Blizzard has announced that it will be further delaying Shadowlands, the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft. During Gamescom 2020, the company confirmed that World of Warcraft: Shadowlands was scheduled to be released in late October.
However, this is unfortunately no longer the case, as the company now plans to release it later within the year. Although on the bright side, the first pre-patch for the expansion will be launched on October 13.
Blizzard took to Twitter to explain why they had to delay Shadowlands. In the statement, the company says that the team has been “listening to” and “building upon” the feedback of the players. After all, Blizzard hasn’t shied away from revealing various details about the expansion to the public.
As such, Blizzard goes on to say that they have come to realize that they “need a little more time” to keep on working on Shadowlands. During this extra time, the developers plan to polish, balance, and iterate some parts of the expansion.
Just like many other studios this time around, Blizzard admits that Shadowlands’ development has also been affected partly because of the coronavirus pandemic and the work from home policies.
The company says that the expansion’s development was already complex and intricate to start with, and due to COVID-19, tweaking and fine-tuning the endgame was made even more difficult.
That being said, Blizzard commits itself to making sure that the expansion “lives up to its full potential” now that the developers have extra time to work on the game.
— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) October 1, 2020
Blizzard doesn’t specify which part of Shadowlands it will be going over again due to player feedback. One possible aspect they could be iterating is the Covenant system, which has received a lot of criticism from the avid World of Warcraft players.
To be more specific, fans have criticized the way abilities are linked to certain Covenants. As such, players who min-max are forced to choose a Covenant they don’t really like just to get a certain ability. Although game director Ion Hazzikostas has previously said that this is a feature that won’t be changing any time soon.
However, as mentioned, Blizzard has made an attempt to lessen the players’ frustrations by releasing the expansion’s pre-patch on October 13. Shadowlands‘ first pre-patch will include the highly-awaited level crunch.
Actually, the pre-patch has been on Blizzard’s public testing servers for quite a while now. Without a doubt, players are definitely looking forward to it, especially those alt-levers.
At the moment, Blizzard hasn’t given out a new release date yet, but it will certainly release more information regarding the expansion’s launch as soon as it’s ready to. All we know so far is that Blizzard will delay the expansion to a later date from its original October 27 release date.
The company is still evaluating when the new release date should be, and it’s highly possible that this will all depend on what the developers are working on to make the game better.
It’s likely that Shadowlands will be released in December rather than November, but since there really is no guarantee from the studio, anything is possible for now.
