World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has been pushed back to an unspecified date

For those of you who have been waiting eagerly for World of Warcraft's new Shadowlands expansion to launch, let's just say that I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is that the pre-patch for the expansion, which sets up most of the gameplay foundations including a new level-up mechanic, rookie player experience on Exile's Reach and of course more character customisation options, will release on schedule starting October 13. 

However, the bad news is that the expansion itself, which explores Azeroth's four-way concept of the afterlife has suffered some development hiccups along the way. It was supposed to drop on October 27, but now it's been pushed back. To when? We don't know, and neither do the developers.

According to the blog post published earlier today on the WoW website, Executive Producer John Hight laid out some of the reasons behind the delay. For the most part, however, it's because the team still feels that Shadowlands needs some "additional polish" before it's ready to go, and it seems they really want this one to really knock players out of the park into one of the game's four great beyonds.

Now, this doesn't just refer to aesthetics; Hight also noted that they needed more time to properly balance and integrate some of the endgame content. "Shadowlands is one of the most intricate expansions we've yet created," he writes, "and while we’ve made great progress, the challenge of tuning the endgame was compounded by the team having to work from home." Ah, curse you COVID-19.

Anyway, as mentioned above the pre-patch is still going to proceed as planned, which is good, and since you've got more time on your hands now, why not check out what we thought of Shadowlands? Long story short, we're all going to hell...at least in WoW terms, ahem.

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