Blizzard's goal for WoW in 2023 is to put out more content updates with less downtime in between.
World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion will receive two major content updates in 2023, Blizzard has announced, with four minor updates also planned to roll out over the course of the next year.
The two major updates will include everything players expect from a big content update: a new raid, zone, and seasonal rewards. The minor updates will look to include more story content, evergreen events, updates to old game systems, and more opportunities to implement feedback from the community, according to a blog post from WoW executive producer Holly Longdale.
Your adventures in #Dragonflight are just beginning!With six updates planned for 2023, we’re looking to deliver more content to players more often.
EP @TheWindstalker on the road ahead: https://t.co/cX93MdwEog pic.twitter.com/TQx0yNNzJt— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) December 21, 2022
As for when the first of those updates will arrive, players won’t have to wait too long. The recently announced Trading Post system, along with the ability to transmog poor-quality and common-quality items and some new world content coming to the Primalist Tomorrow area, will go live “early next year” with update 10.0.5.
The next update on the docket will be 10.0.7, which will introduce new story quests that involve the Dracthyr returning to the Forbidden Reach to learn more about their origins and future. Longdale teases the storyline will set up the next major story for Dragonflight, and that at its conclusion, “it should be obvious what our next destination must be.” That update will also include the long-awaited Human and Orc Heritage armor quests and more.
Longdale admits that Blizzard’s track record when it comes to releasing new content for players of the subscription-based MMORPG to sink their teeth into has been lacking over the last few years. That’s something the team is looking to change in Dragonflight.
“In planning out the road ahead following the release of Dragonflight, we’ve been mindful of the duty we owe our players to nurture this living world and, frankly, the need to do better than we have at times in the recent past,” Longdale writes. “Our goal for Dragonflight is that there should always be something right around the corner, with a new update hitting our test realms shortly after the last one is live and in your hands.”
Longdale writes, “the goal is simply more Warcraft: more story, more content, more rewards, more events, more tech improvements, with less downtime between them.” Her statements, combined with the recent news that WoW veteran Chris Metzen is returning to work on the Warcraft universe as a creative advisor, makes it seem like 2023 could be the year WoW once again finds its footing after two years of the game’s Shadowlands expansion and the sparse content updates it entailed.
So far, the new expansion itself is off to a great start. In GameSpot’s WoW: Dragonflight review in progress, we came away “impressed at how a handful of new ideas, along with major facelifts to some old ones, breathe new life into Blizzard’s flagship title.”
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