Blizzard has made the difficult decision to further delayed the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, the company announced Thursday afternoon. World of Warcraft Shadowlands has been planned for release in late October since August, as confirmed at Gamescom 2020. With the delay, Blizzard now plans to release Shadowlands later in 2020, thought to lighten the news, Blizzard did confirm that Shadowlands' first pre-patch will be going live on October 13.
A justification for Shadowlands' delay was provided. Blizzard describes that it has been "listening to" and "building upon" player feedback as Shadowlands has been shared more broadly with the public. As such, Blizzard says that "it became clear we need a little more time" to continue working on Shadowlands. Polish, balance, and iteration on certain aspects of Shadowlands' endgame will be priorities for Blizzard during this extra time.
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 of Shadowlands' is described as intricate and that tuning the endgame was all the more challenging because of the obstacle COVID-19 presented. Acknowledging that, Blizzard goes on to dedicate itself to ensuring Shadowlands "lives up to its full potential" with this extra development time.
It's unclear what specific aspects of Shadowlands' endgame that Blizzard will be iterating on based on player feedback. One potential area of focus could be the Covenant system, which many of World 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 soothe World of Warcraft players' frustrations before they peaked. The first pre-patch for Shadowlands, 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 and World of Warcraft players are definitely excited for it. Alt-levelers are, specifically, looking forward to it.
Blizzard will be certain to share more information regarding when Shadowlands is launching as 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.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC.