World of Warcraft now has new character models. They're a visual improvement, but for some they've come at a cost, with many complaining that their dark-skinned characters are now looking much lighter.
Posts like this have been popping up on the game's forums complaining about the issue, as people installed the patch and found drastic changes had been made to their beloved human and worgen characters.
New characters could still be given darker skin tones, as you can see below. The problem is that the patch is turning existing dark-skinned characters into white ones (as you can see up top).
Accusations of digital "white-washing" were quickly levelled at Blizzard, but the company says it's an error that's currently being patched out.
A Blizzard rep tells Kotaku:
We introduced new character models with today's patch and ran into a bug where some of our new HD textures are appearing too light when the lighting hits them at certain angles. We're working on an update for that and will get it implemented as quickly as possible.
We also have a similar issue with Worgen skin options, but it's based on a different bug. Worgen customization options are linked between each form (Human and Worgen), and we found an error in how we numbered the texture files used to set which skin tones are linked between them. This means that some Worgen players out there are seeing a pretty stark mismatch, which is due to the game simply pointing at the wrong texture file. We're in the process of working on a patch to address this issue as well, and we expect that to go out as soon as tomorrow.