• News

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands set for November release date

After a brief delay, World of Warcraft is finally ready to enter the Shadowlands in just a few weeks.

Ozzie Mejia

October 29, 2020 5:45 PM

1

It's been a year of delays for the gaming world and among them was the heavily-anticipated World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands. It was originally set to release this week, but Blizzard had delayed it in hopes of polishing the final product. It now appears to be ready to go, because the publisher announced that Shadowlands would be releasing in late November.

Here's the message from World of Warcraft VP John Hight on the World of Warcraft website:

Greetings heroes of the Horde and the Alliance,

On behalf of the entire World of Warcraft team, I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank-you for your patience as we’ve continued to work on Shadowlands, and for all of the words of support after we made the tough decision to delay the game. Today, I’m happy to share that the expansion will be arriving November 23 at 3 p.m. PST (November 24 at 12 a.m. CET).

We’d like to thank everyone across the WoW community who helped us get where we are today, including players leveling up new characters in the Shadowlands pre-patch (and keeping Azeroth’s barbers extra busy), as well as all the beta testers who continue to provide us with invaluable feedback on the expansion.

Since we first told you about our decision to delay, we’ve used the time to further polish the expansion and shore up the endgame, including overhauling the combat and rewards in the Maw, and reworking the Covenant systems to make your choice more immediately impactful and have clearer long-term goals. Now the team is in a great position to get things the rest of the way to the finish line before November 23—and as always, we’re committed to working with you to improve the game for as long as you’re out there playing it.

Now that we have our launch date, we’re also excited to tell you that our pre-launch event will kick off November 10, so steel yourselves to take on a flood of the Scourge. In addition, we’ve set a December 8 date for the opening of our first raid, Castle Nathria—which takes players into the heart of Sire Denathrius’ lair in Revendreth—along with the start of Shadowlands Season 1.

The November 23 release date also holds larger significance for the franchise as a whole. As Executive Vice President Mike Ybarra pointed out on Twitter, that date marks the 16 year anniversary of the original Warcraft's launch.

For the uninitiated, Shadowlands is World of Warcraft's next major expansion. Beyond pushing Azeroth's story forward, it introduces a handful of new features like new playable factions, Soulbinds, customization options, and more.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is out on PC on Monday, November 23, just in time for you to ignore your family at Thanksgiving.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?