Blizzard has made the difficult decision to further delayed the upcoming expansion forWorld of Warcraft, the company announced Thursday afternoon.World of WarcraftShadowlandshas been planned for release in late October since August, as confirmed at Gamescom 2020. With the delay, Blizzard now plans to releaseShadowlandslater in 2020, thought to lighten the news, Blizzard did confirm thatShadowlands' first pre-patch will be going live on October 13.
A justification forShadowlands' delay was provided. Blizzard describes that it has been “listening to” and “building upon” player feedback asShadowlandshas been shared more broadly with the public. As such, Blizzard says that “it became clear we need a little more time” to continue working onShadowlands. Polish, balance, and iteration on certain aspects ofShadowlands' endgamewill be priorities for Blizzard during this extra time.
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As many game studios have admitted, Blizzard also mentions that development has been hampered at least partly by the pandemic and work-from-home policies. The development ofShadowlands' is described as intricate and that tuning the endgame was all the more challenging because of theobstacle COVID-19 presented. Acknowledging that, Blizzard goes on to dedicate itself to ensuringShadowlands"lives up to its full potential" with this extra development time.
It’s unclear what specific aspects ofShadowlands' endgame that Blizzard will be iterating on based on player feedback. One potential area of focus could be theCovenant system, which many ofWorld of Warcraft’s most-dedicated players have criticized. Namely, they criticize how abilities are tied to certain Covenants, all but forcing players who min-max to pick a Covenant they may not particularly want just to get the best ability. However, this is a topic game director Ion Hazzikostas has previously said won’t be changing.
As mentioned, Blizzard did make an effort to sootheWorld of Warcraftplayers' frustrations before they peaked. The firstpre-patch forShadowlands, which will include the expansion’s highly anticipated level crunch, will officially launch on October 13. Blizzard has had the pre-patch on its public testing servers for a good while now andWorld of Warcraftplayers are definitely excited for it. Alt-levelers are, specifically, looking forward to it.
Blizzard will be certain to share more information regardingwhenShadowlandsis launchingas it’s able, but for now, there’s no new release date. All that’s known is that it’s arriving later than its previously announced October 27 release date and before the end of the year. The new release date is still being evaluated, which likely means it’s dependent on some of the work Blizzard is still doing. As such, a December launch seems more likely than a November launch, but anything is possible.
