World of Warcraft: Shadowlands release date confirmed with new trailer

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed a lot of games that were slated to be out at some point in 2020, but throughout the changes necessitated by the spread of the disease, Blizzard has insisted that World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will still be out this year. As surprising as it may be, that is one promise the company can apparently keep, as Blizzard has revealed the release date for Shadowlands.World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will be out on October 27th, 2020, which is probably even a little bit earlier than most of us were expecting. Shadowlands will be WoW's eighth expansion since the base game launched in 2004, and it's bringing some rather dramatic changes along with it.

For starters, the expansion will take us to the titular Shadowlands, which is the realm of the dead. There will be four new zones to explore in the expansion, each of them part of the afterlife and each ruled by a Covenant. The goal, it seems, is to stop Sylvanas Windrunner after she abandoned her post as Warchief of the Horde and pierced the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

In addition to the new content, Shadowlands will also bring a big stat and level squish with it. While the current level cap in Battle for Azeroth is 120, Blizzard will implement a new level cap of 60 with the Shadowlands expansion. It's worth remembering that 60 was the original level cap in vanilla World of Warcraft, so it's been a long time since we've seen the cap this low.

If nothing else, it should be interesting to see how World of Warcraft changes after Shadowlands launches. There is an invite-only beta currently happening, but the good news is that those who don't get in won't have too much longer to wait before they can simply play the full expansion.