World of Warcraft will get the Fifth Expansion
World of Warcraft to get fifth expansion
11 November 2013
Blizzard has announced the fifth expansion for its flagship World of Warcraft (WoW) online game.
The Warlords of Draenor, also called the Warlords of Draenor, adds an entirely new world to the game. Players can create settlements and instantly increase the level of their characters.
The announcement comes just as WoW player numbers hit the lowest level in five years, and Blizzard begins to group players on a lesser number of servers.
Blizzard has also announced plans for a new game called Heroes of the Storm.
Small audience
Details about Warlords of Draenor were unveiled at the annual Blizzcon gaming convention. The expansion will allow players to relive some of the events from Warcraft strategy games prior to WoW.
The expansion takes place in the world of Draenor and offers players an array of new dungeons, zones and other instances to play. Warlords lets players play at levels 100, introduces settlements for players called garrisons and updates the appearance of some of the game's races.
Blizzard said that Warlords buyers would be able raise a character's level to 90, allowing them to immediately explore expansion worlds. There is no release date for Warlords has yet been given.
This news comes just a few hours after Blizzard announced that WoW's subscriber numbers had dropped to 7.7 million. They were at their lowest in 2007 and are currently significantly less than the peak of 2010 of 12 million.
To manage this decline, Blizzard has introduced a system that allows players to play on multiple servers to ensure that the game's economy, Player-versus Player areas and arena battle systems have enough people participating to keep them functioning.
Writing on the Rock Paper Shotgun game news site, Nathan Grayson described Warlords of Draenor as an "decent expansion" but said the decision to revisit Warcraft's past was "puzzling".
"This is maintenance in some sense," he wrote. "Something to keep existing players engaged and satisfied. Who knows? Perhaps a smaller audience will allow WoW to focus more effectively in the long run.
Blizzcon saw the debut of Heroes of the Storm, an exciting new game. This arena-based, hero brawling game lets players play as key characters from nearly every Blizzard game including Starcraft and Diablo. The heroes are united in teams and compete against each other to take the upper hand on the various maps.
A beta test of Heroes is currently in progress and Blizzard confirmed that the final game will be released "soonish".
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Heroes of the Storm
Rock, Paper, Shotgun