2020 has struck again, even as the year comes closer to an end. Today, the developers over at Blizzard made the difficult decision to delay World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, the upcoming expansion for the MMORPG titan.
The expansion was set to release at the end of this month, but there have been some alarming signs in the air, such as there still not being a release for prepatch. While many were worried that it might be delayed, we hadn’t had much of a reason to believe it until now.
Unfortunately, it seems that the worries were true. Originally set to release on October 26th/27th globally, roughly four weeks from today, Blizzard has officially pushed the release back.
We also are not given a specific release date this time. Currently, the only thing we have to go off of is that the expansion will be coming out “later this year,” and we really have no strong reason to believe that it won’t be pushed farther back once again as is common in the gaming industry.
“This was an incredibly difficult decision for the team, as we’re as eager to get the expansion into your hands as you are to play it – but ultimately, we feel it’s the right decision for the game – and for our players,” executive producer John Hight announced on Twitter today.
Hight discusses that, over the last several months of testing, a great amount of progress has been made polishing and improving the core features and gameplay of the expansion.
The executive producer mentions that they’re at a strong point in the development, as well. Zones, campaign, questing, and the story are all essentially “ready to share,” as Hight says it. Overall, it seems that development is in a strong position
“However, as everything started coming together and we’ve been listening to and building upon your feedback, it’s become clear we need a little more time for additional polish,” Hight mentions. Furthermore, the expansion is considered to be one of the most intricate expansions that the team has made.
One of the dominant factors in this has been the challenge that 2020 as a year has posed to the world and gaming studios. With so much of the team working from home, it’s much more difficult to keep things going at the top efficiency.
While we don’t have a new release date, and it’s certainly a disappointment to see it delayed, it’s better than Blizzard crunching the title as hard as possible and delivering a broken, awful product at launch. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too much longer for the title to be finished.