With the recent announcement of pre-orders for the World of Warcraft Dragonflight expansion, the most attentive will find some very interesting information on the release date of WoW’s ninth expansion. Very recently, we found out that the developers would be programming much sooner than they announced two months ago, and there’s been a lot of discussion in the community lately.
Dragonflight release date
That wouldn’t have been the case had the more regular speculation of the past few weeks helped the Dragonflight expansion layout in Q1 2023, possibly March. Contains Battle Net page It’s reserved for pre-orders, and we learned that it’s actually planned recently”No later than December 31, 2022“The information is official and comes from Blizzard.
Above all, this means that the game will definitely be released a priori this year. It doesn’t have to be in the next two months, or even December 31, but less than six months so far. Blizzard has yet to comment on the already highly controversial decision, so this may be the maximum timeframe the company has set for its expansion.
Are you coming to Dragonflight too early?
Unsurprisingly, the potentially early release date, at least three months ahead of the expected and widely publicized release date, caused quite a stir in the gaming community. Led by a few influential people, the bulk of the players pointed out that it was happening.too earlyFor fear of reproducing the chaotic scenario of the Shadowlands configuration. Also, while Dragonflight’s Alpha has yet to roll out or even be announced, they question the legitimacy of such a “statement” (not really), which is sobering. The game may not be able to invite players to explore the first elements brought by the expansion.
But as Ion Hazikostas told us in an interview last April, “Pre-orders will also be available when the expansion is ready“She added because she knew it”Players are hungry for new experiences and content“But he and his team didn’t want to commit too soon until they committed to expansion.”I’m not sure the game is ready and perfect“So if they are available, it means that the development team is confident in the current quality of the content already developed.
Promises that could be reassuring if the latest expansions had not encountered serious resistance during their deployment due to the mechanics they introduced, and offered players a game that did not reflect what they enjoyed in World of Warcraft. .
That said, it’s important to note some things that already hinted at Dragonflight’s development progress back in April. The game director said in the same interview that the expansion’s endgame should have ended two months before it started:As we near the end of Dragonflight’s final game, we don’t have a clear idea of what we plan to do.“
In addition, we understand that this ninth expansion should not a priori include a new progression system, and we obtain a game that is not very greedy in terms of development time (all things considered, let’s be clear). The idea that Dragonflight has already been developed by the developers is by no means out of the question, and there is no doubt that in the coming months we can only imagine that players will be able to submit their comments on the Alpha and Beta for a fix. Items where developers can get it wrong, for example, what capacity we expect.
Since patch 9.1.5, World of Warcraft development seems to have taken a very focused path of listening to its players for the first time in history. It’s a big step forward (for better or for worse, many players’ opinions are often disastrous, let’s be honest), which gives some hope for the quality of the future expansion.
However, it’s still too early to make any decisions on that or its release date. If Alpha of Shadowlands had been available from April 2020 and the beta had been released on July 7, 2020, four months before its official release, the development of the two expansions could have been very different as long as (in our opinion) the differences described between the two appear. I know) sharp. Alpha shouldn’t be delayed any longer, and we’ll find out at this point if its 2022 rollout was a serious strategic mistake.
Source : Millenium
