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The team behind World of Warcraft: Dragonflight has promised to release six new content patches in 2023, which will include new missions, zones, raids, and the introduction of trading posts.
Dragonflight brought with it a range of new features, from new zones and missions to the noble art of dragon riding. However, developer Blizzard Entertainment knows there’s still some way to go to take the expansion to the prestige level of 2016’s Legion. With an official Announcement (opens in new tab)Blizzard says it plans to “nurture” the “living world” of Azeroth in 2023 by dropping six new content patches as part of a structured system of updates.
In addition to “new zones, raids, and seasonal rewards,” we can expect the introduction of new trading posts where players can earn cosmetic rewards by completing monthly missions. There’s also a new quest campaign in the works, set in the Forbidden Reach, which will give us an origin story for Dragonflight’s new dragon-humanoid hybrid race, the Dracthyr.
“We know that the merit of an expansion depends on the continued quality of the entire arc,” Blizzard Entertainment executive producer Holly Longdale wrote in the announcement. “We’ve been aware of the duty we owe our players to nurture this living world and, quite frankly, the need to do better than we have at times in the recent past.”
Christmas all year
World of Warcraft has been running since 2004, so it makes sense that it’s had to evolve over the past 18 years. Dragonflight, the game’s latest expansion, launched in November 2022 and features the ability to finally visit the Dragon Islesride dragons, play as the new Dracthyr race, and enjoy an all-new class: the Evoker.
Of the six patches Dragonflight will receive in 2023, only two are planned as major updates. These include the raids and new zones mentioned earlier in Blizzard’s announcement, but that doesn’t mean the other four updates are all bullshit, no padding.
In between these major content drops, Londgale shares plans for “new narrative chapters and cutscenes that could serve as an epilogue or prologue to the next big step in the adventure.” This means that we can expect more emphasis on world building in the future.
The first update, 10.0.5, is scheduled for early 2023 and will bring Trading Posts. In addition to choosing from a selection of cosmetic rewards, players can also apply poor or low-quality items as transmog appearances. more sober appearance.
Shortly after this patch launches, its successor, 10.0.7, will go live in the Public Test Realm (PTR) and will feature a new quest in the Forbidden Reach that will bring historical texture and backstory to the Dracthyr race. New questlines for Human and Orc Heritage Armor will also be added to the PTR in the upcoming beta.
Two more content drops will occur in the second half of 2023. “We don’t want there to be a specific formula for the size or shape of these updates,” says Longdale, “but the goal is simply more Warcraft: more story, more content, more rewards, more events, more technical improvements, with less downtime in between.”
While Longdale’s announcement doesn’t quite mention the class system, she shares the team’s desire to “respond to feedback and change or add elements based on what we hear our players need most.” Hopefully, this means Dracthyr players will be able to access more than just the Evoker class in the future. After all, it does little justice play like a dragon now.