The World of Warcraft: Shadowlands delay marks yet another game impacted by working from home. Blizzard announced that the expansion will not be hitting its October 26 release date and will be moved to sometime later this year. However, the expansion’s pre-patch will still be coming on October 13.
Blizzard announced this on its official WoW Twitter account with a long statement you can read below. Executive Producer John Hight said the team was still trying to figure out the new date but wanted to be as forthcoming with the community as possible. He said the expansion was coming together relatively well yet it still needed some additional time for balancing and polish, particularly in the endgame. That difficulty of tuning the endgame has been “compounded” by working from home.
— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) October 1, 2020
What is the new WoW: Shadowlands release date?
The new WoW: Shadowlands release date is still a mystery. Blizzard said it would still be coming this year so that only leaves around two months for the expansion to come out without being bumped into 2021. It is not clear how probable another delay would be, but Blizzard seemed keen on still putting it out in 2020 and will likely give a more exact date in the coming weeks, if things go smoothly.
With Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time and Star Wars Squadrons coming later this week, video games are starting to come out in full force, which will explode when the PS5 and Xbox Series X launch in the second week of November. Hopefully, this commotion doesn’t drown out Shadowlands and Blizzard is able to find a good niche for this expansion.
It also remains to be seen if other Blizzard projects have been internally delayed. The multi-team developer has not spoken much about Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 since their reveals last year at BlizzCon. BlizzConline isn’t happening until February 19 and February 20, 2021 so we might not hear more about both until then.
