem solving: Fallout 3’s train is a glove worn by an NPC, many of Skyrim’s tables are bookcases embedded in the floor, and Half-Life 2’s Breencasts are taking place in a small floating room just outside the map—because if it works, it works.
In WoW’s case, when the developers have needed something to trigger scripted events, pilot moving entities, or fire off spell effects for dramatic effect, the most straightforward answer has often been to simply have an invisible NPC do it. According to the 2019 book The World of Warcraft Diary by former Blizzard level designer Johnathan Staats, bunnies were chosen because “critter_bunny” was the first entry in the alphabetical list of creature models. We can assume it was a convenient side effect that their size made them easier to overlook if—and when—a player might somehow detect that they’re there, quietly allowing reality to function.
WoW’s developer tools have gotten more sophisticated over time, but given that Woodwardo encountered an invisible bunny in the revamped new player zone that was implemented with the Shadowlands pre-patch, it seems that Blizzard has still been turning to the tried-and-true bunny methodology as recently as 2020. And it’s safe to assume that as long as WoW’s servers keep running, there will still be an invisible bunny somewhere in the world with a job to do.
Read the full article here
