On Thursday, Activision Blizzard held a special event in Los Angeles to announce the launch date for World of Warcraft's fifth expansion pack, Warlords of Draemor. During this event, lead game designer Ion Hazzikostas told the local press that the team has plans to create a character that will be dedicated to the late Robin Williams, who spent many hours in the virtual world of Azeroth.
"We haven't decided, but it will most likely be a character inspired by him or some of his favorite roles of the past," Hazzikostas said.
Robin Williams was known to be a big gamer, enough so that he named his daughter after the famous Princess in Nintendo's Zelda games. In the wake of her father's death, 25-year-old Zelda Williams recently signed off of Twitter and other social networks for good thanks to harassing Internet trolls.
"I'm sorry. I should've risen above. Deleting this from my devices for a good long time, maybe forever. Time will tell. Goodbye," she said.
Her departure from Twitter pushed the company into thinking twice about cyber-bullying and lead to the closure of two accounts.
"We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules, and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users," said the head of Twitter's Trust and Safety Team, Del Harvey.
As for the Robin Williams avatar, Blizzard has not issued any statements regarding when the World of Warcraft character will make an appearance. In the meantime, there's a petition on Change.org requesting that Nintendo dedicate a character to Robin Williams in the next Zelda game headed to the Wii U. The petition asks that the character be named "Robin," which seems like a reasonable request that won't disrupt the fantasy setting.
Currently, the petition still needs 1,367 supporters before it's sent off to Nintendo.
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