More than 15 years have passed since "World of Warcraft" was first released, and its aging has begun to show. The character creation screen, for example, has not changed much throughout that time, despite the addition of new playable races, classes, and many ways to customize your appearance. Yesterday, however, the closed alpha test client for this summer's Shadowlands expansion was updated with several minor new features, including this unexpected change to the character creation method. You can see the new version in the image above. I really don't like it.

If you are not familiar with the old version (there are screenshots below so you can compare the two), the biggest difference is that everything is laid out and displayed in a more minimalistic way. Instead of the Horde selection being on the left, the Horde races are now displayed on the right side of the screen. The advantage of this is that players no longer have to go to an entirely separate menu just to see the Allied Races, a special race of the core Horde that they unlock through various means.

While it is nice to have all the race options available on one page, the overall reworking has a serious mobile game feel. The round buttons on the character portraits feel like they should be thumb-pressed instead of mouse-clicked, and instead of feeling minimalist, the new menus feel empty.

Customization options have also changed. Instead of scrolling through panels that visually display each option, like the various hairstyles, there are sliders to adjust for each part of the body. Again, it doesn't look very good to me.

I'm not the only one who isn't crazy about the new look; on the WoW subreddit, user 'freeflame18' said the new look has lost "a lot of soul" and to bring back some of the visual elements from the original character creation screen some photoshopping was done.

But maybe I'm just being unfair. Because character creation is a process that I don't even think about for months, until I decide to create a new character, which takes about two minutes of my time. So it doesn't matter much if this version is not changed between alpha and beta testing and becomes the version that ships with the Shadowlands expansion this summer.

What do you think of the new redesign?